Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  And what factors determined what we could see? How, for instance, did an object’s density and shape affect whether it stayed on the surface and how it traveled through the Gyre? And how old were the objects we saw? And how toxic? And what proportion was large objects versus confetti? And was there a class of sub-confetti particles, an as-yet-unknown kingdom of microscopic polyethylene flora? And most important, what kind of change did this wreak on the ecosystem?

  Little of this is yet known to science—and to my nerd mind, it was the chance to help answer even one of those questions that should have been our white whale. It was a whale that swam alongside us for the entire voyage, but that we never noticed. And so the Kaisei sailed the ocean blue, irony on the wind, a mission to raise awareness, but not knowledge.

  The Pirate King was a licensed ham-radio operator. Of course he was. He could have built a ham radio from an old soda can and a box of matches, underwater, while strangling MacGyver with his feet. In his circumnavigation of the globe, he had built up a network of land-based radio contacts, colleagues whom he had never met. Through them, he said, he could get a radio transmission patched into the phone system. We could call home.

  I wanted to tell the Doctor I was still alive, and when we would return to land. But nobody knew. Although we were supposed to arrive in time for San Diego’s tall-ship festival, Mary had been making indistinct noises about staying out as long as it took to find areas of higher trash-density. (Art’s jokes about Captain Ahab were seeming less joke-like by the day.) The Pirate King, for his part, was bent on heading back. I couldn’t tell if he was impatient with Mary, or tired of what he thought was a wild goose chase, or if perhaps he had a deep personal need to attend the tall-ship festival.

  In the wheelhouse, the Pirate King keyed the radio and read the Doctor’s phone number to an impossibly distant ham operator—a hobbyist in Florida, I think. Then he handed me the radio. I waited, while on the other side of the planet, a phone rang.

  I never reached her. Several times I left a message, telling her the Kaisei’s latitude and longitude, and that I was alive and well, and that I loved her. She later told me the messages were sometimes garbled and unintelligible, my voice warped and splintered by its passage through the atmosphere. In those moments, she couldn’t understand where I was, or anything I said. Only that it was me.

  In the pit of night, the radar alarm sounded. A contact directly in front of us. The Pirate King said it was probably a squall, from how its profile on the radar screen changed and grew. Squalls patrolled this part of the ocean, hunched pillars of storm that could interrupt the night with lashing winds and rain.

  In the wheelhouse, with our faces lit by the glow of the radar, we watched the contorted bolus of pixels bear down on us. It passed through the three-mile radius, then the two-mile. Then, slowly, it convulsed, stretched, and crept to port, passing within a mile.

  We went outside and stared off the rail into the darkness, straining to see it. Nothing. No sky, no horizon. All night, we had seen nothing but a pair of stars, hesitant in the gloom. The radar said there was something out there, but we couldn’t see it.

  Then…something changed in our vision. Its outline came into focus. We could see it, faint and vast in the darkness, a monstrous anvil sliding over the ocean.

  The sails hovered in the still air, indifferent. We went to bed.

  24 AUGUST—32°59′ N. 145°50′ W

  After ten days at sea, we turned back.

  The tension among Mary and the Pirate King and the Kaisei’s captain had been growing for some time. All anyone knew for sure was that Mary wanted to stay out as long as possible, and that the Pirate King thought we needed to turn back, and that the captain liked to stage brief fits of nonsensical rage. The Pirate King stood in the upper lounge and lectured us. He was as hell-bent on San Diego as Mary was on her current lines. As for the crew, we just wanted to know when we would head back, so that we could plan how we might, one day, return to our lives. But it seemed increasingly likely that we might wander the seas forever, a ghost ship in search of plastic. I saw Mary in the lower lounge, studying a distribution map in a textbook called Marine Debris (Coe and Rogers, 1996). “There should still be trash there,” she said, pointing to a spot off Mexico.

