The Baal Shem Tov, or Besht —  the founder of Chasidism — 
met the soul of the Messiah during an ascent to heaven. 
The Besht asked him, "When will the Master come?" 
The Messiah answered, "When your wellsprings break forth to the outside!" 
(from a letter written by the Besht to his brother-in-law about one of his soul ascents) 

Tashlikh teaching

Tashlikh bim'tsulot hayam kol chatotam – You will cast into the depths of the sea all of their sins!

The practice of Tashlikh comes from a time when no one could imagine that human acts could deplete entire oceans. The vastness of the sea, its capacity to receive and transform, to cleanse all, to breakdown and replenish, this is what we evoke in Tashlikh ~ what Walt Whtiman wrote about in Leaves of Grass:

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of
       the sea, which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all
       over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that
       have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever...

Now our appetites consume whole species of fish, though fish are our model and metaphor for unimaginable fecundity. Industries kill off reefs; oil spills entire coastlines. Our ways of agriculture wash ages of good soil into the ocean, along with pesticides and manure. The greatest earthly symbol of the infinite is reaching its limits in our generation.

Can we still recite Tashlikh, throw our bread into the water, without remembering that our sins literally spill into the ocean? If only our sins could be transformed so simply by rituals, but it cannot work that way. We need to acknowledge this reality in our Tashlikh liturgy.

How would you do this? You could discuss the issue during the ritual of course; you could also read the Al Chet prayer for the earth as part of Tashlikh (download it here). Please contribute your own proposals and liturgies for Tashlikh to NeoHasid.
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The quote from Leaves of Grass comes from "This Compost". The poem continues:

...That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the
       orange-orchard—that melons, grapes, peaches,
       plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what
       was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such
       endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual,
       sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts
       such leavings from them at last.

Design in progress © Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg 2006