No Planet B

by Lucy Diavolo

  The politics of plastic are nuanced, and to deter the global crisis means to look beyond the recycling bin and toward “the corporations that got us into this mess,” Pinsky says. “Companies have gotten [used to] a certain way of doing business and actually are pushing the cost off onto us, onto the commons, to our environment, into public health.”

  The plastics industry reportedly knew it was polluting the oceans back in the 1950s but only increased production, keeping consumers in the dark, Pinsky says. It has had great influence over regulations, has been on the receiving end of subsidies, and has long-standing, widespread lobbying power and deep government ties. Just like the plastics industry, the U.S. government appears to deny that the synthetics are related to health problems.

  Up until this year, the U.S. sold its recyclable trash to China, exporting sixteen million tons in 2016. President Donald Trump failed to acknowledge that decades-long relationship (which also has economic ties) when blaming China for the ocean’s plastic crisis while signing legislation in October, pledging a commitment to “clean [them] up.” “As president, I will continue to do everything I can to stop other nations from making our oceans into their landfills,” he said.

  In the same year, the United States and Japan were the only two nations that refused to join the G7 Ocean Plastics Charter, a pledge to work toward 100 percent recyclable, reusable, and recoverable plastics and increase recycling by 50 percent by 2030. The Trump administration has shown no signs of slowing down the source of the crisis: the plastics industry. In fact, it has displayed quite a bit of support, from its move to reallow plastic bottles in national parks to environmental policy rollbacks that mark a committed partnership with the fossil fuel industry.

  The industry is made up of everyday brands that are responsible for manufacturing billions of plastics and plastic packaging each year, largely single-use. There is little to no transparency as to exactly how much they create or distribute. An audit of plastic debris collected from six continents by the Break Free From Plastic movement, a group of over fourteen hundred organizations, found the world’s biggest polluters to be a who’s who of consumer culture. (Some of these brands spoke with Teen Vogue about their plans to combat the plastics problem in an additional story for this series, expressing “ambitious goals” to use reused plastic content or biodegradable products, but no plans to create less overall.) In the GPGP we pulled from the water still-branded, fully intact plastic vessels for items readily available at most pharmacies and convenience stores, products I’d repeatedly purchased and enjoyed prior to the trip.

  Plastic seems unavoidable, especially when buying food at the grocery store, but Pinsky explains that the shop itself and the brands it stocks can avoid it and offer alternatives. Greenpeace has asked major supermarket chains to consider a full audit of all plastic products in their stores—a daunting, “almost impossible” task that gets them thinking about the overall issue. (Pinsky encourages those interested in combating plastics to hold their local chains accountable, too.)

  Grocery stores have adapted before. Pinsky worked on Greenpeace’s 2018 Carting Away the Oceans report, which has audited major chains for their seafood sustainability since 2008. The campaign has seen major changes happen over time, largely thanks to consumers and activists holding corporations responsible. All retailers in the first report received failing grades. By this year, twenty out of twenty-two passed, though at time of its publication, none of the profiled retailers had “major, comprehensive commitments to reduce and ultimately phase out their reliance on single-use plastics.” Change could be on its way, however: just after the report was released in August, Kroger Co. (which operates multiple store banners such as Kroger, Ralphs, and Harris Teeter) promised to nix plastic bags in all of its stores by 2025 and plans to “divert 90 percent of [its] waste from the landfill” by 2020. Pinsky says that to show true commitment, a comprehensive plan to reduce single-use plastic must be released, too.

  But as for the companies producing the products found on those store shelves, few attempts have been made to develop major innovative solutions, despite the well-documented problem. Pinsky says that if the grocery stores they’ve worked with are any indicator, it’s in their best interest for leaders of every industry to start working on a fix to move away from fossil fuel-based plastics, and soon—their competitors may already be doing so because it’s what this new generation of consumers demands. Meanwhile, their products, either plastic or packaged in plastic, are marketed to consumers as safe to use despite major and minor varied risks associated with its use.

  Some company leaders are starting to look at recycled ocean-bound plastic as a source material because it’s smart for their business’s bottom line. HP and IKEA, for example, are both part of NextWave Plastics, a global business consortium focused on keeping plastics “in the economy and out of the ocean” that also includes Dell and General Motors. (IKEA has also promised to phase out all single-use plastics by 2020.) Beauty brands are starting to do the same. Food and fashion are both beginning to get creative to avoid contributing further to the epidemic as well.

  Consumers have been putting the pressure on corporations to change production practices, including many young people rising to the challenge. “The brands that young people care about, those brands care about them and are trying to deliver products … and be hip and socially responsible as well, because they know that young people care about this,” Pinsky says. “Younger generations can say, ‘enough is enough.’”

  Teen activists have organized their communities in demanding alternatives in schools and local businesses, and can call them out at any time on social media when they see branded plastic in a waterway or natural space, Pinsky says. In addition to bearing witness up close, organizations like Greenpeace are applying pressure in a myriad of ways, including a petition that asks major companies like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and PepsiCo to “invest in alternatives and phase out single-use plastic.”

