by Donovan Hohn
On our last day of sampling, sails raised again, beating north toward the Big Island, we had better luck, or worse luck depending on your point of view: lots of granulated plastic in our samples. Moore, elbows propped on winches, face inches above the sampling bowl, studied the contents like a clairvoyant inspecting tea leaves: “About ten pieces in there, plus some fishing line. A velella baby. Actually, scratch that, I can see a good twenty pieces in there even without looking under a microscope.” He fished around with a teaspoon, poked around with tweezers, plucked out a black ball the size of a jujube. “Hard to tell whether that’s a nurdle.”
Our third trawl of the day brought up more plastic still. “Yeah, this has got all the stuff we look for,” said Moore. “Some big stuff. Nurdles.” He plucked an unmistakable nurdle out with his tweezers. “Slightly less than a gyre sample, but this is definitely the worst place we’ve found around Hilo so far. I think we can definitely say that the debris is statistically associated with the plankton. More plankton, more debris. Certainly looks that way.” In the next trawl, we collected even more plastic.
Success brought about a change in mood, futility giving way to some moderate sense of accomplishment. Amy Young, who’d recently acquired a waterproof camera that she was notably proud of, went around snapping photos. She asked me to give her my best “adventure pose.”
The Big Island came into view: first the clouds that ring the volcanic peaks, then the dark green-black line of land on the horizon slowly growing into cliffs, and then at the edge of the cliffs a row of figures—fishermen with poles, dropping their lines hundreds of feet off the sheer rock into the ocean. As we approached, Moore luffed the sails and announced a swim call. We were to go snorkeling, looking for “hand samples,” semibuoyant flotsam and jetsam suspended in the water column below the surface. On the Greenpeace website I’d seen footage of Moore doing this, swimming around in the Eastern Garbage Patch with a dive mask on, pointing out the derelict objects around him—a toothbrush, a briefcase, a plastic shopping bag. I decided that it would be humiliating and unprofessional of me to sit the swim call out.
After three days in close quarters a camaraderie had developed among the members of the Alguita’s crew. I’d ended up confessing my fear of sharky waters. Young, who wants to be a scuba scientist, doing her fieldwork underwater, admitted that she, too, was afraid to swim out here, in blue water. Swimming on reefs, she didn’t mind; in the shallows of reefs the sharks tend to be of the smaller, fish-eating variety, and you can see them coming. It’s in blue water, near rocky coasts, that the sealeaters, who out of hunger or confusion become man-eaters, tend to remove the knobby limbs of scientists enjoying a swim call.
When he goes swimming or snorkeling, Moore wears, in addition to flippers and a mask, red trunks and a shiny blue long-sleeved shirt that together give him the aspect of an aging superhero—Snorkel Man, Captain Plastic. He plunged in flippers first. Most of the crew, Ernst, Hungate, and Pool, quickly followed, outfitted with snorkels and flippers and little green nets of the sort with which people remove dead guppies from fish tanks. Sam was at the helm. Young and I stood on deck, panicking, she in her bikini, me pasty and pale, flippered and masked, in my red trunks. Young, overcoming her fears, made the plunge. Left with no other choice, I followed.
Then I was in the deep ocean, underwater, hair swirling. Bubbles bubbled before my breath-fogged mask. I’d read somewhere that to prevent goggle fogging you’re supposed to spit on the plastic before jumping in. Too late for that, and if I opened my mask now, the water would rush in, and I might well lose a contact lens. Better to keep the mask on and peer through the fog. Everything hued to blue except my pasty limbs and the little green net I clutched in my right hand and the colorful swimwear and luminescent limbs of my shipmates. In no time I was sucking ocean through my snorkel and commenced to hyperventilate. Hyperventilation tends to interfere with snorkeling. Hyperventilate with a snorkel on and you tend to snorkel down big mouthfuls of the Pacific. So research has found. Upon surfacing, upon blasting the water from the snorkel, peeping over the waves lapping at my mask, recovering my bearings, I splashed madly—in the sort of way that, I’d read, tends to attract sharks, whose sensory organs are well-attuned to the panic of seals—for the Alguita’s swim ladder. 19
I hauled myself back out, flippers flopping, onto the aft deck, water dripping from my red trunks onto the rubber mats. There, safe, taking slow deep breaths, making sure that my wet trunks weren’t clinging to my anatomy in an embarrassing way, plucking the cloth away from my anatomy in the way men do, I felt more ridiculous and more ashamed than ever. And so, having caught my breath, having fetched my little green net from where I’d dropped it while clambering aboard, having spat onto my mask, I gave it another go.
