by Donovan Hohn
Confusingly, despite her litany of caveats, Flint’s praise for Moore was unequivocal: “I think that he’s done a tremendously valuable service to humanity by pursuing this when none of the big oceanographic or academic institutions or government institutions did,” Flint said. She predicted that other researchers would soon “get on his bandwagon.” Her prediction seems to be coming true. In the last few years several studies of plastic poisoning have appeared in reputable journals.
The hardest question to answer about the Garbage Patch, it turns out, isn’t whether plastic debris threatens animals and ecosystems, but what if anything can be done about it. “We haven’t been able to hatch up any good ideas,” Flint admitted. Albatross fledglings don’t forage on land, she explained. In fact they don’t forage at all. Their parents do, flying far and wide across the Pacific, swooping down to skim morsels off the surface, which they bring back home and regurgitate into a hungry fledgling’s mouth. That’s where all the detritus in that Greenpeace ad came from. Even if we were to clean every beach in the world, it wouldn’t keep albatrosses from stuffing their offspring full of plastic. “You’d have to clean the entire ocean,” Flint said.
Back on the Alguita, I’d described for Charlie Moore the tonnage of debris I’d witnessed on Gore Point. “That’s not unusual,” he’d said. “I have pictures of Japan, where that’s the case. I’ve got pictures of Hawaii where that’s the case. Any windward side of an island’s going to have situations like that. The question is, How much can we take? We’re burying ourselves in this stuff.” Moore sympathized with Pallister’s motives, and believed that GoAK’s efforts might help “raise awareness.” But he also agreed with Bob Shavelson that cleanups alone serve little purpose. If Pallister thought he was saving Gore Point from plastic pollution he was fooling himself. “It’s just going to come back.”
Evidence I’d collected on the day of the airlift lent credence to this prediction. Before I boarded the helicopter and began my long journey home, I’d hurried across the isthmus for one last solitary walk along the windward shore. At the strand line I’d found the day’s deposit: toothbrush, Clorox bottle, surfboard fin, capless deodorant stick, sixteen water bottles, all Asian in origin. This, in Moore’s opinion, is why the 2006 Marine Debris, Research Prevention, and Reduction Act is likewise doomed to fail. “It’s all been focused on cleanups,” he said of the action the federal government had taken. “They think if they take tonnage out of the water, the problem will go away.”
Moore is right in this respect: current federal policy does treat symptoms more than causes. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, whose shores are washed by the southern edge of the Garbage Patch, federal agencies are staging one of the biggest marine-debris projects in history. Since 1996, using computer models, satellite data, and aerial surveys, NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have located and removed more than five hundred metric tons of derelict fishing gear in hopes of saving the endangered Hawaiian monk seal from entanglement. Administrators at NOA A’s Marine Debris Program point to the project as an example of success, but the results, vindicating Moore, have been mixed at best. NOAA incinerates the debris it collects at a power plant on the outskirts of Honolulu, converting it into electricity. But unless they’re supplemented by a metropolitan supply of garbage, such incinerators operate at a loss, and in places that cannot support them, like maritime Alaska, the only option is to bury debris in landfills, and in many coastal communities, landfill space is already running short. Furthermore, although wildlife biologists are now finding fewer monk seals entangled in debris, they are also finding fewer monk seals, period.20
In some respects, however, Moore’s indictment of the Marine Debris Program is not entirely just: NOAA isn’t focusing only on cleanups. The agency is also investing in educational programs to teach litter prevention to both beachgoers and fisherfolk. And NOAA scientists known as “net nerds” are submitting derelict gear to the sort of rigorous scrutiny to which archaeologists submit arrowheads and potsherds. Although it’s not a job I’d want, the expertise of net nerds, and the Siddharthan reserves of patience and attention they surely must possess, does command a kind of admiration. From the colors of the fibers and the size and style of the weave, net nerds can distinguish old nets from new ones, American nets from Indonesian ones. Toward what end all this taxonomizing? To hold the guilty parties accountable and persuade them to change their ways.
Then, too, the NOAA scientists I spoke to in Honolulu do not believe that cleanups alone will make marine debris go away. In removing debris from the water column, they merely hope to spare as many animals as possible—sea turtles, seabirds, whales, monk seals—from the tortures, often fatal, inflicted by a ghost net or plastic bag. “If animals do get entangled in gear and they aren’t able to get out of it, it’s a very slow, rather painful death,” a freckle-faced, black-haired NOAA cetologist of mixed Scottish-Japanese descent told me. Her name was Naomi McIntosh. Consider what happens to a juvenile humpback with a loop of netting snared around its fin: As the whale grows, the nylon line will carve through flesh and bone until the animal dies—slowly, painfully—from its infected wounds. “With animals that are entangled, you can see the weight loss, their bones coming through. When we see animals that have been entangled for a long time there are parasites,” McIntosh said.
