What We Did With All That Trash

Despite our supposed environmentally-conscious blog title, WAWGDWATT has rarely delved into issues of Earth preservation. We always seem to get distracted by more important societal quandaries.

Like, for instance, while watching recent episodes of "Saturday Night Live," I was introduced to the musical phenomena of Justin Beiber (adorably asexual!) and Ke$ha (adorably hooker-like, but anybody who inserts a dollar $ign into their name is an asshole, and seriously, you go on TV to sing a song, and you bring with you a U.S.-flag cape and third-grade laser show to distract me from the fact that you're a broke-dick Britney? Weak.)

Anyway, all the trash we keep throwing into the ocean is collecting to the point where an island of garbage has formed in the Pacific Ocean that some estimate is twice the size of Texas. Let's quantify how big that is. If you were to drive east to west across Texas without stopping, it would take you about 14 hours. Times two! But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (terrible name, by the way; my suggestion: Trashlantis!) is old news. Now, the Atlantic ocean, jealous the Pacific was getting all the Greenpeace love, has started to form it's own trash island.

Usually, this statement of fact would be followed by all manner of disgust and pessimism from me, with a little conspiratorial, anti-capitalism sentiment thrown in just for flavor. But not this time, my friends. This time, I'm going to look on the bright side; I'm going to see our new ocean landfill as half full.

I think the ocean is doing us an incredible and marvelous favor. I think the ocean knows we've been using it as the world's biggest trash receptacle for the past few thousand years, and has chosen to use its powerful currents to collect all of our refuse into a couple of visible-from-space collections. That way, when we finally get serious about preserving our, you know, source of life and shit, we can just build a couple of huge crabbing nets attached to some rockets, throw them around all the garbage islands, and blast those floating heaps of plastic shit into outer space.

Yeah, that's right. I say let space deal with our trash. Fuck space. What's space gonna do about it? Oh, and the best part: we don't live in space. We live here, protected by atmospheres and ionospheres and clouds and shit. Once we get the garbage out of our air space, it's out of sight, out of mind as far as I'm concerned. Plus, space is at least twice as big as our ocean. It'll take us forever to fill it up with trash islands.

Thank you, ocean. Your mysterious, ancient ways give you the foresight we humans lack. For that, we are eternally grateful. And after we send all that trash into space, we'll totally stop throwing our two-liter Coke bottles in you. Promise.