by Donovan Hohn
Such fears are not new. In 1972, long before Moore went trawling in the Subtropical Convergence Zone, Edward J. Carpenter of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found between one and twenty plastic particles in every cubic yard of Long Island Sound. A few years later, he found elevated levels of plastic and tar at the heart of the Sargasso Sea. Other oceanographers followed Carpenter’s lead. If you’re awake enough, and have a long enough attention span, you can read dozens of scientific papers published in the 1970s on, for instance, plastic containers discarded on the beaches of Kent, on the “evidence from seabirds of plastic particle pollution off Central California,” on concentrations of DDT and PCBs in the western Baltic. The list goes on and on. Over the course of the 1980s, the bibliography of scientific studies on the impact of plastic pollution grew to encyclopedic lengths.
Carpenter, like many of the scientists who followed him, also worried about plastic’s environmental impact. Particles could encourage bacterial growth, he speculated, or block the intestines of fish, and like Moore he worried about toxicity. It wasn’t the contaminants the particles had adsorbed that troubled Carpenter most. It was the toxins in the plastics themselves, a concern Moore, like many of the scientists who came before him, shares. Once fish or plankton ingest those poison pills, Moore speculates, the poisons both in and on the plastic may enter the food web. And since lipophilic toxins concentrate, or “bioaccumulate,” in fatty tissues as they move up the chain of predation—so that the “contaminant burden” of a swordfish is greater than a mackerel’s and a mackerel’s greater than a shrimp’s—these poison pills could be poisoning people too.
Far-fetched as the theory sounds, the bioaccumulations of mercury in seafood provide a well-established precedent for the plastic-poisoning hypothesis. According to the “National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals” put out in 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), all sorts of synthetic substances with scary, polysyllabic names are getting into the average American’s bloodstream, including both POPs and ingredients in plastic—ingredients like the endocrine-disrupting, gender-bending phthalates that resin manufacturers add to PVC to make it more pliable. As early as 1978, a paper published in the prestigious journal Science identified “phthalate ester plasticizers” as “a new class of marine pollutant.”
The sources of these contaminants are usually impossible to determine, which is why the plastic poisoning hypothesis is so difficult to prove, or redress. When it comes to plastic, the “single biggest ‘smoking gun,’” in Moore’s opinion, is bisphenol A. First concocted in the laboratory as a synthetic form of estrogen, bisphenol A was later polymerized and is now found in everything from baby bottles to compact discs to the linings in tin cans—linings invented to protect us from botulism. Bisphenol A turned up in 93 percent of the urine samples tested by the CDC.
The mere presence of a toxin does not make it a health risk, of course, as the precedent of mercury illustrates once again. Various factors—from dose size to developmental stage (fetuses and small children are most vulnerable) to genetic predispositions—can negate or amplify the danger, and the effects of endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A, which can play out in subtle ways over the course of a lifetime, are especially difficult to determine. High doses of bisphenol A, for instance, have been found to cause weight loss in rats. Counterintuitively, however, small doses administered in utero led to abnormal weight gain later in life. Some scientists now suspect that fetal exposure to substances like bisphenol A may be partly to blame for soaring obesity rates and declining sperm counts in people, and to rising rates of hermaphroditism in populations of frogs and fish that inhabit polluted waterways.
The trade group that represents the chemical companies and resin plants and extruders that together constitute the plastics industry was until recently known as the American Plastics Council. It is now known as the American Chemistry Council; plastics, apparently, is a dirtier word than chemistry. Plus, with its new name, the trade group is easy to confuse with the American Chemical Society, an independent scientific guild that, among other things, credentials university chemistry departments. The ACC has called the studies on plastic poisoning “fascinating” but inconclusive, and even worried scientists agree: there are no conclusive findings yet. No conclusive findings, just some disturbing ones. Although a PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to your child, no one really knows how the postconsumer plastics that escape the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The accidental experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing.
“Holy Christ, Ted!” Pallister exclaims while I’m rummaging around among the drift-net floats. “We’re going to have to find some clearings for the helicopter!”
Last week, Pallister contacted a helicopter pilot in Homer, who’d assured him that timber companies regularly airlift logs out of forests as dense as this. So long as GoAK loaded the debris into Super Sacks, and so long as the weather wasn’t too foul, the forest would pose no problem. Super Sacks are giant, white, rip-proof plastic bags, the size and shape of a balloonist’s gondola, that the shipping and construction industries use to sling cargo—up to four thousand pounds of it—through the air. Peering into the canopy of branches, imagining the airlift, Pallister has his doubts. My gaze follows his. As the spruce trees rise, they seem to draw into a twiggy funnel at the distant end of which is a gray asterisk of sky.
EUREKA
That night eating halibut tacos around the campfire I learned that the seven Floatees on display aboard the Johnita II weren’t the only ones GoAK had collected in the previous two weeks; others had been secreted away in backpacks and duffel bags, destined in most cases for the eBay auction block, where they could fetch, rumor had it, anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred. Nor were toys the only items mentioned in Beachcombers’ Alert! that the currents had delivered to Gore Point. Hockey gloves had been found. So had a computer monitor. So had numerous toddler-size Nike sports sandals, a shipment of which had fallen overboard in 2003. Gore Point was a driftological mother lode, and yet—aside from Michael Armstrong, a loyal follower of Curtis Ebbesmeyer who the next morning would be returning to Homer with a duffel of derelict treasures—no one besides me seemed particularly interested in the riddles the tides had written with flotsam and jetsam on Gore Point’s windward shore.
No room for us aboard the Johnita II, Pallister and I retired that night to the Opus—he sleeping astern, atop the engine hatch, mendicantstyle, without a blanket or pillow; me in the V-berth, which was a kind of crawl space, small as a pup tent, inside the bow. The V-berth was where Pallister’s boys would sleep on hunting trips when they were young, all three of them, snuggled in there like cubs in a den. It was padded with a thin foam mattress, and furnished with flannel blankets, and cozy as could be. There was a little reading light, and fishing rods velcroed to the bulwarks. Going to sleep, I felt the way I used to feel camping in the backyard as a kid.
Late in the night, a storm blew up. A big swell came rolling in from the Pacific. The waves sloshed and slapped against the plywood hull all around me, and the little boat banged and thumped and knocked against the yacht. Waking in the brief predawn dark, I felt more like Jonah tempest-tossed on the Mediterranean than a kid in a tent. I assumed that this was what it was usually like, sleeping in a V-berth in the maritime wilderness. The next morning the skies were mostly clear, the waves mostly calm. That, Pallister told me when I boarded the Johnita II, was one of the roughest nights at sea he could remember.
After breakfast, Cliff Chambers, having delivered his shipment of inferior babes, prepared to ferry the previous rotation of volunteers back to Homer. As the Patriot was about to raise anchor, Chambers’s silent, ponytailed deckhand stripped down to a pair of black bikini briefs, climbed onto the starboard rail and did something astonishing.
With Pallister, Leiser, Raynor, the boys, and me looking on from the Johnita II, the deckhand balanced on the Patriot’s starboard rail as if at the tip of a d
iving board, arched up onto the balls of his feet, raised his arms into a wedge, and plunged fingers first—a pale, headlong flash—into the frigid, bottle-green lagoon. Pallister, Leiser, and Raynor shook their heads and jeered. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Pallister said. “But I don’t think he knew very much about boats the way he was yanking on that Evinrude.” The boys and I clapped and whooped. The deckhand surfaced, dog-paddled around to the ladder mounted on the Patriot’s stern, pulled himself aboard, and, without comment or a smile or a bow or any other acknowledgment of the derision and admiration with which his astonishing dive had been received, shook his long hair, flinging droplets around in the sun. Moments later, the Patriot departed, Pallister disappeared belowdecks with a toolbox, and the rest of us headed off to Gore Point’s windward shore.
“It was a few feet down, buried under all sorts of stuff,” Raynor said, beaming with pride, when I came running. He was sitting on a log way back in the forest, his T-shirt tucked into his jeans, his jeans tucked into his boots. There was something prim about him. For an outdoorsman, he was surprisingly well kept. After two weeks in the wilderness, his hair was miraculously short-cropped. Perched beside him on the log was his unearthed prize, a hollow plastic beaver. “Must have been there for years,” he said. How many years—fifteen, ten, six—was impossible to say.
Although I, like Pallister, am no oceanographer, it occurred to me that here was a flaw in Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s scientific method. In the data that the Orbisons and other beachcombers collected, Ebbesmeyer scried oceanic patterns. The Orbisons found more toys in some years—1992, 1994, 1999, 2002, and 2004—than in others. Those peak years, Ebbesmeyer reasoned, must correspond with the laps the toys were taking around the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre, and their laps must correspond, he postulated further, with the gyre’s orbital period. Therefore, the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre must complete a revolution “about every three years.”
Never mind that the intervals in the Orbisons’ records were erratic. Some peak years had occurred two years apart, some five years apart. Averaging the intervals to “about three years” didn’t exactly seem scientifically precise. Now, at Gore Point, I’d discovered something else fuzzy about Ebbesmeyer’s logic: the date of Ted Raynor’s latest discovery—July 16, 2007—indicated nothing about when this particular beaver had washed up. All it indicated was that on this date, today, a foul-mouthed, pit-bull-owning, surprisingly well-groomed nature lover had come along and liberated that beaver from the wrack. The dates of the Orbisons’ discoveries were similarly ambiguous. Tyler Orbison, a digger, had chiseled toys from ice, excavated them from beneath pebbles and jackstraw and sand. Ebbesmeyer’s data, in other words, had been corrupted by happenstance.
By the time Raynor started hollering about his discovery, his voice echoing through the woods, in that strange way that voices echo through woods, glancing off tree trunks, perhaps, muted by all the rustling forest noises, I’d made a discovery of my own. GoAK’s labors, I’d discovered, were even more Herculean than I’d imagined. Cleaning up debris turns out to be slow, mind-numbing, back-straining work, especially if, but not only if, you happen to be recovering from a microdiscectomy. Trying my best to obey my doctor’s orders, I’d sit down atop a pile of debris and shovel everything in reach into a garbage bag emblazoned with the sunflower logo of BP. When nothing remained in reach, I’d move over a little and start shoveling again. The other members of GoAK’s crew worked all around me, several yards apart, some sitting, some stooping and rising, gleaners harvesting surreal produce—plastic gourds, fungi of foam. Even more than gleaners, what they resembled were rag-and-bone pickers, as nineteenth-century trash scavengers were known. All over the developing world, rag-and-bone pickers are still at work, some of them in colossal landfills from which they somehow scrape a living, and in which they seek out not rags and bones but plastic and aluminum recyclables.
Not all Asian flotsam and jetsam washes out from landfills, however. Now illegal in most of the developed world, the dumping of trash at sea is still widespread in the developing world—Africa, Latin America, Asia. Go to the collector beaches of Europe and you’ll find great payloads of flotsam and jetsam originating from the coasts of the Caribbean. Here then is another way in which plastic pollution resembles airborne pollutants: the developed world burned fossil fuels indiscriminately while their economies were maturing and only belatedly decided to mitigate the environmental impacts. So go the coal plants, so goes pelagic plastic. You might then be inclined to condemn those developing countries. But for which markets do Chinese coal plants burn? To whom do we send our virtuous recyclables? We Americans consume and throw away far more per capita than does the developing world. In the early years of the new millennium, shipping containers that delivered Asian goods to American shores often returned carrying postconsumer waste—recycled paper, plastics, metals ferrous and nonferrous. For a while there, postconsumer waste was California’s leading export. The Chinese market for raw material had by 2005 driven the value of polyethylene water bottles up to around twenty-five cents a pound—piddling compared with what a castaway toy could supposedly fetch on eBay, but not chump change when you’re living, as the Filipino rag-and-bone pickers of Payatas do, on less than two dollars a day.
Out here on Gore Point, what to GoAK’s gleaners looked like an unsightly blight would have looked to a rag-and-bone picker, as to a driftologist, like the mother lode. Then, too, on Gore Point, the gleaning, though back straining, was far more pleasant than it would have been in a Filipino landfill. Here, the weather was lovely and the cool forest smelled mostly of sea breezes and spruce needles and damp earth and tree falls undergoing their slow-motion combustion, returning to dust. Then too, the paid rag-and-bone pickers here were earning a hundred times what the average Filipino earns.
Every now and then someone would find something remarkable—a bottle with Arabic writing on it, a toddler-size sports sandal, a Russian vacuum tube—and hold it up for the rest of us to see, before pocketing it or, more often, dropping it into a bag with the other trash. When you stepped back to examine your progress, the difference would hardly be noticeable. But the hours and bags added up, and by late in the day, it was clear that the last of the Gore Point midden heap would be bagged by nightfall.
I was beginning to despair of finding a Floatee myself, and the more I dug and shoveled and gleaned, the more intense my determination grew. I kept seeing them: There! Under that drift-net float, something green! A frog? I’d inevitably unearth a disappointment: an empty bottle of dish detergent, say, or yet another float, embossed, often as not, with Asian characters. To make my defeat taste all the more bitter, when I recounted the legend of the bath toys lost at sea to the North Slope volunteers, one of them breezily announced that she’d found a plastic duck a few hours back and dropped it thoughtlessly into her bag. I considered trying to locate and tear open the bag in question. By then we’d piled up dozens of them. It was hopeless. That duck was lost. Who knew what other archaeological treasures, and what other driftological data, and what other stories those bags contained? It was a shame really that, if GoAK succeeded in its rescue mission, all these artifacts would end up along with banana peels and coffee grounds in the Homer landfill before an archaeologist of the ordinary had a chance to examine them illimitably long.
Late in the afternoon, my luck turned. Squatting amid the prickly leaves and stalks of devil’s club, plucking kernels of Styrofoam out of the humus, I spotted something. Was it? The familiar tail? Teardrop shape, waffled in cross-hatched lines? I bent back the devil’s club with the toe of my rubber boot. Sure enough, there, bleached pale, perched atop dead leaves in the shadow of a spherical fishing float, was a plastic beaver. Not a duck, but good enough.
By dinnertime all that remained on that forest floor were a few sprinklings of Styrofoam—“bear messes,” Ted Raynor called them. “You can see the huge rake marks they make with their claws,” he told me. “They find something with any sort of smell at all, they jus
t rip into it, they just”—he pretended to be a bear—“raaar! The Styrofoam messes we find it’s always bears. Raaar! ”
Our day’s hard labor done, we climbed, some of us less nimbly than others, over the slippery, shifting bone-white logs of the driftwood berm, built a fire on the windward beach, and gathered around it to celebrate. A case of Milwaukee’s Best and another of Molson emerged from the secret stash. Out on the water the salmon were jumping. Pallister’s three sons fetched fishing rods and stood at the edge of the surf, casting and reeling in, until one of them snared a dolly, not as tasty as a silver, but it, too, was good enough.
They gutted it, wrapped it in foil, and baked it among the cinders “barbarian style,” and when it was done, they passed the foil package around, and we plucked out steaming morsels of the pink flesh with our fingers, and when there was none left we cooked hot dogs on sharpened alder branches, and Ted Raynor gave a speech about making Mother Nature happy. We’d restored this awesome place to the way Mother Nature had intended it, he said. Although I found his pantheism sentimental and suspect, the mood of beery triumph was infectious. Far, far away, in the lower forty-eight, green consumers were shopping for carbon offsets and energy-efficient lightbulbs. Meanwhile, this merry band of rugged eco-mercenaries or conservationists or remediation contractors or whatever the hell they were had ridden out into the wilderness to do battle against pollution, and the impact of their actions could be reckoned in tons.
