by Donovan Hohn
But things grew thornier still: Sponsors of the International Coastal Cleanup include a number of corporations that make and sell the sorts of products the volunteers most commonly pick up, corporations like Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, and ITW-Hi Cone, manufacturer of the notorious six-pack ring. Every year, along with funding and volunteers, these sponsors contribute inspirational homilies about saving the planet. “Working together we can keep our coasts clean,” ran Coca-Cola’s contribution to the ICC’s 2006 report, titled “A World of Difference.” Marine debris, declared Dow Chemical, is a “problem that we, the citizens of the world, have the power to stop.” Is it? Over the past two decades, the ICC has shown no sign of stopping it.
Shavelson asked me if I remembered the old “crying Indian” ad, an anti-littering public service announcement that ran on TV in the seventies. Of course I did, as would any sentient TV-watching child of the seventies. If you were born too late, or if your memory’s fuzzy, or if you were alive and sentient in the seventies but didn’t watch TV, you can now view the crying Indian ad as often as you like thanks to the magic of the Internet. The preservation of pop-cultural ephemera is perhaps one of the most underappreciated blessings the Internet has bestowed on humanity; reviewing the crying Indian ad, I find myself experiencing something akin to those time-traveling intimations of immortality ignited in Proust’s mind by a petit madeleine.11 Said Indian was played by an actor who went by the stage name—ironic for a crying Indian—of Iron Eyes Cody. Even off camera Iron Eyes Cody tried to pass as an Indian of Cherokee-Cree descent. In truth, like many of my Greenwich Village in-laws, he was descended from Sicilians. Irony Eyes Cody he should be called, for his real name was Espera Oscar De Corti. What, in the ad, makes him cry, is a bag of trash tossed onto a highway shoulder from the window of a passing car.
First broadcast on Earth Day in 1971, the ad appeared to be the heartfelt if heavy-handed work of environmentalists. It wasn’t. It was part of the Keep America Beautiful campaign. If like many Americans you thought that Keep America Beautiful was an environmental group, you’d be mistaken. It was created by beverage and packaging executives in 1953. By organizing volunteer cleanups and running public service announcements, the group has over the past half century managed to present pollution as an aesthetic problem for which litterbugs, not industries, are to blame. Meanwhile, the group’s sponsors—the American Chemistry Council among them—continue to lobby against regulatory actions.
In Bob Shavelson’s opinion, GoAK was comparable to Keep America Beautiful. It was an Astroturf group, a Trojan Waterkeeper. Politicians and corporations “love beach cleanups,” he told me, “because of the metrics.” By metrics he meant measurable results. Results that lend themselves to spectacular photo ops. Results that can be reckoned in tons, rather than in parts per billion. Show a scientifically illiterate layperson the chemical formula of bisphenol A, or try explaining to them the phenomenon of lipophilic bioaccumulation, or endocrine disruption, and their attention will drift off on currents of boredom or doubt. They’ll seek refuge in pictures of Jessica Alba or go dipnetting in Bird Creek. Show them photographs like those Pallister had taken at Gore Point, before and during the cleanup, and wallets begin to open. “I have a friend who used to be a Democratic congresswoman,” Shavelson said. “She says, ‘You know, there’s nothing that resonates more with senators than that stuff.’” It’s no wonder, says Shavelson, that Ted Stevens, Alaska’s famously pro-development Republican senator, cosponsored the 2006 Marine Debris, Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act.
Nor is it any wonder that the commercial fishing industry supported it. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing funding, the director of another Alaskan environmental group would later tell me, and I would later confirm, that the largest Alaskan beneficiary of the Marine Debris Program was the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation (MCAF), the group from which Pallister had just won a $50,000 grant. Since the MCAF had been given the power to disburse an outsize portion of the federal funds allocated to Alaska for marine debris programs, this unnamed environmentalist was, like Pallister, beholden to their largesse. Hence, her request for anonymity. Like Keep America Beautiful, and Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling, the MCAF is no more a conservation group than Iron Eyes Cody was an Indian or GoAK a chapter of the Waterkeeper Alliance. It’s a taxexempt nonprofit created in 2005 by the commercial fishing lobby.
