As immoral as creating it was.
The immorality is habitat destruction and negligently killing.
The garbage patch isn’t intrinsically bad, beyond being ugly, which is an aesthetic rather than moral judgement. It’s bad because of the impact it has in the life around it. If life has adapted to live on it it’s no longer purely damaging. If they adapt such that more benefit than are harmed then cleanup would be more damaging than beneficial.
A real example is the USS Arizona. If we were given the choice, we shouldn’t have sunk a massive battleship with 1.5 million gallons of oil onboard.
Now though, it’s become a coral reef and is full of life that would be destroyed if we removed the ship (to say nothing of the risk of spilling the remaining 500,000 gallons of oil).
Nothing is ecologically dependent on the garbage patch though, and it’s most likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, so it’s a moot point in the end.
As immoral as creating it was.
The immorality is habitat destruction and negligently killing.
The garbage patch isn’t intrinsically bad, beyond being ugly, which is an aesthetic rather than moral judgement. It’s bad because of the impact it has in the life around it. If life has adapted to live on it it’s no longer purely damaging. If they adapt such that more benefit than are harmed then cleanup would be more damaging than beneficial.
A real example is the USS Arizona. If we were given the choice, we shouldn’t have sunk a massive battleship with 1.5 million gallons of oil onboard.
Now though, it’s become a coral reef and is full of life that would be destroyed if we removed the ship (to say nothing of the risk of spilling the remaining 500,000 gallons of oil).
Nothing is ecologically dependent on the garbage patch though, and it’s most likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, so it’s a moot point in the end.