UNICORNS FOREVER.
*click to enlarge*
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13 years ago
From the Vaults - JPG Artifacts #2
Today I say "meh" and revert to unicorns.
UNICORNS FOREVER.
*click to enlarge*
UNICORNS FOREVER.
*click to enlarge*
It's Just That Kind of Place
Warning! Mad blogging ahead! I'll be catching up with my first year in Oxford over the summer, but at the moment I'm still trapped in the clutches of exam time. "It's the most wonderful tiiiime...of the year..."
That'll be Oxford for you. (Portland friends, you know what I'm talking about, am I right?)
*
In the meanwhile, here's a picture of...a carriage on a truck. They were filming a movie. This happens quite a lot around here. You're walking along, thinking about groceries, when suddenly Marie Antoinette or a man in a Pink Panther costume comes prancing around the corner. (Fact.)
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Mr. Blogspot's Very Bad Day
Dear Blogger,
I hate your new format.
But "hate" is not a nice word. Let me rephrase: I deeply, violently dislike it, navigating through it in ways that explore new shades of frustration and hopelessness, my aesthetic soul shrivelling like burnt hair whenever I see its vast unused amounts of dead white space and its hospital-waiting-room color scheme and its infinitely useless button links that do things like "Insert Jump Break!" I do not need a jump break. I need a workable text window that fills more than 1/3 of the screen. I need clarity.
Please get on that. There's a great site you can use as an example of elegance and user-friendliness. It's called Blogger circa 2010.
Thanks, signed-
Fifteen Feet.
I hate your new format.
But "hate" is not a nice word. Let me rephrase: I deeply, violently dislike it, navigating through it in ways that explore new shades of frustration and hopelessness, my aesthetic soul shrivelling like burnt hair whenever I see its vast unused amounts of dead white space and its hospital-waiting-room color scheme and its infinitely useless button links that do things like "Insert Jump Break!" I do not need a jump break. I need a workable text window that fills more than 1/3 of the screen. I need clarity.
Please get on that. There's a great site you can use as an example of elegance and user-friendliness. It's called Blogger circa 2010.
Thanks, signed-
Fifteen Feet.
Murals, Ireland, and the Post I Can't Write
After having it on my life list for many years, I finally got to visit Northern Ireland. I waited for a lull between bombings. Nothing's exploded for a while, hey? Time to go!
It was as amazing as I'd hoped it would be...and far more tense than I ever expected. I mean really, really tense. If I happened to say "Derry" instead of "Londonderry," the British Loyalists would say, "So...they've gotten to you, have they? They've taught you to call it that?" If said "Londonderry," the Irish Nationalists would take me aside and tell me to rip the "London" right out of it. And that was the least of the hostilities. I dare not write what else I heard. Wherever I went, it always felt like half of the population was looking away from the other half. A powder keg about to blow.
Indeed, a bomb did go off just a week or two after I left, but since I was still travelling I didn't hear about it until much later.
I originally planned to write a post about all the various murals I saw throughout the country, ones honoring fallen heroes on both sides, ones that inspired, ones that terrified. But then I realized I couldn't write a single letter without bias, because what information I learned on my short fling through the country is hardly worthwhile repeating. I left with nothing but impressions. Impressions of men who frightened me, no matter their politics, with stories about their roles in violence and murder. Impressions of the dead castles, the green hillsides, the waves crashing steadily against the mathematical rocks of the Giant's Causeway, that pay no heed to whose feet stand or whose blood flows. I came and went as a tourist in the purest sense of the word, unable to contribute anything useful to the argument. Unable to articulate anything, really, except a great sense of loss and frustration, even though I have nothing personally at stake.
I can't write this post, you see, because I can't possibly tell an accurate version of what is happening, what has happened, in Northern Ireland. It's too complex, and I'm bound to get something terribly wrong, or oversimplify, or just plain insult. It's over my head.
What I can give you, however, before I slip down any further into my own deep morass of rumination, is
THE RED HAND OF ULSTER
Zing! Here it is. You can, I don't know, stare at it for a while.
This was a mural in the Shankill area of Belfast. In comparison to some of the others in the area, you might consider this particular mural "lighthearted." A sign on the side reads, "There are many legends telling the origins of the Red Hand of Ulster. This mural depicts only one of these."
I think this mural depicts the "race" version of the legend. According to Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898:
"In an ancient expedition to Ireland, it was given out that whoever first touched the shore should possess the territory which he touched; O’Neill, seeing another boat likely to outstrip his own, cut off his left hand and threw it on the coast. From this O’Neill the princes of Ulster were descended, and the motto of the O’Neills is to this day 'Lamh dearg Eirin' (red hand of Erin)."
I love how in the mural O'Neill is saying, "Yay I won!" while waving around his one remaining hand.
Also he doesn't seem to be wearing any pants. Couldn't he have, I don't know, just cut off a finger? You've got to hand it to him - he was determined. I guess he handled it the best he could. It's a good thing there wasn't a seagull nearby, or he might have been caught by it red-handed. Hand to mouth, you might say. It's okay that the other guy lost, though. He wouldn't have wanted the land anyway. It was a hand-me-down.
Okay, I'm done.
The Red Hand has been used as a symbol by both Loyalists and Nationalists. So there. I'm safely apolitical. This post has been entirely evenhanded.
Er...
It was as amazing as I'd hoped it would be...and far more tense than I ever expected. I mean really, really tense. If I happened to say "Derry" instead of "Londonderry," the British Loyalists would say, "So...they've gotten to you, have they? They've taught you to call it that?" If said "Londonderry," the Irish Nationalists would take me aside and tell me to rip the "London" right out of it. And that was the least of the hostilities. I dare not write what else I heard. Wherever I went, it always felt like half of the population was looking away from the other half. A powder keg about to blow.
