As aptly pointed out by the Polish Nobel prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska, humanity has adopted a number of aesthetic and moral resolutions with regard to nature. And while those of a moral kind are slowly being retracted, the aesthetic ones prove a lot harder to eliminate. The comment was made…
They’re everywhere. From carpets beneath our feet, through contact lenses in our eyes, to planes above our heads. Synthetic materials, although synthetic, have become perfectly natural, and the growing piles of plastic waste are just another element of our world. But discarded plastic accumulates not only in areas with thousands…
It sneaked up on us, cheeky rascal. We had only just come back from the field. Tired and hungry, we didn’t even have enough time to bring food tins to the table, which temporarily stood outside. We came out from behind the corner and there it was, the king of…
The archipelago was probably known of already by the Vikings. Brief mentions of “cold shores” in the area, which is now instantly associated with Svalbard, appeared for the first time in 12th-century Nordic sagas. The thing is, though, that no evidence has ever been found to confirm that the Vikings…
Seas and oceans have served humanity as rubbish dumps for hundreds of years, but initially it wasn’t much of a problem. As recently as at the end of the 18th century, there were merely 1.5 billion of us and the majority of rubbish we generated was made of natural materials,…
The issue of marine litter may be approached in a number of ways. The widest recognition is usually given to initiatives focusing on prevention, such as raising the awareness of dangers involved in excessive use of plastic or searching for environmentally-friendly alternatives. There is also much talk about improving existing…