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World Oceans Day and You…th!

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Leaping humpback whale

Breaching Humpback whale.
Photo: Ocean Conservancy

Friday is WORLD OCEANS DAY 

This year’s theme:  “Youth: The Next Wave for Change”

Young people around the world are tuning in every day to the planet’s stunning and imperiled ocean ecosystems and how we connect to them all. Celebrating World Ocean’s Day, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) members are celebrating with programs and events (find one near you). 

Karumbe-Pintando Tortuga
Photo:Alejandro Fallabrino

My contribution to the DAY is sharing information about a critical ocean problem — plastics pollution. Maybe something here will spark you to spread info and ideas, change what you do, or where you devote time. There’s a lot here, but you can come back anytime, read more, follow the links. 

I’m lucky to live next to the Pacific Ocean. Today, as part of my volunteer job, I fed bull kelp to abalone and sea urchins in the intertidal display tank we have at our local light house.

Point Cabrillo Lightstation — State Historic Park
Mendocino, CA
Photo: Katy Pye

Intertidal display tank
Pt. Cabrillo Lightstation
Photo: Katy Pye

But you don’t have to live near the ocean to have the ocean in your life. You don’t even have to live near an aquarium. Go online — look at photos, listen to wave sounds, or watch a video, like this one, where marine biologist, Wallace “J” Nichols, Phd, talks about “Blue Mind –how your brain gets when you’re at the ocean. Then, get off the computer and go outside. Why? Because studies show our brains on ANY nature change for the better. So cool! We knew that, right?


Now that you’re relaxed and mellow from the lovely pictures, let’s dive into the problem.

PLASTICS AND THE OCEAN GYRES

Plastics — all kinds, sizes, shapes, and chemical composition end up as garbage. We know that much. At the Turtle Island Restoration Network “BlueMind” symposium last month I was reminded all oceans are “downstream.” Everything we do to our land, our waterways, even our air, ends up in an ocean — likely more than one, depending on the currents.

The 5 ocean gyres.
NOAA map

A lot of plastic and other human junk has stalled into a floating “island” called the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the North Pacific gyre (or current). The mess twice the size of Texas. More garbage and tiny, broken down plastic bits are showing up in the other gyres, too, swirling in the equivalent of a plastic alphabet soup. Watch Wallace J. Nichol’s TEDx video on the garbage patch and rethinking our oceans and lives in exciting ways.

Soup-of-plastic-Charles Moore

Plastics Soup
Photo:Charles Moore

“The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.”

—Commandant Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

The scale and cost of cleanup is beyond doable. But there is a way to slow things down. Reduce the waste stream. Hello–that means us. Polar bears don’t drink bottled water or use styrofoam plates and plastic forks at their picnics.

A Few Factoids:

For an extensive look (with astounding photos) of the plastic waste problem worldwide, go to Coastal Care.org. Definitely worth it, but a caution, it may change your life.

The average American generates 600 lbs. of garbage/year. Half is synthetic and ends up in landfills or “recycled.”

Examples elsewhere — an estimated 150,000 tons of marine plastic detritus washed up on Japanese beaches in 2009. Same year. India. 300 tons in one day. Think of Hawaii as unspoiled? Not all of it.

Hawaii-shores-EPA

Hawaii shores
Photo: EPA

Yamuna River, New Delhi-see the children?
Photo: Manan Vastsyayana

Plastic bags make up 25% of urban waste that ends in our creeks. Which run downhill — i.e. into an ocean.

plastic-bags-in-ocean-EPA

Plastic bags in the ocean and on corral
Photos: US EPA

Plastic bottle caps likely don’t go in the curbside bin; they need special recycling. Avena stores and Whole Foods will take them, or go here to find a drop-off place near you.

About 8% of the plastics we use are “recovered.” 50% to landfills, the rest is re-manufactured or “disappears.” In 2009, the EPA estimated only 31% of all water bottles hit the recycle bin. Is buying bottled water a little nuts, considering the U.S. has the cleanest water on the planet? Cities spend bazillions of dollars every year ensuring our drinking water (you remember, the stuff out of the tap) is safe to drink. Don’t like the taste, get an inexpensive faucet or counter-top filter. Okay, I’m preaching, but really!

“Downcycling” plastics is recycling them into other things like toys, tables, park benches, pillow and coat insulation fibers, etc. Good news is about 1,800 American businesses handle or reclaim post-consumer plastics collected at your curb. Bad news?  These re-manufactured products can’t be recycled when worn out. They go in a landfill.

A Berkeley, CA Ecology Center report says it costs more in labor and energy to recycle than it does to reduce production and use in the first place. From what I’ve read, it’s a lot cleaner for the environment, too.

