A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a
plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins
are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Published: November 2006 [ Updated: March 2009 ]
Photo: Courtesy of Matt Kramer/Algalita Marine
research Foundation Fate can take strange forms, and so
perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s
purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800
miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning:
Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of
Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had
altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the
curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the
eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific
subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats
purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors
called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the
tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with
prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling
vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that
lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40
miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he
possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba
diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the
ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot
of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were
ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as
what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an
ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked
bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe
his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic
crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth
and swapped it for a landfill.
How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What
did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn
that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire
implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the
area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore
realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed
and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a
purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the
21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.
“Everybody’s plastic, but I love
plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a
six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the
solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is
surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and
vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas,
guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the
house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air
earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in
a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business
here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped
hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline
above it.
Article continued at:
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.php
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