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| Here's an example of some of the stuff we pulled out of the ocean. |
Several years ago I helped sail a tall ship out into the North Pacific in search of that evasive gyre that held a collection of trash the size of Texas. We found an awful lot of plastic but nothing like that envisioned. Much of it was in specks, less than an inch in diameter, the kind of thing filter feeders would inhale and not even know it until the amount overwhelmed their internal organs and they washed up dead on a beach somewhere.
To be sure we found large floating objects too, but not in the quantity we expected to encounter. Principal among them were what we called ghost nets, huge tangles of damaged synthetic netting that had been tossed overboard from commercial fishing boats and had continued doing their job collecting fish long after their economic life had ended. Each net came up with critters tangled in it.
Many of the crew members were idealistic young people including my son, intent on stopping pollution and cleaning up what damage already had been done. There were a few older people in their thirties and forties and then a couple of us old farts spooking 70.
Toward the end of the voyage the sponsors held a kind of roundtable meeting in a common area of the ship and invited each of us to talk about what we had seen, what we had learned and what we intended going forward. As one person after another spoke of making personal choices in what we buy, doing what they could to stem pollution and some ideas for cleaning it up, enthused to move foreword on a personal level to address the problem.
As each one spoke, I was listening and also turning over in my mind what I should say, what to me was the reality here? Here I am eight years later trying to recall exactly what I said then, because of that meme that showed up on facebook today, but it went something like this:
I started by saying I was impressed with the young people and their determination to make a difference. Then I said something like, but if each of us does all the recycling we can, try not to buy single-use plastics, clean up a stream or a beach when we can and live as clean a life as possible, if all of us on this boat do that it is not going to make one bit of difference and attacking the problem. Being on this ocean and sensing how large it is, and then thinking about the amount of trash in it, and, too thinking about the amount of trash that’s coming to it, our little contribution isn’t going to even show up. Instead of thinking in terms of your own little world, start looking into the bigger picture. How can you attack the mass rather than the individual piece of plastic.
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| Our ship |
Study something like chemistry, come up with containers and other other typically plastic throw-away products , that are biodegradable, of have secondary and tertiary uses to replace things like plastic straws. Then you are making a difference. Find ways to cut of the flow of disposables and replace them with reusable materials. Go into public service, government, lead the way to turning the nation around to the problem and guide public policy toward cleanup and change. Think and act on the grand scale. I don’t mean you are wrong to do what you are doing personally, but I do mean to encourage you to devote your working lives to change on a grand sale. That’s the only way this problem gets fixed.
I hated to tell them that, and discourage them but it needed to be said, and maybe even more now than then. When that meme came up today calling for systemic change it brought the whole problem to me again. Today with the current administration’s massive attacks on the environment it is more important than ever to stop that and to start moving toward systemic solutions.
It’s not going to be easy. Even when we know what the right thing to do is, there are reasonable people who are going to object. The issue of straws is a case in point. A friend of mine has a daughter who is largely confined to a wheelchair. Among other necessities she needs straws to drink. My friend has tried metal straws but they are clumsy and difficult to clean. I assume there are other substances that would work, but none of them are universally available. How complicated it gets is I saw another meme today that showed a paper straw, but it came encased in a plastic sanitary wrapping. What does that solve?
What it says is the solution is even more complex than what I told those kids on the boat years ago. When we solve a problem we also need a solution for those folks who depend on the very item we are eliminating.
Brain exploding.
