Something's fishy

We all get caught at traffic lights, or in traffic jams, behind those who’ve stuck a plastic fish-symbol application to the back of their car as some sort of proclamation of their Christian faith.

In Christianity Today magazine, an editor writes of the practice, “Critics of the fish symbol either decry it as tacky tokenism or point out that the fish still carries baggage from the days when pagans used it to represent fertility or, more specifically, the female reproductive organs . . . Greeks, Romans, and many other pagans used the fish symbol before Christians.

“Hence the fish, unlike, say, the cross, attracted little suspicion, making it a perfect secret symbol for persecuted believers. When threatened by Romans in the first centuries after Christ, Christians used the fish to mark meeting places and tombs, or to distinguish friends from foes.

“According to one ancient story, when a Christian met a stranger in the road, the Christian sometimes drew one arc of the simple fish outline in the dirt. If the stranger drew the other arc, both believers knew they were in good company. Current bumper-sticker and business-card uses of the fish hearken back to this practice.”

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There is now said to be a one-in-four chance that any given piece of fish a human consumes has plastic in it.

“Somewhere between 15 trillion and 51 trillion pieces of plastic litters the world’s oceans,” according to a study released this month by London’s Imperial College.

“The total weight of small plastic pieces that accumulated in 2014 alone is estimated to be between 93,000 and 236,000 metric tons, which is only approximately one percent of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean annually,” according to study researchers. Estimates do not count plastic waste that ends up sinking to the ocean floor or is ingested by fish and other marine species.

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More than 8 trillion microbeads enter U.S. aquatic habitats on a daily basis and that’s only a fraction of what’s being dumped in waste-water treatment facilities, according to a new study published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Eight hundred trillion of the plastic beads settle into a sludge and transform into a runoff from sewage plants and go on to pollute the waterways.

"We're facing a plastic crisis and don't even know it," according to Stephanie Green of Oregon State University, co-author of the study.

Chelsea Rochman of the University of California, Davis and lead author of the study, reported that the microbeads were one of many types of microplastics found in the gut content of the marine wildlife:

"We've demonstrated in previous studies that microplastic of the same type, size and shape as many microbeads can transfer contaminants to animals and cause toxic effects.”

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According to Prevention Magazine, “Imported shrimp actually holds the designation of being the dirtiest of the ‘dirty dozen,’ and it's hard to avoid, as 90% of shrimp sold in the U.S. is imported. Imported farmed shrimp comes with a whole bevy of contaminants: antibiotics, residues from chemicals used to clean pens, filth like mouse hair, rat hair, and pieces of insects.”

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Hosea 4, which contains the famous line, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” starts out with the admonishment:

“Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
[2] By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.
[3] Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away."