Indeed, a bomb did go off just a week or two after I left, but since I was still travelling I didn't hear about it until much later.
I originally planned to write a post about all the various murals I saw throughout the country, ones honoring fallen heroes on both sides, ones that inspired, ones that terrified. But then I realized I couldn't write a single letter without bias, because what information I learned on my short fling through the country is hardly worthwhile repeating. I left with nothing but impressions. Impressions of men who frightened me, no matter their politics, with stories about their roles in violence and murder. Impressions of the dead castles, the green hillsides, the waves crashing steadily against the mathematical rocks of the Giant's Causeway, that pay no heed to whose feet stand or whose blood flows. I came and went as a tourist in the purest sense of the word, unable to contribute anything useful to the argument. Unable to articulate anything, really, except a great sense of loss and frustration, even though I have nothing personally at stake.
I can't write this post, you see, because I can't possibly tell an accurate version of what is happening, what has happened, in Northern Ireland. It's too complex, and I'm bound to get something terribly wrong, or oversimplify, or just plain insult. It's over my head.
What I can give you, however, before I slip down any further into my own deep morass of rumination, is
THE RED HAND OF ULSTER
Zing! Here it is. You can, I don't know, stare at it for a while.
This was a mural in the Shankill area of Belfast. In comparison to some of the others in the area, you might consider this particular mural "lighthearted." A sign on the side reads, "There are many legends telling the origins of the Red Hand of Ulster. This mural depicts only one of these."
I think this mural depicts the "race" version of the legend. According to Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898:
"In an ancient expedition to Ireland, it was given out that whoever first touched the shore should possess the territory which he touched; O’Neill, seeing another boat likely to outstrip his own, cut off his left hand and threw it on the coast. From this O’Neill the princes of Ulster were descended, and the motto of the O’Neills is to this day 'Lamh dearg Eirin' (red hand of Erin)."
I love how in the mural O'Neill is saying, "Yay I won!" while waving around his one remaining hand.
Also he doesn't seem to be wearing any pants. Couldn't he have, I don't know, just cut off a finger? You've got to hand it to him - he was determined. I guess he handled it the best he could. It's a good thing there wasn't a seagull nearby, or he might have been caught by it red-handed. Hand to mouth, you might say. It's okay that the other guy lost, though. He wouldn't have wanted the land anyway. It was a hand-me-down.
Okay, I'm done.
The Red Hand has been used as a symbol by both Loyalists and Nationalists. So there. I'm safely apolitical. This post has been entirely evenhanded.
Er...
The Election Word of 2012
Every presidential election season generates its own special buzzword. It's a word that comes out of nowhere, maybe by the pen of some unknown reporter who, working late through the night, sees it fluttering mothlike in the light of his lamp among countless lesser phrases and makes a snatch for it, stabbing it on his pen tip, as the perfect expression of his thoughts. So perfect, this phrase, in describing the political atmosphere, the field, the best of a candidate, the worst, or whatever the particular flavor of that particular race, that soon it's repeated in other articles, on cable news networks and talk radio, by the candidates themselves...it has become THE WORD.
It's a word common enough for most people to immediately understand in context, more or less, but unusual enough that no one had ever before used it on a regular basis. It begins to leap out each time it appears, a florescent marker flagging the extent of political punditry's shared consciousness.
In 2004, the year of Bush’s stand against Kerry, it was gravitas. As in, “Kerry has gravitas, but no charisma,” or “John Edwards needs to show more gravitas,” or “Bush has no gravitas whatsoever.”
Remember? It’s when we as a nation were craving seriousness and respectability in a leader. Somehow it seems like we were a lot more mature back then.
In 2008, the year of Obama's extended fight with Hillary and (seemingly) dozens of GOP candidates' fight with each other, it was throw under a bus. I suppose it shows what a catty tooth-and-nail campaign it was for both parties that THE WORD...or well, I suppose in this case a phrase...was one that represented blind ambition.
Thankfully, I can no longer quote an actual quote containing "throw under a bus." I was so sick of hearing that phrase, I think my brain purged all memories of it. I DO remember saying, "Stop saying that! There is no bus! There never WAS a bus! LEAVE THE BUSES OUT OF IT!"
Ladies and gentleman, for this election season, the campaign for President of the United States in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I am pleased to announce that the official WORD has finally made itself known.
feckless
Every candidate has been called this at least once, often by another candidate. It has now appeared in the mediums of newsprint, magazine, and television. "Feckless" it is. As words go, it's not nearly as irritating as "throw under a bus" or "gravitas," but it's still a little disturbing that it's neither a course of action nor a virtue. Yes, the word of the year is an insult, and one meaning "lack of vitality" at that.
Is it a reflection of our feeling about our nation as a whole? Do we cringe away from the very weaknesses that we fear to find in ourselves? Does it reflect four years of losing footing on the global economic stage, the loss of faith in our military focus, our inability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? How much significance should we attach to a word that rises from our collective subconscious, a word reoccurring, like a mantra, in our popular dialogue?
Personally I was hoping for "widdershins," but I guess there's always the next election.
It's a word common enough for most people to immediately understand in context, more or less, but unusual enough that no one had ever before used it on a regular basis. It begins to leap out each time it appears, a florescent marker flagging the extent of political punditry's shared consciousness.
