Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University professor and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, talks in about the state of the world at the Long Now Foundation seminar.

The North Pacific Gyre is a section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that is accumulating trash due to the nature of its water currents. This garbage patch in the ocean consists of trash debris and non-biodegradable plastic that just breaks up into more tiny pieces.

This video on YouTube sumarizes it best…

saying that there is 7 million tons of floating waste spanning an area twice the size of Texas. Birds and wildlife die when they mistaken these plastic bits as food. A lot of these garbage get washed up on beaches.

The latimes.com also has some video pieces on the North Pacific Gyre here.

And this video is a more detailed explanation of trash in our oceans…

The reason why there is not a lot of good photos of the North Pacific Gyre is that most of the garbage is just underwater and is somewhat spread out as explained in theoystersgarter.com.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist goes to India Bangalore’s call centers to talk to the young folks living there and how globalization is changing the way they live. Friedman does not only just visit the high tech centers; he also visits the villages of the working poor less than an hour’s ride away where there is often not even running water.

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Here is an entertaining and enlightening talk by Hans Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Lots of good data and animated graphs to give you a more accurate look at the world.