  In a pair of heated meetings, the argument finally spilled out into the open. The Pirate King insisted that we had to turn around right away. Not only was the tall-ship festival approaching—about which none of us really gave a damn—but Joe, the ship’s engineer, was sick. He had some kind of throat infection, something that looked like it was getting serious. As an argument for speeding back to land, this was dubious; if Joe’s condition was life-threatening, he would need an emergency airlift whether or not we turned the boat around.

  But that was the argument that won the day. We wore ship, as sailors say, and headed east. Almost as soon as we had reached the Gyre, we were on our way out. Too many days wasted at the dock in Point Richmond, a little bad luck with the Gyre seeming to have pushed west that summer, and in the end I never got my turn in the dinghy, picking up Garbage Patch garbage with my own hands. And none of us ever went over the side to watch a ghost net swimming in its natural environment, attended by plastic minnows hovering in the spell of the fearsome, blue abyss.

  Bravo Watch was quiet that night. There were rumors that Mary was heartbroken to have turned back, that she considered it a major blow to Project Kaisei. It was impossible to know if such gossip was true. None of us volunteers were going to go knock on her door and ask. But it didn’t matter. It was true in broad strokes. It felt like we had turned around as soon as we had gotten to the Garbage Patch. Had we even gotten to the heart of it? If we hadn’t turned around, could we have found the current lines? Could we have found Art’s Great White Ball of Trash?

  It’s sad how quickly a beginning turns into an end, with nothing in between. One day you still face an eternity at sea; the next day the voyage is over—though you may be days or weeks from land. It all depends on which way you’re pointed.

  We motored through the gloom. I was in the darkened wheelhouse, waiting to log any sightings from the generally fruitless nighttime debris watch.

  Mary appeared next to me. We stood together, subdued, staring out at the night, at the murky silhouette of Kelsey at the helm, and listened to the engine drone.

  I felt bad for her. The mission had been a great overreach. If our goal had been ecotourism—or pollution tourism—the voyage would have been a triumph. The Pirate King, aggressively self-righteous, never tired of pointing out the irony of us burning so much fuel to get out here. But that didn’t bother me. People burn fuel all the time. They burn it to fly to London. They burn it to take a cruise. We had burned it to try to see something about the world. And though I was critical of Mary’s goals, I could only credit her drive and determination. It was because of her that we were able to be out here, witnessing one of the great phenomena of our time.

  I said some optimistic things. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t seen the current lines, I said. We had seen stretch upon stretch of particles. Places where they were too numerous to count. Places that prompted Henry to radio the bridge, “Oh, shit, they’re everywhere.” Weren’t the particles the most intractable part of the problem, anyway? Hadn’t we seen what we came for after all?

  She murmured in agreement, unconvinced.

  I watched the navigation unit. The radar echoes of nearby rain squalls crept across the display, primordial blobs of orange and yellow pixels that pulsed with a quiet, mysterious life.

  “They look like little amoebas,” I said.

  Mary stared at the screen. A tear hovered at the edge of her eye.

  “I wish they were islands of plastic,” she said.

  25 AUGUST—32°53′ N. 143°08′ W

  The bowsprit was a good place for a morose crew member to cheer himself up. I sat on the netting, looking back at the place where the Kaisei’s prow sheared through the water. Looking down, I could see an a
rea of water the size of a living room, undisturbed as yet by our onrushing hull. Hello, human-scale bit of Pacific. Goodbye.

  The Kaisei’s mission had been easy fodder for a skeptic. It was the perfect expression of the weird symbiosis between an activist and the cause he or she is fighting against. It had been imperative for Project Kaisei to pinpoint, document, almost celebrate, the issue of marine plastic in its most horrifying instance.

  But I wasn’t so different. My mission was to find the world’s most polluted places, as if I knew what that meant. Only if I found those ecosystems of despair would I be able to implement my conceit of contrarian ecotourism and compose my great elegy for the pre-human world. But instead of finding degraded ecosystems that I could treat as though they were beautiful, I was just finding beauty. The Earth had gotten there first. I went looking for a radioactive wasteland and found a radioactive garden. I went looking for the Pacific Garbage Patch and found the Pacific Ocean.