Plastics take hundreds of years, or more, to break down in a landfill.

The Marine Conservancy estimates decomposition rates of most plastic debris found on coasts stack up like this:

  • Foamed plastic cups: 50 years
  • Plastic beverage holder: 400 years
  • Disposable diapers: 450 years
  • Plastic bottle: 450 years
  • Fishing line: 600 years

Let’s back up to the point about plastics production and source reduction

All plastics increase our dependency on fossil fuels (especially natural gas) and create seriously toxic pollution to air, land, and water during manufacturing. Read Diane Wilson’s book for an inside view of what plastic production can do to people and the environment at the source. It’s a powerful story about social injustice and a load of motivation to change our ways. 

Toxics escape from plastics in landfills, bottles tossed along roadsides, even the teeny, tiny chunks floating in bays and oceans. Plastics pollutants are believed to cause hard-to-diagnose, and easy to dismiss, health problems in living organisms. Including people. Especially the young.

Marine mammals and fish die horribly from entanglement or eating plastic that looks like food.

Seal-entangled-NOAA

Seal entangled in discarded net
Photo: NOAA

50% turtle 50% plastic-

50% plastic, 50% turtle. Alejandro Fallabrino-Uruguay

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Start simple. A great site, 5 Gyres, offers a promise you can make. Can you add others ideas to the five here?

Make the 5 Gyres Plastic Promise 

I promise to:

Bring my own water bottle, mug, utensils and reusable

Say ‘No Plastic Straw Please” when I dine out.

Buy what’s in the least amount of plastic packaging.

Pick up 5 pieces of plastic pollution I see littered whenever I’m out.

Engage family, businesses and co-workers to make this promise too.

Download a plastics recycling info card for your purse or wallet.

National Geograhic has 10 Things You Can Do To Help the Oceans.

My favorite shopping bag

“If I find one more stinkin’ plastic bag in my ocean…”
my favorite shopping bag by Eco Maniac Co.

I’ve trained myself to the cloth-shopping-bags-in-the-car thing, I’ve bought reusable veggie/fruit bags or reuse plastic ones — some still stick to my fingers no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Now I’m paying attention to what I pick up when I shop. What’s it made of? How is it packaged? Is there an alternative with less or no outside wrap (bulk bin)? Most of all, do I really need it? That’s a tough one, sometimes. I do more charity “gifts” on birthdays and holidays — no more gift wrap to throw away and MOST of my family and friends still love me! Giving a few bucks to plant trees in urban neighborhoods is good for neighbors, cleans the air, AND helps oceans!

I LOVE podcasts. Thank You Ocean is a way to keep up with ocean science through its short news stories. Yesterday’s was on World Oceans Day. Other recent ones feature Wallace “J” Nichols talking about sea turtles and Blue Mind. Or read the Santa Cruz Sentinel article from May 29, 2012 on Dr. Nichols. 

And how cool is this? There’s an Android “Marine Debris Tracker” app for people in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina who want to help track marine debris washing up on their beaches. The project is a joint venture between NOAA and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative (SEA-MDI) out of the University of Georgia Faculty of Engineering. I want one for California! Update: use the app anywhere in the world.

Also, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program has a 1 page download explaining garbage patches. Think about what you can do to reduce the load–seriously. Print it out and pass it along.

My daughter is a big fan of singer Jack Johnson. Now I’m impressed. He made sure his 2010-11 “To the Sea” concert reduced its environmental footprint.  His article about it is on Ocean Conservancy’s web page, or go to All At Once for the figures.

Here’s wishing you a fabulous, Blue Mind, World Oceans Day!  Post a comment on how you’re planning to celebrate our magnificent gift from our big, blue marble — and your gift back at it. Peace.

Kids Fight for Atmosphere as a “Public Trust”

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“THE STATE HAS A SOVEREIGN OBLIGATION OVER ALL EARTH AND AIR WITHIN ITS DOMAIN.”    U.S. Supreme Court 1907

Creative Commons photo Rachel CarsonIn 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, I was eleven, the same age as Jamie-Lynn Butler now. I was thirteen, like Glori Die Filippone, when Ms. Carson lost her fight with cancer. As a kid, the “environment” was school, summer camp, or my room. The only battle lines I drew were those separating my parents from me. It took more than a decade before I got that “the environment” wasn’t about my tiny world view. But recalling my youthful ignorance or feeling badly when I slack off recycling are empty gestures.

CC Scales_of_justice

Seventeen year-old iMatter Movement founder, Alec Loorz, and the other young people at the core of the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the federal government and 49 states, have taken charge and inspire awe. They’re not phrase-makers.