In 2004, the year of Bush’s stand against Kerry, it was gravitas. As in, “Kerry has gravitas, but no charisma,” or “John Edwards needs to show more gravitas,” or “Bush has no gravitas whatsoever.”
Remember? It’s when we as a nation were craving seriousness and respectability in a leader. Somehow it seems like we were a lot more mature back then.
In 2008, the year of Obama's extended fight with Hillary and (seemingly) dozens of GOP candidates' fight with each other, it was throw under a bus. I suppose it shows what a catty tooth-and-nail campaign it was for both parties that THE WORD...or well, I suppose in this case a phrase...was one that represented blind ambition.
Thankfully, I can no longer quote an actual quote containing "throw under a bus." I was so sick of hearing that phrase, I think my brain purged all memories of it. I DO remember saying, "Stop saying that! There is no bus! There never WAS a bus! LEAVE THE BUSES OUT OF IT!"
Ladies and gentleman, for this election season, the campaign for President of the United States in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I am pleased to announce that the official WORD has finally made itself known.
feckless
Every candidate has been called this at least once, often by another candidate. It has now appeared in the mediums of newsprint, magazine, and television. "Feckless" it is. As words go, it's not nearly as irritating as "throw under a bus" or "gravitas," but it's still a little disturbing that it's neither a course of action nor a virtue. Yes, the word of the year is an insult, and one meaning "lack of vitality" at that.
Is it a reflection of our feeling about our nation as a whole? Do we cringe away from the very weaknesses that we fear to find in ourselves? Does it reflect four years of losing footing on the global economic stage, the loss of faith in our military focus, our inability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? How much significance should we attach to a word that rises from our collective subconscious, a word reoccurring, like a mantra, in our popular dialogue?
Personally I was hoping for "widdershins," but I guess there's always the next election.
Choose Your Loop
This weekend is the annual spring beach cleanup in my hometown, an event that separates the passionate, determined, save-our-coast visionaries from the dry people. It's usually a day that pours rain, you see. This is Oregon, after all.
Thinking about this upcoming weekend made the reflect on something I've been reading up on lately, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the under-reported problem of plastics in the ocean.
Thus inspired, I thought for today's post I should write a photo essay* about a problem near to my heart (and my home!) - a problem that you, dear reader, should probably know a thing or two about.
*All photos are mine unless otherwise stated.
Plastics are Forever
Long ago when Hypercolor shirts and Koosh Balls were flying off the shelves, when I was but a young and innocent thing watching nature documentaries and dreaming of travelling the world, there was a cartoon that featured dancing dinosaurs singing, "Recycle, reduce, reuse, and close the loop! We can close the loop!" It popped up every now and then between TV commercials, lodging itself forever into my subconscious.
Recently I went looking for it out of curiosity. Thank you, Internet - I found it, and learned that it was part of an awareness campaign put on by California's Department of Recycling. It only aired locally, I guess, which means that most of the nation hasn't had this little earbug ("We can close the loop!") stuck in their head for the past twenty years.
Here it is. You've been forewarned:
Gosh, what a flashback. (Don't worry, I have no idea what the end means either.) That was, I suppose, my first introduction to the concept of the three R's. It aired at a time when there were no recycling facilities anywhere close to my hometown, not counting the 5 cents you could get for returned bottles. I remember looking at the little arrow symbol on the bottom of plastic and thinking, "Huh," before throwing it away. I didn't have an alternative. But the idea of "Recycle, Reduce, Reuse" stuck, if nothing else.
Fun little dinosaur ditties are a great introduction to pressing issues like overconsumption and pollution. (Much better than the alternative, "Hey kid, look at this picture of a thousand dead sea turtles!") Still, some things have to be seen first-hand before they hit home.
The first time I participated in my town's twice-annual beach cleanup, I was shocked by the amount of garbage I picked up. Detergent bottles, food wrappers, cigarette lighters, and countless unidentifiable chunks of plastic. "Where does it all come from?" I wondered. "Are the people in my area really that trashy?"
Jump forward many years, and I'm living on the Galapagos, researching wildlife. My island was at the farthest end of the archipelago, 600 miles from mainland South America, pretty much as far from civilization as a person can get. Yet it never ceased to amaze me what sorts of things washed up on the beach.
It was exactly the same as back home in Oregon, but far more inexplicable. Nylon rope, a shoe, potato chip bags, PVC pipe, torn nets...how far did these things have to travel to get here? Even in the middle of nowhere, so isolated, I felt...invaded, like each piece of trash represented the person who last touched it, their ghost lingering alongside it, haunting one of the last truly wild places on earth.
Plastic takes a long time to degrade even under the best conditions, but once it hits the water, that process is halted. Plastics in the ocean never truly go away. Eventually they break down into polymers, smaller and smaller bits of "microplastic" that begin to look something like this:
In 2008, C-MORE (The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research & Education, based in Hawaii) took an expedition to study the infamous stretch of ocean called "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch," or the North Pacific Gyre. A gyre is an area where wind and currents converge to form giant, slow-moving whirlpools - there are five of them worldwide.
Anything in the ocean that can't move under its own power eventually collects in one of the gyres. Now if you hear "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," you might, like me, be envisioning floating garbage so thick you can walk across it. Not so, the C-MORE expedition found. There's not much visible trash, but pull up a sample of water from the gyre and what you find is a thick soup of tiny microplastics drawn together from the farthest reaches of the ocean.
So What?
Until my time on the Galapagos, I never understood the true importance - and fragility - of the ocean. It seems like a mighty thing, doesn't it? Off the coast of my hometown the waves crash down in 40-foot thunderclaps, ripping boulders from the jetty and sweeping away people foolish enough to turn their backs on it. The ocean seems as infinite, impassive, and untouchable as the distant stars.