  I sat on the bowsprit, leaning my face on one hand, a walkie-talkie slung around my neck, listening to the ocean crash against the ship. Soon, when we came closer to land, dolphins would find us, capering through the water below the bow net. We would lie in the netting, listening to them chatter and squeal. But for now, I was alone.

  A plastic bottle ran under the boat.

  I keyed the radio to report it to whoever was manning the debris log. But before I could, a sprinkling of confetti appeared on the water, and then another bottle. Then some more confetti, a piece of tarp, some other objects—a crescendo of trash that peaked within a few seconds. I looked out to starboard and saw us bisect what I thought was a stripe of garbage several meters wide that ran toward the horizon.

  It wasn’t solid. No carpet of trash. But it was the densest, most localized stretch of debris I had seen all voyage. I called the wheelhouse on the radio and told them we had just crossed over a current line.

  We didn’t stop. Nobody even called Where away? Who was in the wheel-house—the Pirate King? The captain? They had eyes only for San Diego. But I had just seen it: the Great White Stripe of Trash. I keyed the radio again, filling with rage. This was fucking stupid, I told them. I think we just crossed right over a current line.

  The Kaisei motored on toward San Diego. I think Mary was in her cabin.

  FIVE

  SOYMAGEDDON

  The smell of smoke, a plume rising by the road, and then we saw the flames. The forest was on fire. “Stop! Stop!” Gil cried, and Mango pulled over. Adam and I waded through the brush and emerged into a world of ash and cinder.

  We were in the Amazon rainforest. The former Amazon rainforest, to be exact. The broad field where we stood was empty, freshly scorched to the ground. The air swirled with cinders. They mixed with sudden clouds of small, attacking insects. Where had they come from? Was there a species of bug driven to riot by the smell of smoke?

  At the edge of the field, we found the fire crawling over what was left to burn. It reared up in brief flares, as tall as we were, then ducked its head back toward the ground. Adam started videotaping.

  I turned back to the field, a monochrome square a hundred yards to a side. A single massive tree stood alone in the ruin. The ground was warm through my boots. In front of me, long bands of white crossed the ground, dividing, and dividing again, growing thin. They were the ghosts of trees. Felled and burning, they had turned to ash where they lay. Ashen branches sprouted from ashen trunks. I kicked one and it rose into the air, a white eddy circling on the hot breeze.

  Everyone knows forests are good and deforestation is bad. Forests are habitat. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and forestall global warming. But not everyone knows that cutting them down and burning them not only releases carbon dioxide into the air but also creates local feedback loops that cause the forest to die back even further, meaning more habitat loss and more CO2 emissions. The Amazon, at ten times the size of Texas, give or take a couple of Texases, has so much forest that to cut it back is to set off what some have termed a carbon bomb, with global consequences.

  I had come to Brazil to see the burning fuse on that tremendous carbon bomb. There was only one catch: this probably wasn’t it. You could even argue that this blackened, boot-melting wasteland, with its phantom trees and prowling flames, was protecting the forest from something even worse. Here, near the joining of the Amazon and one of its greatest tributaries, the people standing in the way of the rainforest’s destruction sometimes looked a lot like they were cutting it down, or setting it on fire.

  India was supposed to be next. India, with the Doctor, married, for our honeymoon. But the Doctor had met me on the wharf when the Kaisei made San Diego, and called it off. A chasm opened in the ground and swallowed the world. It wasn’t me, she said. But still. No wedding. No marriage. My life evaporated in a single afternoon.

  I took it hard. The global environment, formerly such a candy store of problems, now lost its appeal. Even climate change and mass extinction seemed pretty minor next to the growing monument of my heartache. Yet books must be written. Who would take up the gospel of pollution tourism if I let it drop? I ditched India for the meantime and made for the Amazon, a fugitive from my own despair.