“A lot of what they lobby for favors the big guys,” this environmentalist told me. By big guys she meant the owners of the factory ships and processing plants, as opposed to “the little guys,” the “cowboy” fishermen like Larry Calvin who own a boat or two. To the MCAF, she said, “beach cleanups are a PR issue.”
A few days later, I flew down to Juneau to meet with representatives from the MCAF. Their spokesman, Bob King—an erstwhile radio news anchor who’d crossed over to the journalistic dark side of public relations—readily acknowledged his employers’ connections to commercial fishing. The connection was logical and legitimate, King argued. The fishing lobby could more effectively than mistrusted outsiders teach fishermen how to prevent gear loss. Then he took me to the Alaskan Brewing Company, where a flack named Amy Woods plied me with brochures and beer. The beer, I will admit at the risk of product endorsement, was quite tasty. The brochures, less so.
Teaming up with the MCAF, the Alaskan Brewing Company had committed “1% of all proceeds from Alaskan IPA to provide grants that support the cleanup and preservation of the Pacific Ocean and its coastlines.” When the word proceeds replaces the word profits, you know you’ve entered the realm of smoke and mirrors known as PR. How, exactly, would the Alaskan Brewing Company support the cleanup of the Pacific Ocean and its coastlines? Perhaps by endorsing a bottle bill exacting a deposit on Alaskan IPA? Or perhaps by endorsing a ban on disposables? Or perhaps by opposing more insidious polluters—those that generated greenhouse gases, for instance? Or those that spilled oil or mining tailings into watersheds? Nope. The Alaskan Brewing Company would sponsor cleanups and decorate its packaging with public service announcements.
About half the debris befouling Alaskan coasts is derelict fishing gear, and although most of that gear appears to be foreign in origin, much of it isn’t. The MCAF with some truth claims that Alaska’s fishermen are, compared with their foreign competitors, exemplary stewards of the waters from which they earn their living; they work with scientists to prevent overfishing, adhere far more faithfully than their foreign competitors to anti-littering laws such as Marpol Annex V, and in fact there is some evidence to suggest that marine debris prevention efforts have had more success in Alaska than elsewhere, slowing the rate of accumulation if not reversing it. Regrettably, under the rough conditions Alaskan fishermen encounter in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, some amount of accidental gear loss is inevitable, but it would be unfair, the MCAF contends, to hold law-abiding Alaskan fishermen accountable for debris that is accidentally lost or foreign in origin.
Such tangled threads of liability help explain why the problem of plastic pollution has proved so intractable. If you find PCBs in the Hudson River, detective work can eventually lead you back to the General Electric plant, the “point source,” whence they came. Most plastic pollution, by contrast, comes from what environmental regulators call “nonpoint sources,” meaning that the polluters are too numerous and too mobile to identify. Which is another reason corporations and pro-development politicians like beach cleanups, Shavelson told me: no one gets sued or fined for fouling the ocean with debris.
Thirty years ago in Coming into the Country, John McPhee wrote memorably about what he called “the Alaskan paradox,” the irreconcilable cohabitation in Alaska of “the Sierra Club syndrome” and “the Dallas scenario”—of the impulse to sanctify the wilderness and to exploit it. Those two impulses are still at war in Alaska, but the allegiances have shifted and the plotlines have blurred. On the one hand, after the Exxon Valdez fulfilled the dire prophecies of environmental Cassand
ras, threatening Alaska’s fisheries and tourism industry as well as the ecosystem of Prince William Sound, fewer Alaskans now regard the Sierra Club as “a netherworld force” than when McPhee visited the state in the early seventies. On the other hand, in Alaska, as everywhere else in America, it’s no longer quite so easy to tell who’s on the Sierra Club’s team and who’s playing for Dallas, which is why it pissed off Shavelson so much that Pallister and GoAK had obfuscatorily appropriated the Waterkeeper brand.
He had no problem with environmental groups accepting private donations; he himself relied on donations from local businesses as well as from individuals. But he insisted that there was a difference between donations made with no strings attached and those that were, in effect, a stealth form of “greenwashing.” Take those garbage bags emblazoned with the sunflower logo of BP. Just a year before I went to Gore Point, in 2006, BP had spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil onto the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. In response, the Cook Inletkeeper had sent an engineer to Washington to testify on behalf of HR 5782, an act known as PIPES, for Pipeline Inspection, Protection, Enforcement, and Safety. The act passed. Three years later, in 2009, the U.S. Justice Department would eventually hold BP negligently liable for those 200,000 gallons of spilled oil.12 In the meantime, here was GoAK, parading BP’s logo around on the evening news.