But when I lived on the island, I depended on it for everything. The only other water I had was precious drinking water stored in closed 50-gallon drums, so it was to the ocean that I went to bathe, wash my clothes, clean my dishes, and even get water for cooking. When the tide was out I could do nothing but wait. Sometimes, for reasons I still don't understand, the water returned as a foul raging current of dirt and waste, scourging the shoreline clean. There were times I was swimming when this current came, suddenly finding myself surrounded by feathers, sticks, carcasses, and brown floating objects I dared not identify. When the water was like this, it was the same as a low tide - useless.
The ocean is the dishwasher, the washing machine, the bathtub of the world. When it works right, it takes the worst of our waste and turns it back into usable minerals and nutrients. But if it gets dirty, what washes the washing machine? Hmm.
Where I lived, I loved watching the gannet chicks in the nearby seabird colony. They were incredibly curious, and would play with anything they could reach.
Yes, anything, even if they had no clue what it was.
As adults, man-made objects continue to confuse them. They'll eat bits of trash, assuming it's food, and slowly starve themselves (or their chicks) as they fill up with indigestible plastic.
Plastic works into the food chain in more insidious ways, too. If all of the plastic in the ocean did consist of giant, original-sized pieces, we might make some progress in gradually fishing it out. But because it breaks down into such small pieces, collecting it means collecting everything else along with it, including the plankton that form the base of the food chain. The smallest particles of microplastic are ingested by tiny zooplankton, who themselves are eaten by small fish and shrimp.
The plastic travels through the food chain, unchanged, from shrimp to salmon, from herring to shark, back into the water, through barnacles, through whales, until some of it finally ends up here:
Eating microplastics by themselves might not be such a bad thing, as long as they don't jam up your plumbing - I don't know, I haven't chewed on my crayons lately - but according to the NOAA Marine Debris Program, plastic, being a petroleum product, soaks up oil-based chemicals in the water like DDT, PCBs, pesticides, and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
No one knows for sure how much of these chemicals our bodies absorb when we eat microplastic-laden seafood, but studies are increasingly revealing their possible effects - cancer, infertility, a weakened immune system, developmental disabilities...the list goes on. In my neck of the woods, I hear stories of young orcas that wash up dead on the shores, their bodies so contaminated with POPs that they have to be handled like toxic waste. The POPs come to them through their mother's milk. (The mothers, with more body mass, can handle larger concentrations of POPs.) So what are these chemicals doing to us?
We've given the ocean, the great washing machine of the planet, the reverse Midas touch. It's poisoning whatever it contacts, including us.
Go Team Us!
Now might be a good time to go back and watch the dancing dinosaurs again. Isn't pollution depressing? Tell me about it. Tell anyone who's worked as a field biologist. It's a constant cycle of fighting, falling down, and getting back up for one more fight. But we fight to protect the things we love.
So what can we do about the gigantic plastic soup formerly known as our ocean? Well, everyone's got their own strengths, their own unique contribution they can make to the problem.
Mine is teaching. I've been doing it for this entire post...or trying to, at least.
Part of the trouble is that many people simply haven't heard about microplastics or POPs or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Part of the trouble is that those who know don't care. That's where I like to jump in.
Education simply means knowing. Science is just that - from the Latin scire, "to know." If you know something, you begin to understand it. If you understand it, you begin to love it. If you love it, you will want to protect it. Maybe even fight to protect it.
So I try to share my love for the ocean with as many people as I can. I get excited when I see a piece of bull kelp, show people how to look for the delicate dancing legs of barnacles, teach them the difference between a sea lion and a seal. During my time working as an outdoor educator on a sailing ship, I got to do this all the time. There is nothing, nothing, like hearing a tough, angry inner-city kid suddenly say, "Oh man, look at those salmon jumping! Wow, you guys! Wow!"
One of the lessons I helped design and lead was the Watershed Class. "Where's your watershed?" I'd ask. "Is it the building in your yard where you store all your water?" (Insert hearty belly laugh.) Actually, few kids even knew what a watershed was, so we'd go over the map, starting with the smallest creek and working our way up to the biggest river, the Columbia, which drains a vast part of North America.
"Is that the biggest watershed you can find?" I would ask. Sure, yeah, said the kids...and then I pointed out that the Pacific drains our watershed too. In truth, we all live in the same watershed. The ocean is downstream of everything.
The funky little model that I used to illustrate this point was a cooking pan with wads of tinfoil covered with a plastic bag, a mini-watershed. (A good example of "reusing" trash, yay!) The water of the "ocean" started clean, then we started squirting drops of pollutants (in fact just coffee, mud, or food coloring) into different areas of the watershed, watching as they oozed down and gradually turned the "ocean" into a nasty mess. For my final act, I'd say, "Now suppose you happen to throw your candy wrapper away as you're walking home from school..." I would suddenly whip a wrapper out of my pocket and drop it into the middle of the gross "ocean," which covered it almost completely.
The best part of this lesson was that every time, every time, the kids would get extremely concerned about how I was going to dispose of the "polluted" water after the class. Surely I wasn't going to dump it over the side of the ship? I had to let them watch me empty it into a disposal bucket. Success. Success.
If you don't happen to teach outdoor education classes, there's still plenty you can do. Like the beach cleanup I'll be going on this weekend, if you see a piece of plastic lying on the ground, pick it up. Plastic is forever. It's not going anywhere on its own, except perhaps down to the ocean.