The water met my flippers. My face met the water. Here I was again, overboard. Mask on, no longer foggy, snorkel in my mouth, no longer full of water, I decided to take a look below, and what I saw made me hyperventilate again—no sharks, but nothing else either, no plastic bags, no semibuoyant sneakers, no fish, just blue water shading away toward dark, unfathomable depths. Swimming in the tropics feels, Moore had said, “like you’re swimming in the sky.” An apt comparison that in him inspires a kind of reverence and in me, gazing down, a kind of swimsuit-pissing vertigo. Who the hell but a suicide wants to go swimming in the sky? Again I splashed hysterically over to the Alguita’s swim ladder and scampered—you might think that it would be impossible to scamper in flippers, but I can attest otherwise—back aboard, and stayed there.
Moore and the rest flippered merrily about with their little green nets, but they, too, came up empty-handed. Moore again seemed disappointed that we hadn’t found the miniature garbage patch he’d expected to find—no suitcases, no toothbrushes, no grains of plastic visible to the naked eye. “Next year we’ll come at it from the south,” he said, on board, toweling off lustily. There was still some spirit in him. “Maybe the countercurrent here acts as a barrier.” Truth be told, I was disappointed, too; having hunted for plastic on the high seas, I’d found it, but the sprinkling of polymers that had turned up in our sampling jars fell far short of the maelstrom of garbage, the Sargasso of the imagination—refrigerator doors, basketballs, sneakers—I’d been dreaming of. “People always ask me for pictures of the Garbage Patch,” Moore had told me. “You can’t take pictures of it.” You have to watch for it, and trawl for it.
After toweling off, we raised the mainsail, and the staysail, and the spinnaker, and—“Tupelo Honey” playing on the sound system, Young playing her bongos, Ernst his guitar, Hungate playing his long blond hair, I standing by the mast, striking adventure poses, adventure shorts and adventure shirt fluttering in the breeze, Moore standing on his captain’s chair, head, now hatless, poking from the hatch—we ran before the wind. It was dusk again when we motored into Radio Bay.
THE PASSION OF THE ALBATROSS
Looking down at the Pacific from fifteen thousand feet, on a flight from Hilo to Honolulu, I kept remembering what it felt like to be out there, down there, swimming in deep water, gazing doubtfully and fearfully into the bottomless ambiguities, my vision obscured by the foggy snorkel mask, fishing in vain with my dainty green net. How to reconcile the vertiginous emptiness I’d glimpsed underwater with what I’d seen in Karla McDermid’s lab and Pallister’s paradise? Or with that photo Ebbesmeyer had shown me back in Sitka—of 252 plastic tidbits extracted from a single albatross cadaver. That photograph was taken, I’d since learned, by a photographer named Susan Middleton and appears in Archipelago, a collection of zoological portraits that Middleton and another photographer, David Liittschwager, made on a tour of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, the remote volcanic chain to which Laysan Island belongs.
Both Liittschwager and Middleton trained with the fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and his influence on their work is easy to see. Instead of depicting animals in their habitats, or in stylized versions of their habitats, the customary approach of wildli
fe artists since Audubon, Liittschwager and Middleton place their subjects before a white or black backdrop, light them with strobes that vivify the colors, and shoot what Liittschwager describes as “close-up, formal portraits”—a technique borrowed, he admits, from commercial advertising. Their stated aim in Archipelago was to “create an intimate connection between the subject and the viewer,” but to my eye what their portraits mostly do is abstract and aestheticize the tropical sea creatures and seabirds they portray. Shot like advertisements, the portraits look like advertisements, and the connection they create resembles the one that advertising creates—more seductive than intimate—between product and consumer. The protected flora and fauna of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago aren’t for sale, of course; what is for sale is yet another vision—colorful, desirable, pleasing to the eye, often cute, since the photographers make a point of choosing juvenile specimens—of the natural world.