As for why Pallister hadn’t been made director of the Prince William Soundkeeper, Shavelson had an alternative explanation: “Let’s just say Pallister has a hard time working with other people.” I had an idea what he was talking about. To keep the Johnita II from revolving around its anchor, Doug Leiser had run a thick line from the yacht’s stern to a tree onshore. One morning while we were out at Gore Point, convinced that the anchor was slipping and the line going slack, threatening to entangle the prop, Pallister started yelling and cursing, trying to summon help. Then he’d blasted the Johnita II’s horn until, from the other side of the isthmus, Leiser and the boys came running. By the time they emerged from the surfgrass, Pallister was sawing through the line with a knife, cursing under his breath about the waste of a brand-new three-hundred-dollar rope. While the boys hoisted and relowered the anchor, he stormed about the outer deck hollering orders and curses. “When Chris gets into one of his whirlwinds, I keep my distance,” Leiser had said.
Homer, unlike Juneau and Anchorage, is a geographically bipolar town. Most of the 5,332 year-round residents live up on the forested hills overlooking Cook Inlet. The summertime transients—itinerant fishermen, backpackers, tourists—tend to favor the town’s other pole, Homer Spit, a sandbar about a hundred feet wide extending four and a half miles into the seemingly pristine waters of Kachemak Bay, beyond which rise the snowcapped peaks and ice fields of the Kenai Mountains. Thanks to those mountains, the weather in leeward Homer is unusually moderate for the region. Out on Gore Point, Raynor and the boys were stormbound. Here, just fifty miles away as the chartered helicopter flies, the skies were mostly clear.
Driving the length of the spit, you pass boatyards, then a fishing hole stocked with salmon for lazy anglers. On a gravel beach at the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop, visitors in tents and motor homes have set up camp. You come to a commercial strip of gift shops and restaurants and art galleries designed to resemble the quaint shacks of an old-timey fishing village. Then you reach the grounds of the Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby, where during the summerlong halibut season, for a fee, men in splattered aprons will take your day’s catch and—with an expert flourish of knives—clean and butcher it. Finally, near the end of the spit, by the docks, you arrive at a three-story house clad in cedar shingles. Fishing floats are strung like bunting along the railing of the front porch. That morning, an aluminum fishing boat was parked in the muddy yard, up on blocks for maintenance and repairs. This is the home of Brad Faulkner, the “jerk” and “idiot” who’d given Raynor and the boys “crap about cleaning beaches.” Bob Shavelson, a bit eagerly, had produced Faulkner’s phone number.
Inside, the house was unexpectedly nice, airy, with tall ceilings and lots of skylights and lots of art, and Faulkner was unexpectedly thoughtful if also, when it came to the topic of GoAK, expectedly foulmouthed. On his living room wall, beside a Balinese batik silk-screen print of multicolored fish, there branched and curled big dendritic fronds of cold-water coral. Though he used to be a fisherman, Faulkner is now the president of Alaska Custom Seafoods, a dealer in halibut and cod, which he buys from independent fishermen and sells at a profit to processing plants and retailers. The coral branches on his walls were gifts from his suppliers, who’d snared it as bycatch on their trawling lines. Business in recent years had been good, allowing Faulkner to take lots of time off, which is how he liked it. When he wasn’t out on his boat, he liked to read. His sizable home library contained many first editions, including one of Farthest North, Fridtjof Nansen’s narrative of his Arctic expedition aboard the Fram. During the course of our conversation, Faulkner kept jumping up to retrieve books he thought I should read.
Pallister’s description of Faulkner had led me to expect a closeminded ecophobe, but Faulkner said he had nothing against legitimate environmentalists. He applauded the work the Cook Inletkeeper did. “Somebody has to be watchdogging the oil companies,” he said. He also applauded the watchdogs of the timber industry; it was scandalous, he said, the way the National Forest Service had encouraged the building of pulp mills in the Tongass National Forest down by Sitka, many of which were now Superfund sites. That man-made emissions, especially those pouring out of coal plants, were accelerating the pace of climate change was to him “a no-brainer.” Although he’d made his living from Alaska’s fisheries, he felt that the owners of big factory ships had too much influence setting fisheries policy. He was opposed to bottom trawling of the sort that ravaged cold-water coral. “You don’t have to trawl the bottom,” he said. “The fish they’re trawling for, you can catch at midlevel depths. It costs a little more, but you can do it.”
