A new NASA study, using advances in satellite technology, has finally been able to measure the long-rumored drift of pollution from China and other East Asian countries, into North America:

“We used the latest satellite capabilities to distinguish industrial pollution and smoke from dust transported to the western regions of North America from East Asia. Looking at four years of data from 2002 to 2005 we estimated the amount of pollution arriving in North America to be equivalent to about 15 percent of local emissions of the U.S. and Canada,” said Hongbin Yu, an associate research scientist of the University of Maryland Baltimore County working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This is a significant percentage at a time when the U.S. is trying to decrease pollution emissions to boost overall air quality. This means that any reduction in our emissions may be offset by the pollution aerosols coming from East Asia and other regions.”

So basically, we could all live clean as Oregon hippies and we’d still breathing in the toxic exhaust of Chinese factories. But hey, at least we can buy CHEAP ELECTRONICS AT WAL-MART!!!!!111 We can enjoy our last days dying of cancer, watching Planet Earth on FUCKING BLU-RAY! OMG HIGH RESOLUTION!!1:

With so many of Earth’s natural wonders on display, it’s only fitting that the final DVD in this five-disc set is devoted to Planet Earth: The Future, a separate three-part series in which a global array of experts is assembled to discuss issues of conservation, protection of delicate ecosystems, and the socio-economic benefits of understanding nature as a commodity that returns trillions of dollars in value at no cost to Earth’s human population. At a time when the multiple threats of global warming should be obvious to all, let’s give Sir David the last word, from the closing of Planet Earth’s final episode: “We can now destroy or we can cherish–the choice is ours.”

One wonders, if fucking Sir David took the time to figure out that by the time you’ve got your Blu-Ray player hooked up to your Wal-Mart television and you’re playing your FIVE-disc Planet Earth set, you’ve already made the choice? After all, there’s an even higher resolution available when you’re trying to check out nature: its called OUTSIDE. Maybe if we tried marketing that shit on TV it’d become a little more popular.

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute short, part animation, part monologue, that deals with the ecological, social, and personal impact of the linear mode of consumption and production found in Western capitalist society. Though it deals with some pretty heady shit, it’s tone is somewhat maternal, with host Annie Leonard taking the role of kindly kindergarten teacher. But the subject matter is anything but lighthearted. Here are some of the facts:

• 80% of the world’s forests are gone.
• 2000 trees a minute are cut down in the Amazon alone. That is 7 football fields a minute!
• The U.S. has less than 4% of its forests left.
• 40% of our waterways are undrinkable.
• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 30% of the waste.
• 75% of global fisheries have been fished beyond capacity.
• 100,000 synthetic chemicals are used in production today.
• Bromated Flame Retardants (BFR) neurotoxins (toxins to brain) are in computers, mattresses, pillows.
• Food with highest level of contaminants is mother’s milk.
• 200,000 people a day are moving to cities from environments that no longer support them.
• U.S. industry *admits* to 4 billion pounds of toxic pollution released per year (likely far more).
• We see more ads in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime. 3,000 ads a day!
• Average house size has doubled in the U.S. since the 1970’s.
• Average American creates 4.5 lbs. garbage a day — an amount doubled from 30 years ago.
• For every one garbage can you put out at the curb, 70 cans were filled by all the processes needed in order to make it.
• 99% of all those things we buy are not in use after 6 months.

For a more hard-hitting, and depressing breakdown of The Story of Stuff and it’s related harsh realities, check out Jill Ettinger’s ‘The Wasted Years” over at Reality Sandwich. You’ll never look at your pillow the same way again…

All the shit you throw away — grocery bags, cd cases, water bottles, toys, iPods — ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a heap of debris floating in the Pacific twice the size of Texas, consisting of 80 percent plastics and weighing some 3.5 million tons, and floating where few people ever travel, in no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.”The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.

If you want to feel really bad about it, read always-genius Mark Morford’s take on it here. You see, its not just killing fish and turtles and bird, but it’s killing us too!

The poetry goes something like this: Plastic bottle is tossed away. Plastic bottle, along with millions just like it, escapes out to sea, drifts and wanders and ultimately joins giant toxic stew of other plastic garbage sitting like a massive island in middle of impartial but increasingly wary ocean.

Time passes. Life churns. Sea birds and other large marine life ingest (and then die from) some of the billions of bits of brightly-colored plastic floating about, as the sun slowly breaks down the rest of the plastic bottle into its fundamental, ultra-toxic polymer molecules. Stew thickens.

And then, the magic happens. Nature’s most efficient organic filters, the sea jellies, absorb those tiny plastic molecules into their bodies. Small fish eat the jellies. Larger fish eat the smaller fish. Slowly, the deadly plastics, which never completely biodegrade, amble their way back up the food chain and back into the stomachs and bloodstreams and ecosystems of larger and larger animals until, voila, there again is your plastic bottle, right there on your dinner plate. Neat!