Despite her grisly, heartfelt descriptions of the horrors inflicted by marine debris, I found myself, as usual, entangled in doubts. “If I’m a taxpayer in Kansas,” I asked her, “even if I’m concerned about the environment, shouldn’t I be more concerned about investing in alternative energy, or reducing CO2 emissions from power plants, than about the suffering of whales? I mean they’re whales, and they’re cute, and I love them, but they’ve got a lot of competition right now for the tax dollar.”
Perhaps I’d chosen my words poorly, insensitively. To a cetologist, a humpback is not merely cute, after all. To a cetologist, a humpback inspires wonder, and empathy. McIntosh had already described for me, with childish delight, the curiosity of whales, how they like to investigate and play with any floating thing they find. Now, listening to my question, she was visibly distraught. Fighting back tears, she managed a reply: “Sure,” she said, pausing to compose herself, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. “A friend of mine that I spoke to has been in federal government for a long time, and he’s looking at the number of years he has left, and he said to me, ‘You know, Naomi, there are certain issues that are going to right themselves on their own, and there are certain issues that, if we don’t do something now, we can’t change that.’ And to me this is one of those issues because if we lose that particular species or population, we can’t bring it back.” And then, unchaperoned by a press officer, she permitted herself an indiscretion, an outburst of misanthropic wrath: “Or maybe eventually we’ll just kill ourselves off, and the earth will return to its natural state.”
As nearly everyone I spoke to about marine debris agrees, the best way to get trash out of our waterways is, of course, to keep it from entering them in the first place. But experts disagree about what that will take. The argument, like so many in American politics, pits individual freedom against the common good. Both Seba Sheavly, the marine-debris consultant, and the American Chemistry Council, one of Sheavly’s clients, prescribe voluntary measures—voluntary, industry-sponsored research into the environmental impact of plastics in the ocean, voluntary public awareness campaigns in which industry and local governments work together to discourage littering, encourage recycling, and teach more consumers the lesson that volunteers in coastal cleanups learn: that manufacturers don’t throw their products into the ocean; consumers do. “Don’t you tell me I can’t have a plastic bag,” Sheavly says, alluding to plastic-bag bans like the one San Francisco enacted in 2007. “I know how to dispose of it responsibly.” But proponents of bag bans insist that there is no way to use a plastic bag responsibly. “If you go to Subway, and they give you the plastic bag,
how long do you use the plastic bag?” says Lorena Rios, the chemist at the University of the Pacific who subjected my plastic beaver to mass spectrometry. “One minute. And how long will the polymers in that bag last? Hundreds of years.”
“The time for voluntary measures has long since passed,” Steve Fleischli, president of Waterkeeper Alliance, told me. Fleischli would have us tax the most pervasive and noxious plastic pollutants—shopping bags, plastic-foam containers, cigarette butts, plastic utensils—and put the proceeds toward cleanup and prevention measures. “We already use a portion of the gasoline tax to pay for oil spills,” Fleischli says. Such levies shouldn’t be seen as criminalizing the makers and sellers of plastic disposables, he argues; they merely force those businesses to “internalize” previously hidden costs, what economists call “externalities.” This market-based approach to environmental regulation, known as extended producer responsibility, is increasingly popular with environmental groups. By sticking others with the ecological cleaning bill, the thinking goes, businesses have been able to keep the price of disposable plastics artificially low. And as Pallister learned at Gore Point, the cleaning bill may be greater than we can afford.
In Charlie Moore’s opinion, the solution may require more radical sacrifices, sacrifices that the citizens, governments, and corporations of the world are reluctant to make. Eventually we will have to abandon planned obsolescence, he believes, and instead manufacture products that are durable, easily recyclable, or both. In short, we’ll have to abandon the American way of life.
Such eco-utopianism sounds to my ears far-fetched, but there are other smaller, more practical actions we could, in theory, take. In 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council successfully sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for permitting municipalities to pollute watersheds around Los Angeles. As a result of the lawsuit, Los Angeles County had to comply with stricter total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs, the local pollution limits that the EPA places on a region’s waterways under the Clean Water Act. The new TMDLs, the first in the country to treat floatables as a pollutant, will require the county to reduce the amount of solid waste escaping its rivers and creeks from 4.5 million pounds a year to zero by 2016. To meet that target, cities will have to invest in “full-capture systems,” filters that strain out everything larger than five millimeters in diameter. In theory, every region in the country could follow suit, but already cash-strapped governments in Southern California are complaining that these “zero-trash TMDLs” are too costly and ambitious to implement. Moore, meanwhile, has collected data showing that even full-capture systems would allow tens of thousands of plastic particles to escape the Los Angeles River every day.
Forty years ago, Science published an essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons” in which the ecologist Garrett Hardin challenged what might be called the American Comedy of Progress—the cherished notion that with time, technology, entrepreneurialism, and, if need be, activism, all problems can be solved. In America, even prophets of environmental doom subscribe to the Comedy of Progress. Thus, at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore follows his alarming forecast with an uplifting recipe for salvation. In a similarly comedic vein, politicians promise to save the planet and revive the economy by investing in “green-collar jobs.” Hardin’s truth is more inconvenient than Gore’s, so inconvenient it amounts to an American heresy.
