25 breathtaking places threatened by us.

Some may try to deny it, but by now there’s next to no doubt that global warming is having real, profound effects on the world we live in. Perhaps one of the most alarming changes is occurring in the world’s oceans and endangering islands with diverse ecosystems, rich cultures, and breathtaking, beautiful landscapes. Pacific island nations like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands have already come to terms with the irreversible nature of the crisis and are formulating long-term relocation strategies for their residents.

The islands pictured below have been identified as being highly at risk for the devastating consequences of climate change. Their beauty is a reminder that global action is needed now.

(above) Palau

Tuvalu

Antigua

St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands

Kiribati

Fernandina Island, Galapagos

St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Nevis

Bartholomew Island, Galapagos

Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Solomon Islands

Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia

Papua New Guinea

Maldives

Guam

Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia

Fiji

Nauru

Majuro, Marshall Islands

Tonga

Rabaul, Papua New Guinea

Lord Howe Island, Australia

Kauai, Hawaii

Norman Island, British Virgin Islands

Aitutaki, Cook Islands

SEE ALSO:

40 Gorgeous Photos of Europe

40 Gorgeous Photos of North America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Latin America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Asia

Karenjess jewelry is pulled from the sea and cast in reclaimed metals.

Karenjess says that when considering starting her own line, her ultimate dream was to cast shells from around the world in sterling silver and create simple, one-of-a-kind pieces that would carry a story of where they were found.

“Each shell is a reminder of that special place it came from and how precious our beaches are. I want to continue to explore the world and be inspired by Mother Nature and all her elements,” she says.

Based in Vancouver B.C., she is an active business member of the Surfrider Foundation’s Vancouver Chapter, and is dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s oceans, waves, beaches and mountains for all people, through conservation, activism, research and education.

We just love what she does with pretty shells.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

SeriesEnvironmental cleanup in the wake of Japan’s twin disasters. Part 4 in a special series.

A surreal and compelling mix of headlines (read: Royal weddings, Osama bin Laden) may be dominating this week’s news, but the unfolding events in Japan after the March earthquake and tsunami – compounded further by nuclear plant instability – continue. Among the many significant issues: all that garbage.

Nothing illustrates the growing glut of plastic in the ocean from land-based sources like a natural disaster. All of those bleach bottles, all of those candy wrappers, all ending up somewhere. Whether littered or properly disposed of, it doesn’t actually matter when natural forces manifesting in the ocean overcome the borders of sea and land. And rather than death by a thousands cuts (plastic litter and watershed trash from land), Japan’s tsunami unleashed a vast amount of debris virtually overnight into the Pacific. (To see how the theoretical path of the debris works over time, click on this link to view an animation.)

This figure exhibits the projected pathway of flotsam that entered the ocean after waves hit Japan on March 11, 2011.  The model is based on historical data from drift buoys pinging GPS locations in The North Pacific over several years. Image Credit: Nikolai Maximenko, International Pacific Research Center.

The garbage is coming.

Within about a year, garbage will start hitting Hawaii’s shores and the coast of California within three, before circulating back out again to Hawaii and adding to The North Pacific Garbage Patch where it will circulate in the gyre.

Initially, it is difficult to determine how much we’re talking about, but think of it this way: Imagine taking all the plastic for a couple of miles or more from several cities situated on a coastline, and sucking it into the ocean. Think about taking thousands of grocery stores full of plastic products, all those single-use yogurt cups and half and half containers, lifting them all at once, and throwing them into the ocean. Think about all the dumpsters. The reycling bins. The storage facilities. The freight containers. Interesting, if disheartening, California beach-combing is on the way.

University of Hawaii at Manoa‘s Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner created the model. (Full disclosure: Maximenko advises the non-profit I work for on our gyre expeditions to search for plastic pollution.) Modeling, as a science, is still a very difficult enterprise as so many vectors affect how flotsam will actually travel when at sea. But judging by the vast amounts of debris pulled out to sea by Japan’s tsunami, the ultimate impact will be significant.

Finding remnants of the waste three to five years from now, after it has traveled thousands and thousands of miles at sea, will remind us as a society that although the 24/7 news cycle might forget past tragedies, plastic is forever. And it will remind us of the legacy of our culture. 24/7.

Editor’s note: This is part 4 in a special series on plastic. Read part 3, part 2 and part 1.

Images: Official U.S. Navy photographs

ExclusiveThe voyage into the heart of the Atlantic gyre continues.

