The killer from the deep

A synthetic rope washed up on the foreshore. It and its like kill whales, turtles, fish and, in the end, they will probably kill us apes too. 

There was an interesting article in the newspapers this morning about recently discovered letters written by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In them he  expressed fears that the Industrial Revolution was harming the environment.

Writing in 1842 about Bristol’s floating harbour, he said that “the abuses of using the Float as a common receptacle for rubbish have immensely increased”. The pollution was “in some measure unavoidable”, he wrote, but too many were using the harbour as a dumping ground: “I fear still more from the apparent tendency of all persons to use the Float as a good receiver for that which cannot easily be got rid of elsewhere”. 

Clearly a man ahead of his time!