These pictures are hard to bear, but everyone should see them. They show another side of our beautiful planet and why it is so important to think about every soda can or plastic bag you toss away. Because what our trash is doing to other humans, animals, and nature is something that we often can't even imagine. These pictures clearly show what a single rubber band can do to a turtle or what an ice cream cup and do to a sea lion.
19 years ago, when he was still a baby, this turtle got caught in a rubber band. Today he looks like THIS because he couldn't free himself.
A starving polar bear.
A green soup of chemicals and a fisher wading right through it.
The Chinese Wall complete with convenient "trash cans."
This river is being misused as a sewage plant.
No words.
Sanitation works collecting thousands of dead pigs from a river in China.
Penguins that can hardly move from all the oil.
This seal had to be freed from this styrofoam cup because he could barely breathe.
This bird is barely recognizable after a catastrophic oil spill.
Industrial waste and trash in the countryside.
Air polution in "modern" factories.
This turtle grew up wrapped in a plastic can holder. Even its shell was deformed by it.
Garbage collectors on boats.
A boy in China drinks water from the streets.
A bird covered in oil.
Lake Shasta in California at its lowest level in history.
Those are no clouds, but smog that is covering the entire city.
A cleanup worker after an oil spill.
A child takes a bath in the trash.
That's no painting, but the Chaohu lake in Hefei, China full of algae.
The Jianhe River in China. A journalist takes a sample to test it.
A bath in a lake full of algae.
A river full of dead fish.
A koala has lost his home after his forest was lumbered.
A sea lion caught in a piece of wire.
A child wades through a completely littered street.
A dead fish in the middle of a dirty tributary.
A boy jumps over a pond filled with garbage.
He is going swimming where most would wear a protective suit.
These pictures are evocative and important at the same time, for they are a warning. So that it doesn't look like this everywhere all over the world, it's important to SHARE these images with everyone. For the animals and for Mother Earth, so that we can all protect the future of our planet.