The Accidental Seafarer

This week I've been reading Donovan Hohn's Moby-Duck: The true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea. From the shores of Alaska to Hong Kong and Korea; from debris trawling with Captain Moore off the coast of Hawaii to Greenland and a scientific excursion through the Arctic ice-floes, it's the story of Hohn’s search for the lost cargo of the Ever Laurel: a crate of plastic bath toys that went overboard in stormy seas, spilling out across the Pacific Ocean and hitching a ride on its currents around the world.

Marine debris and the plastic wasteland
The subjects that Hohn covers during his adventure are as diverse as his travels: flotsametrics and ocean currents, Chinese factories churning out the everyday items lining our high streets, disasters that befall cargo ships as they transport these goods across the globe from their birthplace, and of our attachment to the iconic image of a yellow rubber duckie. But also, of course, the overriding subject cannot fail to be that of marine debris and, inevitably, plastic.

"The tide of plastic isn't rising only on Alaska's uninhabited shores," Hohn writes (pg. 90). "In 2004, oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic Ocean, north and south. "Remote oceanic islands," their survey showed, "may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialised coasts." Even on Spitzbergen Island, in the Arctic, the survey found on average one plastic item every five metres. Farther south, in the mid-Atlantic and the Caribbean, at the edge of the Sargasso Sea, they found five times as much - one plastic object every metre."

The Guerrilla Seafarer
It's a great book - thoughtful, informative and entertaining. The especial beauty of it, I think, is that it is in no way preachy. It is not an exhortation for the world to mend it's ways, because that is not what Hohn, ostensibly, set out to achieve - he set out to find one of the plastic ducks set adrift by a shipping accident years before, and the facts about plastic, climate change, ocean currents and our commercial mores are just the things that he learned along the way. The beauty is that he slips this information into the reader's mind in-between other tales. It is thoughtful, clever writing. Guerrilla writing.

It is not, perhaps, a perfect story. What about the debris campaigner who, while refusing to buy bottled water, instead stacks his boat with bottled pepsi and cola? Hohn himself points out some hypocritical aspects of the people he meets and the ways they choose to champion their causes, but somehow manages to remain fairly non-judgemental. It does leave me wondering, though, what his own opinions truly are? Did he really just want to find a plastic duck? And what did he, personally, take away from his experiences? An incentive to change his lifestyle and to question the capitalist focuses of modern western society?

Perhaps he has: "Never mind that only five per cent of plastics actually end up getting recycled," he writes (pg. 189). "Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas will in the not too distant future run out. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something - anything - could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting."

As for me, it reminds me that I can do whatever I set my mind to. If a thirty-something teacher from Manhattan can talk himself into Captain Moore's orchard, or onto an ice-breaker travelling the Northwest Passage, then why can't I? At first I thought perhaps Moby-Duck was going to be one man’s attempt to escape impending fatherhood, but it turned out to be a bit of an adventure. Ultimately, I hope it gets a few more people thinking about how lifestyle impacts the planet.

Voyage of a Lifetime

It's nice to know the boy still thinks of me. The following is a direct copy of a book review which Bron saved for me from The New Scientist. The book in question is Plastic Ocean: How a sea captain's chance discovery launched a determined quest to save the oceans, and recounts Captain Charles Moore's experiences of sailing the high plastic seas.

NB. The review was published on page 55 of the New Scientist on 29 October 2011. It is written by Bob Holmes.

Dangerous debris

When Charles Moore sailed his 50-foot catamaran Alguita through one of the remotest, least-visuted parts of the Pacific Ocean in 1997, he was appalled to find plastic flotsam everywhere.

This discovery of what has come to be called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a vast area of the central Pacific where debris accumulates because of ocean current patterns - set Moore off on a crusade to measure, identify and, ultimately, try to prevent plastic pollution of the ocean. A decade and a half later, Moore's obsession has led to several scientific papers, documentary films, numerous media appearances, and now a book.

"I wasn't the first to be disturbed about plastic trash in the ocean, and I wasn't the first to study it," he writes in Plastic Ocean. "But maybe I was the first to freak out about it."

And freak out he certainly did. Chapter by chapter, Moore recounts his growing alarm as he learns about the abundance of plastic debris in the ocean and the ways it can get there. He also documents the clear harm that seabirds and marine mammals suffer when they become tangled in abandoned fishing nets or swallow balloons or plastic bags. And he makes a tentative case that even the smallest shards of plastic - the size and shape of plankton, and thus likely to be a eaten by fish and other planktivores - may carry a payload of toxic chemicals into the food chain.

In the end, though, many readers - especially New Scientist readers - are likely to find Moore unpersuasive. Partly that's because his book is a bit of a mess, rambling and disorganised. But the biggest problem is that Plastic Ocean comes across as a bit of a rant.

By his own account, Moore decided that plastic flotsam is a Very Bad Thing long before he gathered any solid evidence of any harm to sea life. And he is prone to making leaps: just because toxins can be detected in plastics does not mean that they are present in biologically meaningful doses. Moore my very well be right in thinking they are, but readers who are looking for a dispassionate conclusion based on the facts won't find it here.

The Other View

Truth be told, I had only read half of this review before I began copying it. So, when I got to the penultimate paragraph I started to have doubts as to whether I should post it or not. But, leap taker or not, Moore's book is surely going to be an interesting read. A shame that, as suggested by Holmes, it may not create many new converts to the plastic cause, but even if it creates one then that is one more person fighting in what I consider to be the right corner.

Two other books on the plastic problem have also been published this year, if anyone wishes to add them to their Christmas list. Firstly, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel was published earlier this year - a copy is currently sitting on my bookshop waiting patiently to be read. Or for what looks like a lighter read there is David de Rothschild's Plastiki: Across the Pacific on plastic: An adventure to save our oceans. I'm eager to get a closer look at this as I love the website based on the Plastiki's expeditions.

Plastic Symposium Today!

America's TEDx today hosts a day-long plastic extravaganza, including speakers such as Captain Moore, Fabian Cousteau, David De Rothschild, and Fake Plastic Fish's Beth Terry. I really wish I could be there. Luckily, though, it's going to streamed live through the TED website.

Watch the event or take a look at the day's agenda. For UK folks it runs from 3.30pm to 1.00 am (that's 8.30am to 6.00pm Pacific time).

Do I sacrifice the coursework that I'm supposed to be doing today to watch this? I really want to hear everything these people have to say, but I think I might have to cherry pick, as I'm not too keen on sitting in front of the computer until 1.00 am! Fingers crossed that the what I don't get to see today will still be there for me to watch another day.

All the King's horses

Another great, informative little talk from Captain Charles Moore:

"All the King's horses and all the King's men," he says, "will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again."

Solution 101: reduce the pollution at it's source - i.e. us.

Why I Hate Plastic

Wondering why I'm trying to give up plastic? What's so bad about plastic, after all?

Well, take a look at these videos on YouTube to see why, The World's Biggest Garbage Patch and Modern Marvels: Pacific Gyre

Or read this article in Tuesday's New York Times, Afloat in the Ocean, by Lindsey Hoshaw. Below is the second paragraph from Lidsey's article to give you a taster.

"Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool."

I can only hope it scares you enough to think about giving up plastic yourself. For me, it serves as a stark reminder for why I should keep putting in the effort.