  It’s time for protests and bans, to demand action from our lawmakers—and it’s on us, a world of people who’ve been conditioned to rely on plastics, to stand up in our own defense.

  What you won’t hear about the GPGP is that it’s remarkably beautiful. That far out at sea—no distinct matted island in sight— the water is purple at its stillest, with neon ice-white-and-blue curls when crashing. It was refreshing to stand on the deck and imagine all the Pacific Ocean travelers before us; I found it romantic, as nature should be. But with each floating piece and microscopic sample, I was snapped out of my daydreams and faced again with the environmental crisis that modern humans have caused.

  Plastic is unnatural and felt so there, as it does when seen in stream beds or forests. It’s simply en masse, therefore dramatic, in this part of the world. Facing the world’s crisis in its farthest-reaching corner forced me to remember our place and time in history. I could not walk across an “island,” but I saw devastation in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that imposed deep shame. Plastics are everywhere, ranging the gamut of size, more destructive and distressing than I’d ever imagined.

  Without any immediate and drastic change to the way we produce and consume plastics, by 2050, production is expected to have quadrupled. This will exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis, running parallel alongside a projection that assumes average global warming since preindustrial levels could be about twice what it is now by then, too. Substantial transformation will take mass participation from individuals, governments, and industries. The damage and impact of plastic pollution is clear, but re-envisioning the future of consumption is an uncharted path. To activists like those in Greenpeace, it means seeing plastic as trash before it hits the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—while it’s still on shelves, in every new beverage bottle or trinket we buy—and rejecting what’s become normalized for something new: a plastic-free world.

  How Climate Change Is Impacting Animals in the Canadian Arctic

  ROXANNA PEARL BEEBE-CENTER

  December
1, 2017

  In this reported piece, twelve-year-old writer Roxanna Pearl Beebe-Center explains what she learned about the impact of climate change on animals while visiting the Canadian Arctic.

  Adistressed mother polar bear is stranded on a piece of ice in the middle of a great gray ocean in the Canadian Arctic. Eyes wide, she stares up at our ship, the Ocean Endeavour, a colossal, man-made block of steel that intrudes upon her wild, icy haven.

  She leaps into the frigid sea, a cub at her heels, her eventual destination the shore about eight miles away, where she may spend a long time hungry. Seals are her favorite food, and she can only catch them from atop the ice. With the ice melting faster and forming later, she has less time to hunt.

  The ice is moving in ways it should not. Scientists keep a sharp eye on the Arctic because it is our planet’s air conditioning, cooling the globe. And if it malfunctions, as is already happening, people everywhere will notice.

  Traveling with my family on a two-week trip to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic in July, I saw the effects of these changes firsthand.

  It’s where I met twenty-three-year-old Jennifer Kalibuk of Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut, the newest territory of Canada. She’s an Indigenous Inuit woman, and climate change is affecting her food, traditions, and even her home, buckling porches and cracking ceilings. Permafrost—a layer of soil that is supposed to stay frozen—is melting. Pillars that are embedded in the earth to hold up Arctic buildings are sinking, causing large and costly damage. “It’s impacting people’s homes who don’t have money to pay for the repairs,” Jennifer tells Teen Vogue.

  It’s also getting harder to find food. During a recent winter, when Jennifer said the weather was “weird,” her uncle nearly died while hunting on the ice at a time when it would ordinarily have been at its thickest. It had appeared that way that day, but sadly, it was actually weak, and he and his snowmobile sank. “He was in the hospital for about three months, so he is actually now, because of that experience, too afraid to go on the ice,” Jennifer says. “That prevents him from hunting for his family, for providing for his family the traditional country food that we love.”

  Traditional practices have also undergone the impact of climate change. Before her grandfather died, Jennifer interviewed him about his favorite spot for hunting seals, which was only reachable when the water was frozen solid. “It doesn’t get that cold anymore, so it doesn’t actually freeze anymore,” Jennifer says. “The traditional knowledge that has been passed down orally, telling stories of that particular place, it was gone with him. He was the last of his family to have known all the traditional knowledge of that specific place.”

  A week before we were in Cape Dorset, ice barricaded the Inuit community. Ships normally can get through the Arctic for only about six weeks in the summer. The only way out most of the year is by snowmobile or airplane, according to what locals told me.

  In July, the roads are ditches of mud. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed Brianna Rowe, twenty-six, a shipmate I followed as she interviewed Inuit children and teachers about their lives, school, family, and traditions.

  Brianna, who works for Reach the World and is director of the climate-change education project Disappearing Ice, connects classrooms with travelers via the Internet, so kids can travel the world virtually. She was using her vacation, as a student member of the Explorers Club, to connect U.S. classrooms with Arctic classrooms so kids can learn about one another’s cultures—including how the U.S. is one of the main countries affecting the climate much farther north.

  “The decisions that people make in the U.S. have a global impact,” Brianna tells Teen Vogue. “It is important for everybody to be aware of their decisions, and their impact on the environment has an effect on the entire world’s environment.”