Here's an interesting solution I spotted while I was in London. The sign says, "I EAT RUBBISH! This device restores vitality to the Thames by collecting 40 tonnes of rubbish every year. That's equivalent to 800,000 plastic bottles." Brilliant, simple, and effective.
If you have mixed curbside recycling, as most major cities do, for goodness sakes, use it. Consider yourself lucky. Consider it an elite urban perk, and use it as much as you possibly can.
When I recycle, I have to sort everything into separate categories of green glass, brown glass, colored glass, tin, aluminum, steel, paperboard, cardboard, newspaper, and #1 plastics. (Seriously.) Then I drive it out to the transfer center and carry it into the trailers myself. My county doesn't offer recycling for other plastics, so I let my them accumulate in a bin at home until I have the chance to visit some other city/county/state that will take them. It's like my county tries to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to recycle, but I do it, by golly, jumping through all of those ridiculous hoops. When I remember that trash on the beach, whether it's here or across the globe, I know it's worth it.
So listen - if you have mixed curbside recycling, a service that actually comes to your house and does all that work for you...? For the love of humanity! What excuse do you have not to use it?
According to 5 Gyres, a group devoted to raising awareness about plastic pollution, "We currently recover only 5% of the plastics we produce. What happens to the rest of it? Roughly 50% is buried in landfills, some is remade into durable goods, and much of it remains 'unaccounted for', lost in the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea."
The way I see it, plastic can cycle around in one of two loops. One is the loop the dinosaurs sang about, where plastic polymers are shaped into products, used, and reshaped into new products. Then there's the other loop, the one where plastic polymers are released into the ocean, return into the bodies of people and wildlife, and are someday released into the ocean again. In both cycles, the plastic comes back. There is no "away" in "throwing away."
The moment a piece of plastic leaves your hand, you've started it on its cycle. Which one is up to you.
Choose your loop.
Thinking about this upcoming weekend made the reflect on something I've been reading up on lately, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the under-reported problem of plastics in the ocean.
Thus inspired, I thought for today's post I should write a photo essay* about a problem near to my heart (and my home!) - a problem that you, dear reader, should probably know a thing or two about.
*All photos are mine unless otherwise stated.
Plastics are Forever
Long ago when Hypercolor shirts and Koosh Balls were flying off the shelves, when I was but a young and innocent thing watching nature documentaries and dreaming of travelling the world, there was a cartoon that featured dancing dinosaurs singing, "Recycle, reduce, reuse, and close the loop! We can close the loop!" It popped up every now and then between TV commercials, lodging itself forever into my subconscious.
Recently I went looking for it out of curiosity. Thank you, Internet - I found it, and learned that it was part of an awareness campaign put on by California's Department of Recycling. It only aired locally, I guess, which means that most of the nation hasn't had this little earbug ("We can close the loop!") stuck in their head for the past twenty years.
Here it is. You've been forewarned:
Gosh, what a flashback. (Don't worry, I have no idea what the end means either.) That was, I suppose, my first introduction to the concept of the three R's. It aired at a time when there were no recycling facilities anywhere close to my hometown, not counting the 5 cents you could get for returned bottles. I remember looking at the little arrow symbol on the bottom of plastic and thinking, "Huh," before throwing it away. I didn't have an alternative. But the idea of "Recycle, Reduce, Reuse" stuck, if nothing else.
Fun little dinosaur ditties are a great introduction to pressing issues like overconsumption and pollution. (Much better than the alternative, "Hey kid, look at this picture of a thousand dead sea turtles!") Still, some things have to be seen first-hand before they hit home.
The first time I participated in my town's twice-annual beach cleanup, I was shocked by the amount of garbage I picked up. Detergent bottles, food wrappers, cigarette lighters, and countless unidentifiable chunks of plastic. "Where does it all come from?" I wondered. "Are the people in my area really that trashy?"
Jump forward many years, and I'm living on the Galapagos, researching wildlife. My island was at the farthest end of the archipelago, 600 miles from mainland South America, pretty much as far from civilization as a person can get. Yet it never ceased to amaze me what sorts of things washed up on the beach.
A bucket lid, bottle, broken chunks of plastic, and two albatrosses going into their courtship ritual.
It was exactly the same as back home in Oregon, but far more inexplicable. Nylon rope, a shoe, potato chip bags, PVC pipe, torn nets...how far did these things have to travel to get here? Even in the middle of nowhere, so isolated, I felt...invaded, like each piece of trash represented the person who last touched it, their ghost lingering alongside it, haunting one of the last truly wild places on earth.
A sea lion pup takes a nap inside an old tire. Photo courtesy my friend Tiff.
Plastic takes a long time to degrade even under the best conditions, but once it hits the water, that process is halted. Plastics in the ocean never truly go away. Eventually they break down into polymers, smaller and smaller bits of "microplastic" that begin to look something like this:
Microplastics. Photo courtesy C-MORE.
In 2008, C-MORE (The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research & Education, based in Hawaii) took an expedition to study the infamous stretch of ocean called "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch," or the North Pacific Gyre. A gyre is an area where wind and currents converge to form giant, slow-moving whirlpools - there are five of them worldwide.
The five gyres. Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons.
Anything in the ocean that can't move under its own power eventually collects in one of the gyres. Now if you hear "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," you might, like me, be envisioning floating garbage so thick you can walk across it. Not so, the C-MORE expedition found. There's not much visible trash, but pull up a sample of water from the gyre and what you find is a thick soup of tiny microplastics drawn together from the farthest reaches of the ocean.
