Silent springs, burning rivers... and now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

There's a Texas-size whorl of refuse -- mostly shreds of plastic that often have soaked up some of the nastiest pollutants imaginable -- floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Let that sink in for a minute. A patch of toxic filth, as big as Texas. Maybe your radar picked this up better than mine did -- I've seen reports of it here and there for at least a couple years, heard names like "North Pacific Trash Vortex" and "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," but it all never registered as other than one more daunting environmental mess. It looks to be more than that, and right now I feel kinda like I've been asleep at the wheel.

Last night, with a hat tip to a Daily Kos post, I watched some episodes from Garbage Island, a documentary/travelogue serial on VBS.tv about a research vessel's trip to the heart of the garbage patch. I found it profoundly disturbing. Images and interviews show that this vast raft of crap is not floating on the ocean, it's become of the ocean. A significant chunk of the great Pacific Ocean is so rife with tiny, submerged clots of plastic that the water looks like hot and sour soup. I can't imagine how it will ever be cleaned up. Seabirds and marine mammals are dying like flies, their bellies full of plastic junk they've mistaken for food. The stuff -- which has high concentrations of PCBs, bisphenol-A and other POPs -- is in the food chain.

Nearly 40 years ago, Time magazine made national news of the story of the Cuyahoga, a river in Cleveland that had been so fouled with industrial pollutants that it actually caught fire and burned. For many, the image of rivers on fire powerfully symbolized a feeling that something had gone very wrong in our relationship with nature, and the event helped galvanize public will behind the passage of the Clean Water Act.

Imagining the disgusting "plastic soup" out there in the Pacific fills me with a deep unease. It's kin to the feeling evoked by burning rivers, but on a different order of magnitude. Who hasn't looked out over an endless blue ocean, run hands through sands the surf has ground fine over millions of years, and felt the presence of something unknowably vast and eternal? Well, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- which of course has cousins in all the world's oceans -- makes the eternal look awful rickety, at least to me. Like global warming, it's an instance of humankind's terrible power to unmindfully alter and degrade the very conditions of life on Earth. In coming days, I'll be trying to discover a little more about what kind of future the garbage patch suggests we might be headed for.

Here's the first episode of Garbage Island; visit VBS.tv to see the whole series. (Note: one of the narrators has something of a potty mouth.)