  Kristin Gates, a park ranger who trekked alone across the Brooks Range, knows this all too well. Part of the year, thirty-year-old Kristin patrols Denali National Park by dog sled, and she’s making a short film about plastics pollution and garbage in the Arctic. “Climate change is something that affects us every day during the winter months,” she tells Teen Vogue. Frozen rivers are Alaska’s highways, and when they don’t freeze solid, travel becomes dangerous and difficult.

  Unfortunately, mushing (a form of travel that relies on dogs to pull a sled), which Kristin was hoping to learn about firsthand, is now almost nonexistent. Dog mushing as a practice mostly died out after Inuit communities were settled in villages by the Canadian government in the 1950s, so she heard stories about the old days but has not found anyone traveling by dog sled. Nowadays, travel mostly uses motors and gas, in four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and trucks. Kristin enlisted some of us from the ship and others from the community to clean up the beach. In about an hour we collected seventeen bags of trash, a potential threat to seabirds and mammals.

  People’s lives are changing from our warming world—but is the future of adorable little animals just as dim? For birds, that’s not necessarily the case, according to George Sirk, an ornithologist and lecturer who was aboard our ship. “Evolution dictates that the fittest will survive. If you can’t cut it, then you won’t make it. But then there will be other birds that make it, they’ll come up from down south and say hey there’s lots of food up here,” he tells Teen Vogue.

  But, according to Sirk’s calculations, sixty thousand bird species used to flutter and fly about our world, and now only about nine thousand do, he claims. As Sirk said, it’s worth noting that birders have different definitions of what a species is. Melting could actually benefit some birds. When the ice melts, the breeding season will lengthen, and there will be more to eat. That adds to the appeal for birds from the south to come live in the Arctic, which is good for them but not for the native birds.

  At the trip’s end, everyone aboard our ship went their separate ways. My family and Brianna headed home to the U.S., George headed to Canada. Jennifer stayed aboard. Kristin left for the Arctic Circle Trail through Greenland. And Arctic life remained, but with a future in peril.

  Even though the Arctic is far away, you can help protect what’s left. Ways you can help are outlined in the World Wildlife Fund article “Five Ways to Help the Arctic as the Planet Warms,” and at the Ocean Conservancy site.

  I Traveled to the Arctic to Witness Climate Disaster Firsthand

  MAIA WIKLER

  July 17, 2019

  Before I traveled to the Arctic, I considered it to be a remote part of the world where scientists on expeditions gathered samples and photographed glaciers. My limited understanding mirrored media depictions that show empty lands or pristine wildlife, a narrative that emphasizes a vast, untouched wilderness without the people who’ve long stewarded the lands.

  But it’s more than just polar bear scenes in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an immense ecosystem of 19.6 million protected acres where humans and animals alike have coexisted for generations. It’s home to an ongoing human and environmental rights crisis that follows an unprecedented move by the Republican-controlled Congress, backed by the Trump administration, which in 2017 passed a tax bill that mandated the Coastal Plain of the Refuge be open to lease sales to the fossil fuel industry for oil and gas development to help pay for massive corporate tax cuts. If it does occur on this sacred land—the only piece of Alaska’s Arctic that has been protected for its ecological importance—devastating environmental and cultural impacts will follow.

  I went there myself to report this story for Teen Vogue, to meet those fighting to save these lands and see the impacts of climate change firsthand. My journey lasted two weeks, traveling first by way of a ten-seater bush plane to the first Arctic Indigenous Climate Summit in Gwich’yaa Zhee, or Fort Yukon, Alaska. Hosted by Gwich’yaa Zhee, the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, and the Gwich’in Steering Committee, the summit provided an unprecedented opportunity for community members and Indigenous leadership to explain what is at stake in the Coastal Plain region of the Refuge.

  Many locals, scientis
ts, and advocates refer to the Coastal Plain as the biological heart of the Refuge for countless living species: in its wildness, an ideal nesting habitat is found in its wetlands and food supply, safe from industrial impacts. Millions of birds migrate to the Refuge from continents and ecosystems across the world, and a significant number of Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear dens are also on these lands.

  “The Refuge is one of the last places left in the nation where you can experience hundreds and hundreds of miles without a road or trail. It’s home to one of our last intact ecosystems, where grizzly bears, wolves, polar bears, migratory birds, and caribou live in relation with the land as they have for thousands of years,” Emily Sullivan, an organizer with the Alaska Wilderness League, tells Teen Vogue.

  The Arctic Wildlife Refuge

  The lands we know as the Arctic are sacred to Indigenous Gwich’in people. They call the Coastal Plain “Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Good-lit” or “the sacred place where life begins,” referring to the more than two hundred thousand–strong Porcupine Caribou herd that migrates north each year to the Coastal Plain to give birth.

  Gwich’in spokesperson and director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee Bernadette Demientieff explained this relationship at the summit, saying, “The survival of the Gwich’in depends on the survival of this herd. For thousands of years, we migrated with the caribou—we settled along the migratory route so we could continue to thrive.”