Plastic Soup

Walking on water

We were visiting friends in Mill Valley, a beautiful town in the hills outside of San Francisco. Our friends had just visited the Loesje site and found this page that could be easily used for the cover of Plastic Soup:

POLLUTION

JESUS
SOON
WE CAN ALL
WALK ON WATER

Loesje

On our way to Mill Valley we traveled over the Golden Gate Bridge. I was, once again, struck by the beauty of this man-made structure.

What I like so much about it, (besides the result), is that the bridge was designed by a man who was accused of being a dreamer. Joseph Strauss was an engineer and a poet, who had to defend his design for ten years before he could begin to prepare. Of course, he didn’t build the bridge by himself. And it was local people who ensured the Golden Gate Bridge kept its famous orange color. In fact, the orange paint was originally intended as the primer under a dull, gray finish.

I have a soft-spot for dreamers. A world without dreamers would be rather dull. As a result, I am a big fan of Rudolph Eilander, the young architect who conceived the plan to build a floating island in the Pacific Ocean (as a solution to the plastics problem there). He is considered crazy by specialists. I think he is a visionary. Isn’t it that all great ideas are at first labeled crazy?

Centuries ago, we constructed cathedrals which the architect himself realized he would never see the end result. Generations jointly assembled structures that were larger than themselves. Thus they left behind a legacy for future generations.

People now reflect on the plastic soup and say: “We will never get that cleaned up in our lifetime”. Thus they don’t get started in doing something about it.

What is wrong with a project in which you won’t see the immediate the end result yourself? Can’t your children or your grandchildren enjoy what you got going? If nobody begins anything, nothing will happen.

By the way, seventy years ago, construction of the Golden Gate Bridge eventually only took four years.

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