I’ve written about cricket before. I’m a convert. So much so that I prefer cricket to its American cousin, baseball. My current mission is to gently guide my sons toward this, the more genteel of the Australian sports. I am fully aware that they may not be sporty at all, neither of their parents were, and that’s just fine. But, if we’re going to spend weekends watching them play a sport, I’d rather set up a lawn chair beside a vivid green on a warm summer Saturday than huddle in a driving July rain to watch them get mauled (Aussie football) or drift into a torpor whilst watching them fruitlessly kick a ball back and forth for 90 minutes (soccer).

And to that end, I have constructed an elaborate, multi-point plan to ensure that I get to spend lots of time watching cricket with my boys in the coming years.

A morning at the lovely Adelaide Oval in the balmy summer sunshine was just phase one. I was a bit concerned that my plan was faulty when I took Boy Z down to field level whereupon he started shrieking, “I don’t like it! I don’t like it!”. But he began to calm down with the discovery that cricket also involved hot dogs, chips, ice cream, inflatable fingers and miniature bats.

Phase one of the master plan seems to be a success. When I got home from work last night, Boy Z took my hand, led me outside and asked “Wanna play cri-et, Bubba?”

Score one for the old man.

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There are surprisingly few songs about cricket, considering it’s popularity around the world. The Kinks have one of the few good ones on their 1973 album “Preservation Act 1″ available from .

Then I fathered a child.

And with his arrival, my simple life philosophy became slightly less tenable. Because no matter how you slice it, I’ve got some responsibility for my boy and I have some power over him. I guess it is a balancing act between keeping the boy alive and driving myself insane trying to control every single moment of his young life. I’ve never been very good at balance.

My short adventure in solo parenting was a challenge, particularly with a joint father-son summer cold thrown into the mix. I’m used to Boy Z ignoring requests – “Stop climbing on the dog, Boy Z!”, “Do NOT put the phone in the dish tank, Boy Z!”, “For god’s sake, go to sleep child!” – I’m used to him doing whatever he wants. That’s part of toddlerhood and while frustrating is mostly manageable. But it can all build up and it can reach a point where it becomes viscerally unmanageable.

Ironically, I made it through ten days of solo parenting but it got to that unmanageable point the day after Dr. O’C’s return. Yesterday I hit a wall. It was just one of those days. A day on which Boy Z would do nothing according to my plan. A day full of whinging and crying and destruction.  It climaxed with the Boy’s weekly swimming lesson. Through some unknown neural twitch in his toddler brain, he decided he just wasn’t going to do swimming yesterday. He wasn’t going to relinquish his dummy, wasn’t going to finish or give up his half-drunk bottle, was going to scream when I attempted to take either out of his clenched little fists.

And I nearly lost it. And I wanted to throttle him. And I just wanted to scream:

Why won’t you do what I want!?! Why won’t you listen to me?!? Damn it!!!

But I didn’t. Largely because there were a lot of people around the pool deck and there is nothing I like less than making a spectacle of myself. Instead I shoved him to his mother and went to take a shower and we went home.

It’s not the first time I lost my temper with him. Nor was it that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. It was just a damn swim class – $13 and a half an hour wasted. But I came home completely deflated.

My standard formula for writing blog posts is to wrap it all up with a pithy lesson learned. But I don’t have one for today. Days like yesterday make me question whether or not I’m qualified to do this – whether or not I have the tools for this job. I’m not a particularly patient person (but I do love me some alliteration). I spend about 84% of the time with my head squarely up my own ass. My ideal Sunday afternoon would be spent curled up in a comfy chair in a balmy summer breeze with a good novel. This fatherhood gig… I don’t know. From the day I found out Dr. O’C was pregnant I made a resolution that I was going to be a great Dad, maybe the best Dad ever. A Dad that they would write books about. Today, I’m wondering if I’m in way over my head.

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The Kinks’ “Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround” is available from Amazon.

Speaking of buying music, some of you have been buying music on iTunes via links on this site. Since I get a small cut on sales, I think it only fair that I give you something in return. So, if you’ve bought something through this site recently send me an e-mail (chris at afreeman dot org) and I’ll see if I can’t find a little thank you gift to send you.

For some reason, Pi’s carnivorous island was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard a news story on the NewsHours with Jim Lehrer podcast recently about what was described as our rapidly growing eight continent. There are no meerkats and it is not strictly carnivorous and it’s not really an island, but the Great Pacific Garbage Dump is as disturbing and potentially dangerous as Martell’s fantasy island.

