Marine parks decision risks making ocean tragedy even worse.

For too long, we assumed the ocean simply cleanses, purifies and spits out junk – and does not absorb it or get sickened by it.

A black footed albatross chick with plastics in its stomach
 lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian
 Islands. Midway sits in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But slowly, certainly and tragically, we are discovering how foolish that assumption has been. It took about a century to even start questioning the wisdom of shooting raw sewage into the ocean and allowing sewage and industrial waste to pour in, unchecked.

And now: plastic. We have all seen footage of ugly plastics suffocating our oceans, of bird stomachs lethally jammed with human-made jetsam, of string choking the throats of penguins, (just recently a friend of mine untangled balloon string from the neck of a turtle in our bay).

Read Julia Baird’s comment from The Age - “Marine parks decision risks making ocean tragedy even worse.”