As a discouraged environmentalist (I mean really—when states pass legislation that REQUIRE teaching the “denier” side of climate change, what’s left?), I picked up Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore with a sense of dull fascination.
But two events suggested a mindful look. First, a few months ago I was involved in a casual conversation in the post office lobby where the opinion was voiced that the “Pacific garbage patch” was a hoax. A friend’s response, “So, you’ve been there and looked?” Hummm…
Then there’s the article that appeared in our local papers this week noting that debris from last March’s tsunami in Japan has begun to arrive on shores in British Columbia. Specifically, Tofino, a beach community and Canadian National Park of spectacular remoteness and beauty. The local article reminds us debris will be coming soon to our own remote and beautiful (although “plastic sanded” at times) Oregon Coastline. (To view NOAA’s tsunami debris trajectory visit: http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/japanfaqs.html)
Plastic Ocean, by Capt. Charles Moore, released October, 2011, includes a discussion of the potential of tsunami debris in the larger context of the Pacific gyre’s concentration of plastics which Moore, who’s been following and sampling since August, 1997, describes, not as a vast contiguous floating patch, but rather as a “plastic soup.” His findings are just plain scary, perhaps especially to those who like me trained as a marine biologists. When he talks of “nurdles”, tiny floating particles of busted-up plastic, I can only envision filter feeders, concentrating toxic chemicals associated with the plastics even as they starve, filled with plastic rather than the smaller organisms which are their food. There is much much more in the book which by turns curls my hair (the findings) and warms my heart (Moore’s continued commitment to making the change from a consumer disposable to a durable conserver society because it is The Right Thing to Do). The book is dedicated, “To the generation, not yet born, that creates a world where plastic pollution is unthinkable.”
He ends on the note that is all most US environmentalists these days can muster: “we have the smarts, the know-how, and the imperative. The ocean planet will thank you if you help end its plastic plague….I am a patient man, and I have learned the art of seeing….I know how a few well-placed nudges can alter a course, the way a slight tug on a ship’s wheel will point you toward an entirely different destination.”
If you can take it, please read Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore. ( www.plasticoceanthebook.com). Then go out and start nudging.
A postscript: Check out this article from yesterday’s (1/27) LA Times about a plastic trashed resort beach in Mexico: www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-beach-pollution-20120128,0,2261593.story





