If one had any doubt about the thoughts with which Middleton and Liittschwager burden the beasts they portray, one only need read the text that accompanies their images. On Seal Kittery, a tiny volcanic atoll, “astonished” by the sight of an endangered native plant, Middleton experienced the ecological equivalent of an epiphany. “I recognized the same sensation I experienced when I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time,” she writes. Her images of the epiphanic plant, Solanum nelsonii, are postcards brought back from nature’s Louvre. “On Laysan,” where human beings are not the dominant species, “my soul felt nourished,” Middleton writes.
It’s not that I don’t admire these photographs. I admire them the way I admire portraits of the saints—with the aesthetic appreciation of an apostate. I’m grateful for the glimpse that Liittschwager and Middleton give me of a lipspot moray eel swirling like a flamenco dancer through a crepe cloud of pink sea lettuce. But admiration is different from idolatry, and such photographs create no more intimacy between me and their subjects than the Mona Lisa creates between me and Lisa Gherardini, the sixteenth-century Florentine noblewoman who is the ostensible subject of Leonardo’s painting. Far more than by Middleton’s captions, I’m convinced by Susan Sontag, who in her famous book-length essay On Photography writes, “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, an approach which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.”
Two photographs in Archipelago are on their way to becoming environmental icons. The first shows the necropsied cadaver of a six-month-old Laysan albatross named Shed Bird from whose downy breast spills a slimy casserole of bottle caps and cigarette lighters and unidentifiable plastic shards. The second is the one Ebbesmeyer showed me in Sitka, of the contents of that slimy casserole, arranged, carefully, artfully, onto the photographers’ white backdrop—a “mosaic of death,” the caption in their book calls it.
National Geographic published the two pictures of Shed Bird in 2005, and Greenpeace has since used them in an ad campaign captioned with the slogan “How to starve to death on a full stomach.” Shed Bird is now a poster child, and it’s easy to see why. The images are not merely powerful, or shocking; they’re persuasively accusatory. It’s as though the photographers had sailed off into the mists of our collective obliviousness and returned with forensic evidence. Look, dear consumer, these two pictures seem to say; look at what you’ve done, look where what you throw away ends up. Or as Charlie Moore likes to say, “There is no ‘away.’ The ocean is away.” Shed Bird is away.
Nearly everyone I’ve asked about the impact of plastics pollution—oceanographers, environmentalists, policy makers, plastics executives—invokes these images of ornithological death-by-plastic. “You’ve seen the pictures of the seabirds?” Pallister had asked me while we were towing the Opus down to Resurrection Bay. Several months before, after taking a tour of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, First Lady Laura Bush had been asked the same question by a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin: “You’ve seen the picture of what came out of one little bird?”
“That’s one bird from Susan Middleton’s book,” Laura Bush replied.
When I spoke to Benjamin Grumbles, an assistant administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water, he mentioned the First Lady’s concern for those “ocean birds dying or having died because they were eating some toys or other types of plastics.”
“We’ve all seen the pictures of the impacts on sea life,” said Sharon Kneiss, vice president of the products division of the American Chemistry Council. “You can’t help but be moved with concern. We’re citizens of the world, too. We don’t want to see that happen.”
The story goes that the First Lady took up the cause of marine conservation after seeing Liittschwager and Middleton’s photographs, and then persuaded her husband to take it up as well. In 2006, President Bush designated the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago and the surrounding 137,797 square miles of ocean a marine national monument, the highest level of environmental protection that the federal government can bestow. Next to no commercial activities are permitted within the monument’s bounds, not even tourism. You can only visit the place with government permission, and even then, to prevent bringing invasive stowaways with you, you must wear brand-new clothing that has been frozen for at least forty-eight hours. “For seabirds and sea life, this unique region will be a sanctuary for them to grow and to thrive,” Bush said at the signing ceremony. Waxing ecological about “the destructive effects of abandoned nets and other debris,” he called for “robust efforts to prevent this kind of debris from polluting our—polluting this sanctuary, this monument.”
Most environmental groups applauded the designation. Nevertheless, having watched the Bush administration roll out cynically titled policies like the Clear Skies Initiative, which in fact weakened emission controls, or the Healthy Forests Initiative, which gave the logging industry more access to national forests, Jon Coifman, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, was wary of the administration’s motives. “In the rare instances when they’ve done the right thing, it’s because the political cost has been nil,” Coifman told me. “There was no one fat and happy on the other side of it who had an obvious interest at stake.” Designating the monument was, in Coifman’s opinion, such an instance. After all, the territory is largely uninhabited, and the only people whose economic interests will suffer from the designation are a handful of unlucky fishermen. Still, even if the designation were politically expedient, who could complain? Said Coifman: “Whatever motive brings somebody to the table to do something good on the environment, big or small, terrific, welcome aboard, we need all the help we can get.” This would be the largest marine park in the world, after all, home to some seven thousand species, some of them, like the monk seal, seriously endangered, and the Laysan albatross, seriously threatened—though less threatened than when feathered hats were in fashion. As for the former president’s idyll of thriving and growing seabirds, and Greenpeace’s ad campaign (what unlikely allies!), there was, I learned a few days after disembarking from the Alguita, one small problem.
I went to Honolulu to meet with scientists who possessed firsthand knowledge of the Garbage Patch, hoping to learn whether or not they concurred with Moore’s findings and shared his alarm. Beth Flint’s reaction was fairly typical. A biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Flint has been for many years the person in charge of protecting the threatened seabirds of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago. “I suspect that you’ve seen some of those photos of the dead ones with all of the plastic in their guts,” she told me one morning in the conference room of a federal office building. “We find that when we take people up to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the debris is the most compelling thing they see—sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. They can’t tear their eyes away from it or think about any of the other issues because it’s so disturbing to them.”
To her it was disturbing too, but ambiguous. Wildlife biologists don’t
know for certain that plastic killed the albatross. The pathology is unclear. Did sharp shards perforate the intestines of fledglings? Sometimes. Did it obstruct the digestive tract or make a bird “starve to death on a full stomach,” as the Greenpeace campaign put it? Possibly. On the other hand, Flint speculated, albatrosses eat squid, and chitinous squid beaks are also impossible to digest. Furthermore, Flint, who clearly respects the animals she studies, is tired of reading that albatrosses mistake plastic for food. “That’s always the assumption: those stupid birds, they can’t tell a ham sandwich from a plastic bottle cap.” In fact, adult albatrosses seek out floating plastics because nutritious treats like barnacles tend to grow on them.
Despite these caveats, Flint still believed that all that plastic in the albatross diet was “clearly not good for them.” Were the toxins in and on plastics getting into the food chain? According to Flint, studies have confirmed that long-lived seabirds like albatrosses have “high contaminant burdens,” and they also have “plastic in their guts in pretty prodigious amounts,” but “it’s still all sort of circumstantial,” Flint said, and the greater dangers may be the invisible ones.
The greatest known threat to the albatross is commercial fishing. Adult birds will swoop down for a morsel and end up as “bycatch” on a longliner’s fishing hook. Or in the trawl fishery, said Flint, they’ll “collide with the third wire, the thing holding the trawl, and break their wings and die.” And if even one of its parents dies, a hungry fledgling back in the rookery will likely starve. Then there’s the golden crownbeard, an invasive plant that “displaces everything in its path,” and “becomes this impenetrable thicket so that birds can’t even get into their nests, and if they do manage to raise a chick, the chick is surrounded by thick, thick vegetation that cuts off the breeze.” Chicks overheat, dehydrate, and die, and “having a big gutful of plastic” probably makes dehydration all the more likely. So does global warming. Finally there’s the lead paint flaking off the derelict military compound at Midway, which it would take around $6 million to clean up—considerably less than we’re spending on marine debris. Listening to Flint catalog the plague of perils that face the Laysan albatross even there in that sanctuary where seabirds are supposed to thrive and grow, I was overcome by a sense of gloomy futility. Why bother with beach cleanups, or anti-littering campaigns, or plastic-bag bans, or bottle deposits, or any of the “robust efforts against marine debris” that we could possibly make? At least the future of the Laysan albatross wasn’t as dim as that of the Laysan duck, of which there are now only around 465 left; of Laysan albatrosses, by contrast, there remain 2.4 million.
