There is nothing about the United States that I love more than the Great Lakes. I spent my college years on the shore of one of them, and I've spent time roaming around one part or another of the rest of them. They are a miracle of nature. They are an astonishing example of the immense natural gifts bestowed by Whoever on this continent. They were unquestionably vital to the growth of almost everything about this country, from its population, to its economy, to its work, and to its play.

And, yes, we're screwing them up, too.

According to new research coming out of the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, floating plastic debris, similar to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has been found in the Great Lakes. The Pacific garbage patch is an area of trash in the Pacific Ocean that's estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The spot acts as a vortex of plastic particles and other pollutants that the currents have pushed together. The actual dimension varies because the garbage itself is often hard to see from satellites. The Pacific is not alone, there's also a garbage patch in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, and now the Great Lakes." The massive production of plastic and inadequate disposal has made plastic debris an important and constant pollutant on beaches and in oceans around the world," said Lorena M. Rios Mendoza, a University of Wisconsin-Superior scientist researching the impact of such pollution, in a statement to the press. "[T]he Great Lakes are not an exception."

One of my greatest fears is that the massive environmental problems this country faces — climate change being only the most serious of them — are completely beyond the capacity of our political system to solve. There are tiny ecological Hiroshimas all over the country waiting to go off — from lagoons of pig feces to leaky superannuated nuclear waste dumps. None of these problems are going to get better. They're all going to get worse, and all the money seems to be on the side of people who profit from the problems and, even if one of them pops on the national radar, there comes inevitably a lavishly funded attack on the science that's telling us what we all need to know. I honestly don't see a way out here. You can't compromise with chemistry. There's no "bipartisan" solution, no difference to split. Poison has no ideology.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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