Trust litigant Nelson Kanuk watches winter come later every year, threatening his family’s subsistence-based life in Alaska. Twenty-three year-old Montana farmer, John Thiebes, risks his economic future, making his farm a climate-friendly guinea pig. “Climate change,” he says, “is the defining issue of my generation and the generations to follow.”

Alec created the iMatter Movement because he saw what we are doing to counteract climate change isn’t big enough or fast enough. What’s needed is a politically and legally solid engine to drive change. Through the “Trust” lawsuit these powerful young souls face a fight for the environment much bigger than the earlier ones of my generation. I’m ashamed, after such a good start in the 1970s with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and other regulations, we let so much progress on the side of the environment slide under the corporate and individual “can’t live without it” bus. As 65 year-old Huffington Post energy and climate policy contributor, William S. Becker, (“Children v. Dirty Business,”) put it:

I must admit some embarrassment that our children now feel obligated to face off against the giants of industry and government and all their lawyers. These kids are stepping in where their elders in Washington and the international community have feared to tread.

Global fossil carbon emissions 1800–2007

Global fossil carbon emissions 1800–2007

The aim of the lawsuit is simple — our federal and state governments have a mandated responsibility to protect the environment. The suit asks for a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change. Planning. We do it all the time. The atmosphere, the kids claim, like the water we drink and air we breathe, is a “public trust” that belongs to everyone. What a thought. 

What’s Next? Who’s Playing?

In March this year, under District Court approval, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM, “one of the largest fossil fuel lobbying groups in the country”) and five other industry groups joined federal lawyers, asking the kid’s case be thrown out. Most states are following that lead. NAM’s lawyers argue industry has a legal interest (translate, a right) to “freely emit CO2” and that limiting greenhouse gasses would “limit or eliminate their businesses.” May 11th, 2012 a judge will side one way or the other. The efforts of these brave young people will either suffocate in a Washington, D.C. courtroom or breathe the fresh air of hope. 

We can’t vote. We can’t afford lobbyists. We can only trust that our leaders will make good decisions on our behalf.  But when they make decisions like favoring oil company profits over our safety, then we need to hold them accountable. — Alec Loorz
CC troubled nature phase II

Troubled Nature, Phase II

Go here to watch five short and moving videos of the Trust kids mentioned in the article. Five more will be posted at that site, one a month.

And here to learn more about the movement, the lawsuit, donate, or sign a petition to the Obama administration.

Elizabeth, meet Winter.

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On Earth Day, or any day, no story captures better the lows and highs of putting yourself out there to make a difference. Click the title below to read about Winter.

Winter Slade, 7-Year-Old, Raises Thousands For Wildlife Preservation After Being Told Her Idea Was ‘Stupid’

Newfoundland Pine Marten

Newfoundland Pine Marten-threatened…
photo: Earth Rangers and the Nature Conservancy of Canada

Way back in the early 1990s, my daughter Erin was a little older than Winter when she started a local chapter of “Kid’s for Saving Earth,” then sponsored by Target Stores. I remember how excited she was rounding up her friends for their first meeting. They wrote letters to President Clinton about saving elephants, learned about garbage during a  “dump” visit, and how to cook in a solar oven from an ex-Peace Corps friend of mine.

Luckily, no one called these kids stupid. Winter’s passion for the Pine Martens and what her mom, Michelle, did to turn hurt into action will stick with Winter longer than the ignorance of a few adults. This young girl is going places! The Pine Martens even sent her a thank you!

Kemp's ridley by Katy Pye 2010

Kemp’s ridley hatchling
Photo: Katy Pye 2010

This post is the official launch of the website and blog supporting my young adult novel, Elizabeth’s Landing. The main character Elizabeth, like Winter, finds a creature, the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, that snags her heart, big time. Also, like Winter, Elizabeth and her ideas to help save the turtles don’t always get the support she expects.

The site has lots of information (and links) about the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, who they are, where they travel, what they struggle against, and the folks working to save them from extinction. Kids are revved up and involved in all sorts of ways. I’ll be posting their photos and stories. I’ll also post about kids making a difference in the lives of other critters, places, and people. If you come across a story that moved you to act, pass it along. If you’re a kid or young adult working for positive change in the world, drop a note in the comment box and tell us what you’re up to.

So, brava, Winter! Brava, and all the best, Michelle, in your fight with cancer. Thank you for caring and acting.

Peace.

Elizabeth’s Landing is on the Internet highway hunting up an agent. You’ll find more about the book on the Home page.

Thanks to my husband, Robert for telling me about Winter’s story on Earth Day.