So, no, he wasn’t opposed to environmentalists. He simply felt that what GoAK had done on Gore Point was take “this remarkable collection of flotsam and jetsam from the whole freakin’ Pacific,” and turn it into something resembling “the fucking city dump.” The only reason anyone ever stopped there, he said, was to go beachcombing. “Other places collect, but no place collects like Gore Point,” he said. “Between here and Cordova most of the coastline is clean, far cleaner than it used to be.”
My experiences as a GoAK volunteer lent credence to this claim. How Rockwell Kent lasted six months on Fox Island I do not know. Nor did I know, by my third day on Gore Point, how GoAK’s crew had lasted two weeks, with no other company besides one another. It was astonishing, really, that they hadn’t already gone all Lord of the Flies. Astonishing that Ted Raynor or his pit bull Bryn hadn’t been offered up as placatory sacrifice to the local population of grizzly bears in repayment for the Styrofoam playthings GoAK had pirated away into garbage bags. On my last full day at Gore Point, in a cold rain that alternated between drizzle and downpour, the boys in Zodiacs, the other volunteers and I aboard Ted Raynor’s boat, the Cape Chacon, Bryn once again serving as figurehead, had motored around Port Dick, searching for debris.
Judging from what I’d seen that day, Faulkner was right. Except at Gore Point, there was little trash and little treasure to be found along that stretch of the Kenai Peninsula’s outer coast. There were, however, dozens of superior anchorages and camping spots, Faulkner said. Try camping on Gore Point’s windward shore and you’d get “hit in the head by a rubber duckie!” He guffawed loudly at the thought. Pallister, to his mind, was “some dingbat,” and GoAK was a “phony baloney organization” making misleading use of the Keeper name. He could see why you might want to remove the derelict nets that entangle wildlife, but why excavate all that harmless flotsam?
I explained to him the plastic-poisoning hypothesis.
“The fuel they burned in their boats going out there, back and forth, is probably worse for the env
ironment than that stuff breaking down,” he said—a notion, I had to concede, that had occurred to me too.
Furthermore, Faulkner continued, even if there were sound ecological reasons to clean up Gore Point, these “misguided do-gooders” were in his opinion doomed to fail. No way was a helicopter airlift going to work. “That shit’s going to be there for years, until somebody comes along and spends a bunch more money to fix it. It just looks like a scam.”
You might be inclined to see in the controversy over Gore Point the sort of tempest that invariably brews in provincial teapots, especially in geographically isolated provincial teapots like Homer. Rightly or wrongly, I was inclined to see in it something more: a parable of environmentalism in the information age. All the time, all over the world, in the coal towns of Appalachia and Hunan, in the fishing villages of New England and Indonesia, near landfills in Virginia and the Philippines, near incinerators in Hawaii or the Bronx, on farms in the valleys of the Mississippi and the Amazon, similar debates about our vexed relationship to the natural world are playing out. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the fundamental unstated question at the heart of the arguments I heard in Homer was this one: How do you measure the value of a place?
In America, this question has always pressed on our minds with unusual urgency. Our contradictory thoughts about nature in general and this so-called New World in particular eventually gave rise to a kind of pantheistic religion, the early scriptures of which were written by New England Transcendentalists. Like all religions, American nature worship has since its inception undergone a series of schisms and reformations and inquisitions, prophecies of the Transcendentalists ossifying into sentimentalities and platitudes, only to give way to new prophecies (the Book of Muir, the Book of Teddy, the Book of Leopold, the Book of Carson, the Book of Hardin, the Books of Brower, Berry, Wilson, Dillard, Lopez, McKibben, Pollan), spawning denominations as numerous and as internecine as those of the Protestant Church: Preservationism, Conservationism, Agrarianism, Wise Use, Environmentalism, Ecology, Deep Ecology, Organic Agriculture, Biodynamic Agriculture, Biophilia, Locavorism, Green Christianity, Green Consumerism. Now, in the information age, Nature goes by as many names as Allah or Yahweh, and assumes as many forms as the Bodhisattva.