I just watched a BBC news report about the tons and tons of plastic garbage produced on the island of Java. Other than Honshu Japan, Java is one of the two islands with over a hundred million people. The report was alarming, disturbing, horrible, sickening, terrifying. Picture advanced sea life choking on plastic soda bottles or great sea turtles whose clade dates back to the late Jurassic Period caught in six-pack beer netting.

I blame religion for much of the world's suffering and misery. What's this island, the size of North Carolina, doing with over then times the eastern state's population? Their religion encourages them to reproduce, most couples believing “Allah will provide.” I've said this throughout my writing: Religion makes life cheap—all life.

In my book Saving Gaia, I show how the Titan Gaia is the mother of Tethys, the sea goddess, and science assures us that life began in the ocean. As a species we owe the sea love and respect as one would love our own remote grandmother. Religion has sabotaged, corrupted and undermined this natural love, replacing it with a nonsensical plastic figurine which it claims to be the mother of life. It's the sea that deserves our highest emotional empathy and not the offspring of delusional religious leaders.

Saving Gaia postulates that humans are the bane of nature, a cancerous growth on the skin like the fungus Tinea capitis on the scalp. The plastic spoken of earlier decomposes into microscopic, poisonous particles which are entering the food chain. Think of what the world will be like at the end of the century if there's no dramatic change in consciousness. Saving Gaia gives some plausible suggestions, starting with curtailing population growth and stop supporting the church and make the clergy of all religions get jobs like everybody else.