Today we are checking out of Ile St. Marie and heading on to other anchorages in the north and eventually Nosy Be. Ile St. Marie has been a great place to start off our Madagascar adventure! The people here are hospitable and pleasant and everybody seems happy to see us and to have us here in their area.
As we were waiting for the Port Master to arrive, I walked around the back of the office which basically was the beach and I found something there that reminded me of the ongoing struggle with plastics and the ocean.
Yes, those are the plastic guts of a washing machine sitting on the otherwise pristine beach and beautiful view of the mainland Madagascar in the distance.
Just a reminder that we have so much work to do to resolve the problem that faces us. I hope that someday we can figure out something to resolve the problem. Everybody keeps saying that plastics, which come from petroleum, if I’m not mistaken, can’t be destroyed, but just breaks down into smaller pieces of plastic and ends up in our food chain. I hope that someone can come up with a way to completely destroy or recycle plastics or we will continue having an unending supply of plastics that will never go away. And obviously we need to do more to cleanup the plastic that is already on our oceans and landfills brimming to capacity.
Here’s to a brighter future for all of us. As always, don’t forget to follow the adventure on email by subscribing, or you can follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Path! Please comment on this post with ideas on solving this problem if you know of them, to give us all hope.
Living Large by Living Little! 
You know what is missing from that beach and most other beaches in Madagascar? As poverty stricken as Madagascar is, you would think it would be a trash dump like many places in Indonesia or some other S. Pacific islands. Since that is the only plastic on the beach, it shows what not handing out plastic bags at stores, and having recycle glass bottles can do for a country. Even on land, there are few places that are littered. It is a strange culture in poor Madagascar as it seems poverty is associated with trash on the ground, but here.
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True.. In this picture there is only the one item buy that’s mostly because I framed the shot that way. If I had taken 10 steps back you could see the other trash. I agree with you that the trash isn’t as bad here as some other countries but it is still a problem. A couple posts ago, Jeeping around… I mention that there’s a guy who is paid full time to clean up a certain section of the beach every day for visitors. Otherwise the beach is riddled with plastic, albeit mostly from other countries brought here by the Indian Ocean. thanks for your comment!
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