World Envirnoment Day is June 5th, and Treehugger.com, one of our favorite sites for environmental news and views, had the good fortune of being able to interview Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) for the upcoming occasion. Steiner is in year two of his four year post, and manages over 1000 people in 42 countries in his efforts to bring the public and private sectors together on issues of environmental sustainabiliy and social equity.  

Steiner advocates for a GDP generated by nature, a globally green economy, and says that developed countries “should shoulder their full responsibility for having used the atmosphere as a dustbin for some 200 years. The interview outlines Mr. Steiner´s suggestions for government incentive programs for environmental sustainability, as well as a preview of the environmental topics he´ll be covering on World Environment Day.

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If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gets any bigger, we may have to colonize it–that is, if it doesn’t invade us first. This swirling mass of plastic debris was a Texas-sized vortex when I first wrote about it in November. Now, this mass of roughly 100 million tons of garbage has overtaken an “area that is maybe twice the size” of the continental United States, as one researcher who’s studying the vortex told the Independent.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a ” flotsam” expert, has been trailing the trash vortex for fifteen years and describes it as “a big animal without a leash:”

When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.”

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