  My friend Adam came with me. Or maybe I should say that I went with him. Ostensibly he was coming so we could shoot a television news piece in Brazil. We had collaborated on that kind of work before. But I also suspected that, unlike me, Adam wanted to go to Brazil. He may have thought, too, that I could use a little support. Left to my own devices, I might spend the entire Amazon trip in a hotel room, under a mosquito net, watching whatever passes for cable TV down there.

  Friends—they’re always trying to encourage you, and to convince you that you’re not incompetent and unlovable and doomed to failure. Why can’t they just butt out? On the other hand, with Adam on board, I could renounce all the detailed background research that I was going to blow off anyway. What was I going to do—crack open the Amazon with a week’s googling? Screw that.

  Originally, the Brazil trip was going to be about beef. Cattle ranching has long been a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Surely there was some friendly rancher out there who would give us the inside scoop on how virgin rainforest gets turned into hamburgers. Just think of the steaks we would eat.

  But then we found out about soy. That’s where the action was, we read (Adam read). Soy farmers were leveling great stretches of forest so they could sell animal feed to Europe. We ditched the ranching idea and chose Santarém as our destination. The city is the site of a controversial export terminal built by the multinational company Cargill to bring soybeans out of the Amazon. Near Santarém, we would be able to see it all: unblemished jungle, jungle being cut back, soy fields, and the terminal itself, a cruel agribusiness dagger thrust directly into the pulsing, green heart of the world. At least, this was my fervent hope.

  With research outsourced to Adam, it fell to me to direct field operations. I put together a reporting plan.

  1) Buy airline ticket (IMPORTANT).

  2) Fly to Brazil.

  3) Exit airplane.

  4) Exit airport.

  5) Find taxi.

  6) Ask taxi driver to take us to the Amazon, preferably the part on fire.

  This was a plan I could handle, especially once Adam—seeing I had no intention of addressing Action Item No. 1—went ahead and bought our plane tickets himself. (I still haven’t paid him back.)

  Then, as if to punish me for it, he shows up in my office wearing a green visor and waving a sheaf of papers, and gets all NEWSFLASH on me. The Brazilian government had just announced record-low rates of deforestation for 2010. The lowest rates of deforestation ever recorded.

  Those bastards. Here I was, about to drag my ass to Brazil to go adventuring through a jungle-clearing orgy of absolutely first-rate proportions, and up pops President Lula to tell me that deforestation is more or less solved. It was disgusting. Since when? Wasn’t deforestation like death and taxes? I’d been hearing about
the inexorable destruction of the rainforests since I was a child. Now that, too, would be taken away from me?

  It didn’t matter. We had our tickets. And so we turned to the traveler’s customary scramble of last-minute chores: suddenly you have a critical need for magnetic bug-proof socks, and a polarized hat, and a million other little purchases to help you convince yourself that you actually want to go on the trip.

  While Adam spent his last few evenings researching deforestation patterns and Brazilian environmental policy, I screwed around on the Internet, disconsolately hoping for something to spur my curiosity. Somehow, I stumbled across an advertisement for some real estate near Santarém:

  For Sale: 1,907 acres (766 hectares) of prime forest land adjacent to the Tapajós National Forest in the Amazon region of Brazil.

  Rainforest for sale? I called at once. Soon I was talking to a gravelly voice on the other end of the line. His name was Rick, and he lived in Michigan, where he ran a business importing high-quality Amazonian wood.

  “I own two thousand acres of what I consider the finest rainforest in the world,” he said. “I made a lot of money in the exotic lumber business. So I bought it because…well, ’cause I could do it, I guess. It would be a soy farm or a cattle ranch by now, otherwise.”

  Since then, though, the economy had crashed, and business was bad. His company had shed most of its employees, and he couldn’t afford to keep his rainforest anymore. And even though he had made his fortune in wood, he wanted to find a buyer for his forest who wouldn’t just cut it down. Much of the land around it had already been converted to soy fields.

  “I planned on making so much money in the business that I’d give my piece of forest to the state, or a college, or a nonprofit,” he said. But for the past few years it had been a struggle just to hang on to it.