Dead Zone | #PlanetorPlastic ✓

Dead Zone

In 2035, the ocean was declared a Dead Zone.

Corpses floated along the surfaces of the world's major bodies of waters, bloated and discoloured from the toxins in their blood. Beaches became battlefields, and then graveyards, choked with the remains of fallen soldiers who'd lost the fight against their enemy: plastic.

They never stood a chance.

Consumption of toxic debris. Suffocation by non-degradables. Torn apart from the inside as if they had swallowed a grenade, a ticking time bomb of razor-sharp plastic.

It was a ruthless, unforgiving war that spared no one.

Ecosystems were destroyed, species dwindled into extinction, the biological network became a planetary war zone, steeped in death and ruin. Bodies of water became so polluted with the dead that they were deemed chronically unsafe for consumption.

Dead Zones. That's what we called them. Mass graves of rotting bodies that blanketed the water with a film of toxic slime.

Those that did manage to survive didn't last long afterwards. There was nowhere for them to go, nowhere for them to hide. The enemy was everywhere, still floating amid the carnage, searching for the next victims of its unrelenting savagery.

I saw a turtle just a few weeks ago, when I was out on our family's small fishing boat. It was struggling against the current of debris bobbing around the boat, slowly being swallowed by the thick, grey abyss. Dropping the oars, I had reached over the side of the craft and untangled it from a piece of wire mesh that was cutting into its leg, setting it on the floor of the boat.

As it ambled around my legs, enjoying the plastic-free space, I had convinced myself this turtle was the ocean's last survivor, the ocean's last call for hope. I thought I had saved it, I thought it had meant something.

But in the end, it was too late for that turtle. I hadn't noticed it at first - the thing that was poking out from the corner of its mouth, barely visible. A scrap of plastic. I could only imagine what else was nestled in its stomach, slowly poisoning its way through the bloodstream.

It was too late for that turtle, just as it was too late for the oceans. They had both lost the fight against plastic.

And the sad thing was, it all could have been avoided.

There didn't have to be a war. There didn't have to be an undefeatable enemy.

All we had to do - all you had to do - was take the pledge.

All we had to do was be smart, re-think our choices and stop using so much plastic.

All we had to do was choose the planet.