Prime Time 6, Coursebook mit Audio-CD und DVD

3 Plastic Before you read a) Before you read the text make a mind map on the term “plastic”. Include at least the following aspects: • production • cost • advantages • waste disposal • recycling • environmental damage b) When you have finished mark the positive aspects in one colour and the negative ones in another colour. c) Compare your mind map with that of your neighbour and add items which are not in your diagram. Have you had the same ideas? Reading: Bag Lady a) While reading, highlight all the words and phrases in the text that refer to environmental issues. b) Add information about plastic to your mind map. 1 2 It was the birds that nally made me break down and weep. e Hawaiian island of Midway is the main breeding ground for the Laysan albatross, as beautiful a seabird as you will ever see. But standing on a Midway beach, I was surrounded by thousands of dead and dying albatross chicks. I could not move without standing on dead birds. I was lming a Natural World documentary for the BBC about the environmental crisis facing the region’s marine wildlife. But this was beyond a crisis – this was an apocalypse. Adult albatrosses y out over the sea for thousands of miles looking for brightly coloured squid to feed on. However, today there is so much colourful plastic in the water that they pick this up instead. ey y back and feed their chicks with it. It lls up the chicks’ stomachs so they die. Two years ago I thought I was environmentally aware. I was born on a South Devon farm where my father taught me the importance of thinking green. And now I work as a camerawoman for the BBC Natural History Unit. But I was just sleepwalking then. I had no idea how desperate our situation really is. My wake-up call started 18 months ago on the island chain of Hawaii at the start of my wildlife documentary. We had heard that in the North Paci c the ocean currents move in a huge circular motion, sucking in all the rubbish from the continents into the centre, where Hawaii is. We had learned that 80 per cent of all marine litter comes from land and that 90 per cent of it is plastic, but what we didn’t know was the scale of the problem. Our ignorance became clear when we interviewed researcher Charles Moore. Charlie said, “Guys, let me take you to the dirtiest beach in the world.” Kamilo beach was ve miles long but wasn’t the golden sand you would expect of a Hawaiian beach. It was multi-coloured as far as the eye could see. Cups, keyboards, DVDs, plates, combs, knives, forks, toys, TVs, drink bottles, sandwich wrappers, lipsticks, hair brushes, pens, shoes, plugs, clocks – every plastic item you would nd in a typical house was on that beach. “Welcome to consumer throwaway living,” said Charlie. He pointed to the sand – it wasn’t sand; it was tiny fragments of plastic, small enough to be eaten by animals at the bottom of the food chain. is plastic carries dangerous toxins that get right to the top of the food chain. Guess where we are in that food chain. Charlie’s last words to us that day haunted me. “Plastic lasts for at least 400 years and each year it’s getting worse.” Four centuries to clear up the mess – and that’s if we start today. Over the following months we watched a whale rescue team untangling a whale from plastic ropes; I came across an old turtle and her throat was full of plastic packaging; we talked to seal scientists who told us they regularly have to rescue animals from plastic; dolphins were using a plastic bag as a football, unaware of the danger; and on Midway, the albatrosses moved me to tears. I knew I had to do something, anything. Back home in South Devon, I wondered how on earth I was going to get people to understand what we are doing to the planet. By March that year our documentary was nished and I lent a copy to a friend, Adam, who runs a delicatessen in my hometown of Modbury. e next evening he told me he wanted to stop using plastic bags in his shop. I lent the lm to another friend, Sue, who owns an art gallery. Her response was the same. Suddenly the penny dropped – two traders, same 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 38 The Blue Planet Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv