A quote to ponder

Since the Scripps Institution of Oceanography hosted the first in a series of conferences today, I thought it would be appropriate to post a quote from Miriam Goldstein who is a PhD student at Scripps and visited the garbage patch this summer. Miriam and I spoke a few weeks ago about our experiences at sea and what it’s like to be amidst an ocean of plastic. We’ll be speaking together on a panel about the garbage patch at the 2010 Science Online conference in January.

“It’s important to have wildernesses and these untouched places and to be able to see an area that’s so remote. I think people care about it because the open ocean is one of the last wildernesses on the planet. We need these places, that’s what makes it so sad because away from land there’s all this plastic. There’s reason to care even if we can’t show catastrophic harm.  It’s morally wrong to treat the ocean like a garbage can.”

–Miriam Goldstein, PhD candidate, Biological Oceanography, Scripps Institution of Oceanography