Our waters face a war on several fronts.  The enemy: pollution.  For many generations, the oceans, because of their sheer size, have been able to absorb the relatively small amount of pollution humans tossed into the water. But over the last 50 years, things have changed. We now pollute our waters at a greater rate than we ever have before-to the tune of 14 billion pounds each year..   Our seas become increasingly sicker with each passing day.  And though the green movement has had some success remedying the ocean pollution, it’s not enough if we want to sustain this essential, yet ever-dwindling life source.  

Pollution enters waterways in many ways, shapes, and forms.  On one end, we see ample media coverage of huge oil spills that wreak havoc on marine habitats.  These spills, particularly the recent BP spill, certainly do a lot of damage to local ecosystems and economies. But these large oil spills still account for only about 10% of the oil that fills our oceans each year. Road runoff, illegal dumping, and cruise ships are also huge sources of the 700 million gallons of oil that annually flow into the oceans.  

But just as damaging as oil are the water bottles, tires, candy wrappers, plastic bags and other trash end up in our world’s oceans every year.  These and other single use disposable items find their way into the water when they fall out of trash cans or are dropped on the ground by litterbugs. When it rains, these items are washed into sewer grates and into local streams that feed into the water. And it doesn’t matter whether the trash originates in California or Nebraska-it all ends up in the ocean. But the problems don’t end there. Plastic and other petroleum products don’t ever completely break down, but they do photodegrade when they are exposed to the sun’s rays for a prolonged period of time. Photodegradation results in many tiny pieces of plastic floating around the ocean gyres, or currents, thousands of miles from shore.

And while it may be easy to put these out-of-sight problems out of our minds, we won’t be able to do so for much longer. Scientists estimate that 75% of the human population will experience fresh water shortages by 2050 if our current pollution rates continueand this is just one of the many startling statistics that describe the threatened condition of our world’s waters.  And since we are all united by the blue of our ocean’s deep waters, it’s high time to step up our game.