My initial reaction to the NewsHour report is that it was a typical case of what tends to be a melodramatic and lacking in understanding response of the mainstream news media to a juicy science story. Surely there isn’t a continent of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean. The good news is that the media has overreacted, “continent” is not the right word. The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is not visible from the air (because most of it lies slightly below the surface of the water) nor does it have a particular nautical position (due to the shifting wind directions and currents). The bad news is that there are two massive accumulations of plastic waste swirling around in the doldrums of the northern Pacific Ocean. Charles Moore, the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the man who had the misfortune of discovering the dump, estimates that the plastic garbage in the Pacific covers approximately five million square miles (about 1.5 times the land mass of the United States) and contains over 3.5 million tons of largely consumer waste.

By most accounts the trash finds its way to its home in the North Pacific through a long and circuitous route. Trash is dumped into rivers, in both North and South America and Asia, that empty into the Pacific. Ocean currents carry the trash, picking up more debris as it travels, around the Pacific before depositing it in the doldrums of the North Pacific Gyre. 80% of the trash in the ocean originates on land and a majority of that is from consumer products. Thus, it is a hard truth that we – you and I – are the problem. Here is how it works: say that you inadvertantly drop some innocuous bit of plastic – a clear plastic wrapper from a box of candy. The next time it rains, that wrapper gets washed into a storm drain which will flow into your nearest watershed and ultimately into the ocean. That little wrapper floats its way around the Pacific currents until it comes to rest in the Gyre where it will join the rest of the trash. This plastic waste will be around longer than you and I, longer than our children, longer than our grandchildren, longer than our great-grandchildren. Nobody really knows how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade because it basically doesn’t. Conservative estimates are around 450 – 500 years. We are creating a problem that will outlive us by centuries.

It isn’t just an aesthetic problem. In short, it’s devastating to marine ecosystems. Forty percent of albatross chicks are killed each year by consuming plastic accidentally fed to them by their parents. More than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris. But there is a less obvious and more frightening consequence to our trashing of the oceans. Moore’s group does a lot of research into the ecological effects of plastic debris on marine ecosystems. Recently they have been looking at plastic particulate levels in and around the Garbage Patch. The small bits of plastic that are a byproduct of the slow degradation of the plastic debris have been found to accumulate a lot of nasty chemicals – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated and legacy pesticides and hormonally active additives. This latter class are particularly nasty beasties, some of which have been implicated in an increased risk of breast cancer. Moore and his colleagues found that the ratio of plastic particles to plankton in the Gyre was between 1.4:1 and 6.9:1. In other words, there is more plastic particulate matter in this part of the ocean than there is plankton. You don’t have to be a biologist or have an in depth knowledge of food chains to recognize what this means: small fish eat plankton (or plastic particles), big fish eat small fish, humans eat big fish. We are eating our own toxic garbage.

I don’t wish to sound melodramatic or preachy but this is a problem that is getting worse on a daily basis and one that we cannot repair. We can, however, do something to slow the accumulation of rubbish in the oceans. 80% of the trash out there comes from us directly, so it is up to us to do something to make it better.

Here are ten things we can do about it:

1. Don’t use so much plastic. Make a concerted effort to reduce the amount of plastic that you purchase. It’s not easy. I’ve been making a concerted effort since I heard this story and it’s absolutely stunning how much excess plastic you get when you purchase anything. Note how much plastic crap you come home with on your next trip to the supermarket. Preferentially purchase items packaged in glass or paper. Virtually any material is better than plastic.
2. I’m a beach bum. Roughly 10% of the crap out in the Pacific comes from trash left on beaches. So, don’t leave trash on beaches and maybe pick some of it up when you’re out there. Boy Z, Timmins and I are headed out to the beach shortly and I’m bringing a bag with me to pick up.
3. Recycle. Plastic recycling is very low efficiency – only about 3.5% of plastic is recycled in any way. This is due in part to contamination of plastics with non-plastics, food waste and non-recyclable plastics. Clean up your plastic before recycling and make sure that you only include recyclable plastics. If your community does not recycle plastic then demand that they do.
4. Along the same lines, buy recycled products or products containing recycled materials.
5. This is kind of a no-brainer. But do not litter. Most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is thought to be a result of litter working its way into the river system.
6. Consider volunteering or donating to the Algalita Marine Research Foundation or other environmental organizations.
7. Think about the watershed when cleaning up around your hose. Sweep your sidewalks rather than hosing them. Wash your car on the grass so that the water sinks into the ground rather than storm drains.
8. When you go shopping do not take a plastic bag. Use a cloth or other reusable bag.
9. Buy in bulk. Most of the plastic that you bring home with you from the shop is packaging, the higher the product to packaging ratio, the less trash generated.
10. For god’s sake, don’t use so much plastic.

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Image credits:

Plastic trash

North Pacific Gyre Map

Food chain

I was leaning towards Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” for this post, as it seemed appropriately gloomy. But, The Kinks have been in my head lately, possibly because they are apparently reuniting.