So What?
Until my time on the Galapagos, I never understood the true importance - and fragility - of the ocean. It seems like a mighty thing, doesn't it? Off the coast of my hometown the waves crash down in 40-foot thunderclaps, ripping boulders from the jetty and sweeping away people foolish enough to turn their backs on it. The ocean seems as infinite, impassive, and untouchable as the distant stars.
But when I lived on the island, I depended on it for everything. The only other water I had was precious drinking water stored in closed 50-gallon drums, so it was to the ocean that I went to bathe, wash my clothes, clean my dishes, and even get water for cooking. When the tide was out I could do nothing but wait. Sometimes, for reasons I still don't understand, the water returned as a foul raging current of dirt and waste, scourging the shoreline clean. There were times I was swimming when this current came, suddenly finding myself surrounded by feathers, sticks, carcasses, and brown floating objects I dared not identify. When the water was like this, it was the same as a low tide - useless.
The ocean is the dishwasher, the washing machine, the bathtub of the world. When it works right, it takes the worst of our waste and turns it back into usable minerals and nutrients. But if it gets dirty, what washes the washing machine? Hmm.
Where I lived, I loved watching the gannet chicks in the nearby seabird colony. They were incredibly curious, and would play with anything they could reach.
A feather makes a good toy.
Yes, anything, even if they had no clue what it was.
A stick? A feather? Close enough!
As adults, man-made objects continue to confuse them. They'll eat bits of trash, assuming it's food, and slowly starve themselves (or their chicks) as they fill up with indigestible plastic.
Photo by Chris Jordan, a photographer who travelled to Midway Island to document the death of plastic-filled albatrosses. Visit his site to see more.
Plastic works into the food chain in more insidious ways, too. If all of the plastic in the ocean did consist of giant, original-sized pieces, we might make some progress in gradually fishing it out. But because it breaks down into such small pieces, collecting it means collecting everything else along with it, including the plankton that form the base of the food chain. The smallest particles of microplastic are ingested by tiny zooplankton, who themselves are eaten by small fish and shrimp.
How much plastic is inside this shrimp?
The plastic travels through the food chain, unchanged, from shrimp to salmon, from herring to shark, back into the water, through barnacles, through whales, until some of it finally ends up here:
Russian roulette, seafood style.
Eating microplastics by themselves might not be such a bad thing, as long as they don't jam up your plumbing - I don't know, I haven't chewed on my crayons lately - but according to the NOAA Marine Debris Program, plastic, being a petroleum product, soaks up oil-based chemicals in the water like DDT, PCBs, pesticides, and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
No one knows for sure how much of these chemicals our bodies absorb when we eat microplastic-laden seafood, but studies are increasingly revealing their possible effects - cancer, infertility, a weakened immune system, developmental disabilities...the list goes on. In my neck of the woods, I hear stories of young orcas that wash up dead on the shores, their bodies so contaminated with POPs that they have to be handled like toxic waste. The POPs come to them through their mother's milk. (The mothers, with more body mass, can handle larger concentrations of POPs.) So what are these chemicals doing to us?
We've given the ocean, the great washing machine of the planet, the reverse Midas touch. It's poisoning whatever it contacts, including us.
Plastic fish in a plastic sea.
Go Team Us!
Now might be a good time to go back and watch the dancing dinosaurs again. Isn't pollution depressing? Tell me about it. Tell anyone who's worked as a field biologist. It's a constant cycle of fighting, falling down, and getting back up for one more fight. But we fight to protect the things we love.
So what can we do about the gigantic plastic soup formerly known as our ocean? Well, everyone's got their own strengths, their own unique contribution they can make to the problem.
Mine is teaching. I've been doing it for this entire post...or trying to, at least.
Part of the trouble is that many people simply haven't heard about microplastics or POPs or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Part of the trouble is that those who know don't care. That's where I like to jump in.
Education simply means knowing. Science is just that - from the Latin scire, "to know." If you know something, you begin to understand it. If you understand it, you begin to love it. If you love it, you will want to protect it. Maybe even fight to protect it.
So I try to share my love for the ocean with as many people as I can. I get excited when I see a piece of bull kelp, show people how to look for the delicate dancing legs of barnacles, teach them the difference between a sea lion and a seal. During my time working as an outdoor educator on a sailing ship, I got to do this all the time. There is nothing, nothing, like hearing a tough, angry inner-city kid suddenly say, "Oh man, look at those salmon jumping! Wow, you guys! Wow!"
Marine Biology - Dig It!
One of the lessons I helped design and lead was the Watershed Class. "Where's your watershed?" I'd ask. "Is it the building in your yard where you store all your water?" (Insert hearty belly laugh.) Actually, few kids even knew what a watershed was, so we'd go over the map, starting with the smallest creek and working our way up to the biggest river, the Columbia, which drains a vast part of North America.
"Is that the biggest watershed you can find?" I would ask. Sure, yeah, said the kids...and then I pointed out that the Pacific drains our watershed too. In truth, we all live in the same watershed. The ocean is downstream of everything.
The Watershed Class.
The funky little model that I used to illustrate this point was a cooking pan with wads of tinfoil covered with a plastic bag, a mini-watershed. (A good example of "reusing" trash, yay!) The water of the "ocean" started clean, then we started squirting drops of pollutants (in fact just coffee, mud, or food coloring) into different areas of the watershed, watching as they oozed down and gradually turned the "ocean" into a nasty mess. For my final act, I'd say, "Now suppose you happen to throw your candy wrapper away as you're walking home from school..." I would suddenly whip a wrapper out of my pocket and drop it into the middle of the gross "ocean," which covered it almost completely.