In a finite world of diminishing resources, Hardin’s reasoning went, the freedom of individuals will not lead hopefully to progress but fatalistically to destruction. Here’s why: Picture a pasture—a commons—on which all herdsmen are free to graze their flocks. “Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land,” Hardin wrote. But if an era of peace and prosperity comes about and the flocks multiply, “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.” Each herdsman, acting rationally in his own self-interest, will keep adding to his herd. He alone will profit from an additional animal, whereas the environmental impact will be shared by all. What’s one more cow? Overgrazed, grass eventually gives way to dust. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit, “Hardin concluded. “In a world that is limited, freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
In twenty-first-century America, there are still resources that we share, air and water being the best examples, and so the tragedy of the commons still obtains. It explains the depletion of fisheries and aquifers. It explains the pollution of skies and seas. Technology may forestall the tragedy—by increasing crop yields or fuel efficiency, for instance—but so long as the human population continues to grow it cannot in the long run avert it. Only a decline in population or consumption can do that. And here Hardin leaves us with a profound dilemma, forcing us to choose between environmental health and economic growth. If Hardin is right, we cannot have both.
No one—not Charles Moore, not Chris Pallister, not Greenpeace—will tell you that plastic pollution is the greatest environmental threat our oceans face. Depending on whom you ask, that honor goes to global warming, or ocean acidification, or overfishing, or agricultural runoff. In a way, plastic’s greatest threat may be symbolic, which is not to say that it is empty or cosmetic. Most pollutants are invisible. Saturated with CO2, our oceans have begun to acidify, our scientists tell us—you can’t discern pH levels with the human eye. But unlike many pollutants (mercury, for instance, or CO2 ), there is no natural source of plastic and therefore no doubt about how to apportion blame. We’re to blame. Where plastics travel, other, invisible pollutants—pesticides and fertilizers from lawns and farms, petrochemicals from roads, sewage tainted with pharmaceuticals—usually follow. There is no such thing as natural plastic, and because it is so visible, it provides a meaningful—and alarming—bellwether of our impact on the earth. Then, too, as numerous conservationists have told me, compared with other environmental problems this one should be easy to solve. And yet we show no sign of solving it.
PLASTIC BEACH
Down at South Point, after my sojourn in Honolulu, after dropping off my suitcase at the Shirakawa Motel and driving south in my rental car, after reaching the end of the road and continuing on foot, I begin to see what I’ve come looking for—the colorful confetti of plastic debris. In almost every cove formed by black lava rock there are drifts of it, piled up in crescents many feet deep. There’s fishing gear, shattered fishing floats, tangles of nets, but if you stop and stoop down and look closely you can pick out more commonplace objects—detergent bottles, Nestlé lids, golf balls. The coves sort the plastic. In one there’s an abundance of jar lids. In the next an abundance of nets. In another, there are dozens of plastic popsicle sticks. Do fishermen like popsicles? Or did these formerly belong to children on a seaside holiday? I stumble upon the top of a garbage can on which I read the word RUBBERMAID, and then upon one of the kind of flip-flops I’d seen in Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s basement, with the lightning bolt zigzag running through it. I don’t find any Floatees, but I do find a green plastic soldier aiming his rifle at a pebble of pumice, and then a few feet away the wreckage of a plastic jeep that by the look of it has been terrorized by an albatross. On and on I walk, under the tropical sun, and on and on stretches the lava rock littered with wrack. In one cove, I can see the colorful confetti of plastic floating in on the blue waves. Charlie Moore was right to wonder where all this was plastic was coming from.
How beautiful the Pacific looks from here! No catamarans today. Just the blue waves. The spray of the surf. The black rocks. The riddles written in debris. The sun is high. I wish I’d brought a hat. I wish I had some water. It’s nine miles to Kamilo Beach—farther, I decide, than I can hike in this heat.21
The next morning, after a breakfast of granola bars and Gatorade purchased at the gas station up the road from the Shirakawa Motel, a gas station on the side of which someone has painted a pretty, pastoral Hawai
ian mural—white church, tropical flowers, guy playing a ukulele, another guy (Mark Twain?) wearing a mustache and a tuxedo, another guy hacking at sugarcane with a machete—I station myself in the motel courtyard, where a peace pole, a little obelisk inscribed with pacifistic messages in many languages, tilts amid an island of flowers from which butterflies sip.
A silver pickup truck arrives. At the wheel is Bill Gilmartin, a retired, ponytailed biologist formerly employed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. On the door of his truck is a green sign that reads HAWAII WILDLIFE FUND. His truck isn’t your ordinary truck. Gilmartin paid mechanics to turn his pickup truck into a dump truck. The bed, hoisted by some sort of hydraulic mechanism, can tip. You wouldn’t know it looking at it. I climb into the passenger seat, and we zoom south, past the lava rock walls, toward South Point, bound for Kamilo Beach. “I started out in debris collection on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 1982,” Gilmartin says. “You get into this business in your gut and your heart and it’s hard to back out. I got into this business because of the first monk seal pup I rescued.”