1,998 views

Watch
- Search Videos
  
  Advanced search »
- Submit a New Video
Discuss
About
- Try clicking on the various channels to see videos posted to that channel - if you're into music you can click the Music channel to get more music sifts - go on and explore! Use the "hotness" when you have opened the channel link to get videos that have gotten a lot of votes, or use "newness" to have a look at the new sifts.
  When browsing sifts you like, have a look at the Related Posts list to see other related videos, click the tags under the video title to see more sifts tagged with the same tags or have a look at other sifts from the same user in the More Posts By list. If the sifted video is in a play list, have a look at the play list to see other interesting videos the Sift users have linked together.
  Enter the Sift Lounge to chat with online sifters about anything and everything, or read interesting posts in the Sift Talk forum.
  The Top New Videos list is always full of interesting, current videos. It is always recommended that you have a look through the Top New Videos, but also have a look at these:
  - Upcoming Unsifted Videos - active video submissions that neither are published to the front page nor archived to the submitter's personal queue
- Have you seen a really funny, surprising, scary, interesting, cute or in any other way extra good quality video?
  Post and share it here - VideoSift is the best video aggregator on the Web, where we share, discuss, promote, and interact with the best videos out there on the web. Post it here, and share it with the large community of video-interested users. And - you are guaranteed to find more very good videos here already!
  Mind you, we only share videos you discover that someone else has made; if you "self link," by posting a video you have made, have posted or have interests in, you risk the ban hammer - read the posting guidelines before posting. The sift is NOT for promoting your own videos - it is for sharing videos others have made.
  Submit a Video Now »
Login

Toxic Garbage Island: Vice TV

1 decade 5 years 9 months 3 weeks ago

GARBAGE ISLAND - Part 1 of 12.

From http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1485308600

Before this trip, I was never all that crazy about the ocean. I’ve always appreciated the fact that it generates the majority of the world’s oxygen and keeps us nice and far from places like Britain, but in terms of any sort of awe or “respect” it just never happened. I would say I looked at it less as the primeval womb of all terrestrial life than as an excessive amount of water you sometimes have to fly over.

Part and parcel with this was my attitude toward the Pacific Garbage Patch, or as we willfully misidentified it for the duration of our journey, the elusive Garbage Island. All the journalism I’d read about the patch had carefully danced around physical descriptions of the trash, leading myself and the rest of the shooting crew to fanciful visions of a solid, Texas-size barge of discarded Coke bottles and sporting goods. The idea that people had managed to fuck up a part of the world that nobody even visits, much less inhabits, and on such a monumental scale struck me as interesting and, to be honest, slightly awesome-sounding, but at the end of the day the impact of the mess on the rest of the world failed to register. I mean, sure, sea birds choking to death on deflated balloons and sea turtles whose shells have been completely deformed by soda can rings (click here for a picture of this if you want to completely ruin your day)—all this definitely sucks, but so do a lot of things, you know?

Needless to say this whole journey ended up overturning my expectations about the Garbage Patch, as well as just about every misconception I’ve ever held about the sea, environmentalism, consumption, barfing, knots, pollution, humanity, and myself. After absorbing the myriad dangers of our plastic-heavy lifestyles for three weeks, I’m now a proud, carbon-conscious “Earth Warrior” who yells at grocery clerks for double-bagging my produce and carries around one of those 70s gunnysacks to drink out of. Just kidding, although the trip did lead me to ferret out a group of non-hippie environmentalists who you can read about here. I also finally got into Earth Crisis. Pretty decent.

VBS CORRESPONDENT THOMAS MORTON

PS: All the music in this series is by Brighton, MA’s Helios off their Eingya album on Type Records. If you like it, you can check them out here.