The best part of this lesson was that every time, every time, the kids would get extremely concerned about how I was going to dispose of the "polluted" water after the class. Surely I wasn't going to dump it over the side of the ship? I had to let them watch me empty it into a disposal bucket. Success. Success.
If you don't happen to teach outdoor education classes, there's still plenty you can do. Like the beach cleanup I'll be going on this weekend, if you see a piece of plastic lying on the ground, pick it up. Plastic is forever. It's not going anywhere on its own, except perhaps down to the ocean.
London's creative rubbish cage.
Here's an interesting solution I spotted while I was in London. The sign says, "I EAT RUBBISH! This device restores vitality to the Thames by collecting 40 tonnes of rubbish every year. That's equivalent to 800,000 plastic bottles." Brilliant, simple, and effective.
If you have mixed curbside recycling, as most major cities do, for goodness sakes, use it. Consider yourself lucky. Consider it an elite urban perk, and use it as much as you possibly can.
When I recycle, I have to sort everything into separate categories of green glass, brown glass, colored glass, tin, aluminum, steel, paperboard, cardboard, newspaper, and #1 plastics. (Seriously.) Then I drive it out to the transfer center and carry it into the trailers myself. My county doesn't offer recycling for other plastics, so I let my them accumulate in a bin at home until I have the chance to visit some other city/county/state that will take them. It's like my county tries to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to recycle, but I do it, by golly, jumping through all of those ridiculous hoops. When I remember that trash on the beach, whether it's here or across the globe, I know it's worth it.
So listen - if you have mixed curbside recycling, a service that actually comes to your house and does all that work for you...? For the love of humanity! What excuse do you have not to use it?
According to 5 Gyres, a group devoted to raising awareness about plastic pollution, "We currently recover only 5% of the plastics we produce. What happens to the rest of it? Roughly 50% is buried in landfills, some is remade into durable goods, and much of it remains 'unaccounted for', lost in the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea."
The way I see it, plastic can cycle around in one of two loops. One is the loop the dinosaurs sang about, where plastic polymers are shaped into products, used, and reshaped into new products. Then there's the other loop, the one where plastic polymers are released into the ocean, return into the bodies of people and wildlife, and are someday released into the ocean again. In both cycles, the plastic comes back. There is no "away" in "throwing away."
The moment a piece of plastic leaves your hand, you've started it on its cycle. Which one is up to you.
Choose your loop.
A Day at the Beach
A March day, the rain has washed out
the gravel that filled last summer’s potholes.
We’re driving the beach road,
the hidden one,
the one that ends in a wall of sand.
The dunes have shifted –
this one’s grown, its ridge runs farther,
reaching out like an arm,
swallowing us up to the knee.
We climb the inland side,
walk over the edge, air beneath us,
and fall in ten-foot steps to the water’s edge.
We are not alone. The wind is here
claiming the beach for itself.
It worries the loose sand,
pulls it along in currents,
skips it across the ground,
lifts it away,
an hourglass that measures nothing.
Two crows take flight.
They bicker in the air,
with claws and wings,
claws against wings,
the way only old lovers can.
Each blade of grass has bent down,
and where it touches the sand
drawn a circle around itself
as if to say,
Here I am!
Circles within circles, hundreds and thousands,
an earnest art, a triumph
uncelebrated, unseen,
by a careless footstep, undone.
Are they playfully drawn, profound?
Both, both,
the sand captures everything,
every paused step and dug-in toe,
the curious detour, the racing beetle,
cigarettes, patience, bones, life,
all marked in the sand,
where the crows walked together
and where we walk now.
Yes, we will go, but not just yet.
The sand captures everything
and the wind carries it away.
the gravel that filled last summer’s potholes.
We’re driving the beach road,
the hidden one,
the one that ends in a wall of sand.
The dunes have shifted –
this one’s grown, its ridge runs farther,
reaching out like an arm,
swallowing us up to the knee.
We climb the inland side,
walk over the edge, air beneath us,
and fall in ten-foot steps to the water’s edge.
We are not alone. The wind is here
claiming the beach for itself.
It worries the loose sand,
pulls it along in currents,
skips it across the ground,
lifts it away,
an hourglass that measures nothing.
Two crows take flight.
They bicker in the air,
with claws and wings,
claws against wings,
the way only old lovers can.
Each blade of grass has bent down,
and where it touches the sand
drawn a circle around itself
as if to say,
Here I am!
Circles within circles, hundreds and thousands,
an earnest art, a triumph
uncelebrated, unseen,
by a careless footstep, undone.
Are they playfully drawn, profound?
Both, both,
the sand captures everything,
every paused step and dug-in toe,
the curious detour, the racing beetle,
cigarettes, patience, bones, life,
all marked in the sand,
where the crows walked together
and where we walk now.
Yes, we will go, but not just yet.
The sand captures everything
and the wind carries it away.
Next they'll be trading mascots...
Denver is breaking my heart. Maybe it's their conspiracy to reverse the change that has come over me in the last ten years, my transformation from a sane upstanding citizen to a rabid sports fan willing to sacrifice three hours every day not just for baseball, but for spring training baseball. To wit...
Some dude in 2002: "There's a game on."
Me in 2002: "Meh."
Some dude in 2012: "There's a game on."
Me, now: "Holy CRAWDADS drop everything and TURN IT ON!!!!" (*foaming at mouth*)
But lately my favorite teams have been - just - dumb. If they continue along this sordid path, I'm going to experience a rapid descent back to the days of "meh," I just know it.
First it was Tebow. I started watching him when he was a Gator. For two years he was the only college athlete I knew by name. The Broncos signed him, oh happy day!, and all of the sudden I actually cared about a pro football team. (Though still less than college ball. Pro football is monotony itself compared to college ball.) Tebow had the perfect underdog story - vaulted into the limelight by happenstance, pulling out wins by the skin of his teeth, always optimistic. This is a guy who could make me root for any team.
One glorious year of that, and then...YOINK! The Broncos trade Tebow for a guy WHO GOT DROPPED FROM HIS TEAM FOR A REASON, PEOPLE. Don't get me wrong. Before Tebow made me suddenly care about the Broncos I was a Colts fan. Yes, a Colts fan, even though I live nowhere near Indianapolis, all thanks to Peyton Manning. (He's a dreamboat. Yeah. What? Plus he only *kind of* beats up children.) But no, with Peyton up for grabs Denver decides that they'd rather have a few years of slightly-improved-odds-of-winning than work with a youngster who might eventually refine himself into a quarterback superstar.
I predict that the Broncos will be kicking themselves someday soon. I'd sort of like to go kick them right now.
But I can't get too worked-up over the whole Tebow thing. Denver already numbed me to life's cruelties when they started screwing around with the Rockies, the best darn team in all of baseball. Or...at least, they were the best darn team. Today seventy percent of the names I long knew and loved (like, three years ago) are scattered to the winds across the rest of the National League. Now I'll have to go to ridiculous places like Cleveland and San Diego just to finish getting all the signatures on my ball!
When did sports teams become so mutable? Wasn't there ever a time when an athlete was born and died in the same jersey? Do team owners think that the fans value the wins more than the players? Are we all rooting for just a team name, no matter who's holding the bats and throwing the balls?
I guess this must be what the fans want, since so much of a team's success depends on local support. Maybe someone who lives in a city supports their team as a given, a matter of civic pride, whoever the players may be. For me, living 300 miles away from the nearest major league team, I throw my support to the people I like, the guy with the smile, the player with moxie. It's hard to pull for just a logo.
Stupid, maddening major leagues. Well, there's always college ball. (With players recruited from, um...far and wide across the country...)
Well, there's always high school ball. (Cold, wet, not televised...)
Well, there are always video games.
Of course the truth is that I will raise my fist and curse my pro teams for all of their Machiavellian shenanigans even while carving out vast chunks of time from my life to watch every last game. I'll fall in love with this season's new batch of players and have my heart broken again in the spring, and so it goes on, year after year, the sad cyclical life of a rabid sports fan.
Some dude in 2002: "There's a game on."
Me in 2002: "Meh."
Some dude in 2012: "There's a game on."
Me, now: "Holy CRAWDADS drop everything and TURN IT ON!!!!" (*foaming at mouth*)
But lately my favorite teams have been - just - dumb. If they continue along this sordid path, I'm going to experience a rapid descent back to the days of "meh," I just know it.
First it was Tebow. I started watching him when he was a Gator. For two years he was the only college athlete I knew by name. The Broncos signed him, oh happy day!, and all of the sudden I actually cared about a pro football team. (Though still less than college ball. Pro football is monotony itself compared to college ball.) Tebow had the perfect underdog story - vaulted into the limelight by happenstance, pulling out wins by the skin of his teeth, always optimistic. This is a guy who could make me root for any team.
One glorious year of that, and then...YOINK! The Broncos trade Tebow for a guy WHO GOT DROPPED FROM HIS TEAM FOR A REASON, PEOPLE. Don't get me wrong. Before Tebow made me suddenly care about the Broncos I was a Colts fan. Yes, a Colts fan, even though I live nowhere near Indianapolis, all thanks to Peyton Manning. (He's a dreamboat. Yeah. What? Plus he only *kind of* beats up children.) But no, with Peyton up for grabs Denver decides that they'd rather have a few years of slightly-improved-odds-of-winning than work with a youngster who might eventually refine himself into a quarterback superstar.
I predict that the Broncos will be kicking themselves someday soon. I'd sort of like to go kick them right now.
But I can't get too worked-up over the whole Tebow thing. Denver already numbed me to life's cruelties when they started screwing around with the Rockies, the best darn team in all of baseball. Or...at least, they were the best darn team. Today seventy percent of the names I long knew and loved (like, three years ago) are scattered to the winds across the rest of the National League. Now I'll have to go to ridiculous places like Cleveland and San Diego just to finish getting all the signatures on my ball!
When did sports teams become so mutable? Wasn't there ever a time when an athlete was born and died in the same jersey? Do team owners think that the fans value the wins more than the players? Are we all rooting for just a team name, no matter who's holding the bats and throwing the balls?
I guess this must be what the fans want, since so much of a team's success depends on local support. Maybe someone who lives in a city supports their team as a given, a matter of civic pride, whoever the players may be. For me, living 300 miles away from the nearest major league team, I throw my support to the people I like, the guy with the smile, the player with moxie. It's hard to pull for just a logo.
Stupid, maddening major leagues. Well, there's always college ball. (With players recruited from, um...far and wide across the country...)
Well, there's always high school ball. (Cold, wet, not televised...)
Well, there are always video games.
Of course the truth is that I will raise my fist and curse my pro teams for all of their Machiavellian shenanigans even while carving out vast chunks of time from my life to watch every last game. I'll fall in love with this season's new batch of players and have my heart broken again in the spring, and so it goes on, year after year, the sad cyclical life of a rabid sports fan.
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