To make landfall in Uruguay, we’re dependent on our engine to propel our vessel through the windless areas of the open sea. But today, as we followed a line of garbage where we pulled out milk crates, buckets, and nondescript plastic garbage, we heard something terrible. The engine seized. Assessing, we determined that the gearbox had broken, rendering the engine useless. To fix this problem we’d need a machine shop, something one doesn’t have 1200 miles from land. The gearbox shaft extends to the propeller. When the propeller doesn’t spin, the boat doesn’t move forward. End of story.

So here I am, spinning slowly between swells on a becalmed sea with sails hanging, adrift in the South Atlantic with new thoughts on the definition of “the middle of nowhere.” Until wind, we wait, we sweat and we swim. The sea is so placid right now, we can watch small fragments of plastic on the surface floating by.

As Skip Dale donned Scuba gear to sort out the propeller shaft below Sea Dragon, I filmed from the water – the interaction between sea life and a fairly substantial ghost net (net bolus, net ball) we had happened upon just before the gearbox broke. Still under power when we discovered it, we had nearly missed it, and would have if it not for Simon’s spear. Yes, our South African artist crewmate, Simon, had brought a handcrafted, hand-fabricated spear on the expedition, the purpose of which had eluded me until now. Seeing it on the dock in Cape Town, I simply thought: hey, he’s an artist; this object is useless at sea, but it’s cool for photos. I could not have been more wrong. As I watched the bolus drift pass, Simon reared up, and like a Zulu warrior took a short running start and launched the spear from the stern. As if he’d done this a million times before, he hooked the net straight away (the design featured a barb so that it sticks whatever it speared), and he pulled it to the boat with a retrieval line, tied a line to it and then let it drift behind us.

A ghost net is a tangled mess of ropes and fishing nets that floats on the surface, kind of like an iceberg. From surface observations it appears small, but underwater it’s a massive ball that extends downward. Rope and fishing tackle are no longer made of natural fibers, having been replaced within the past 30 years by the non-biodegradable counterpart, polypropylene.

As I swam with the bolus, about 50-100 small fish took shelter under it. Three large Dorado orbited the smaller fish under the bolus and at one point I was able to get within a couple feet of them. Beautiful.

What’s bizarre about ghost nets is how many different kinds of ropes and netting materials comprise them. The ropes don’t necessarily come from the same source vessel, harbor, or watershed, but still somehow, in a great cosmic-drift-grind, they find each other out here, in the open ocean. Drifting through time and space, they conspire only to tangle together, tangle marine life, and slowly disintegrate in the sun, sending pollutant infused plastic fragments adrift in the ocean.

Simply touching this net-ball made a cloud of polypropylene dust explode into the water. I watched as the tiny fish just breathed right through it, unaware. As I hovered there, with Sea Dragon’s belly in the azure distance, I began to shudder to think about where I was, what I was doing and what I was seeing.

With a chill, I realized I was the first person on earth to shoot underwater video footage of a naturally occurring net bolus in the middle of the South Atlantic Gyre. It’s not a realization that fuels the ego, but one that stirs the senses as they rub up against the definitions of words like massive, horrific, unseen, random and sublime.

With modern technology, it’s often easy to forget you’re in the middle of the ocean – indeed a blue desert that encompasses 70 percent of the earth’s surface (only five percent of which has been explored). Yet here I was, having no idea that when I woke up this morning what awaited me in 15,000 feet of water.

Here I swam, untethered to anything, alone, observing bits of manufactured goods that once started out as oil in the ground. That oil was extruded from different sources, then refined at different refineries and shipped to different rope factories all over the world, sold, bought, lost only to one day collect here and be happened upon, quite by accident by our crew. And at this strange moment, in this nondescript patch of pure blue, I observe this entanglement as a sinister, toxic shelter for sea life drifting in a cerulean nether land. It’s like, as one crewmate said of our samples, finding a Twinkie in outer space.

Unfortunately, what we’ve confirmed now, in two separate expeditions, is that the Twinkies are everywhere.

Editor’s Note: This is part 13 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.

Images: Stiv Wilson

Plastic is everywhere. It’s littering our oceans, and even has its own homeland: a behemoth floating mass of plastic known as the Pacific Garbage Patch or, as Planet Green called it in an informative guest post, the “Oh My”¦What Have We Done!?” Scientists say it’s twice the size of Texas (that still state-of-the-art term for Big) and growing. Already aware of this? Well, how about this? The demand for recycled plastic far exceeds its availability. So yeah, maybe we ought to do some fishing.

Electrolux certainly thinks so, as it hits the high seas (all of them, in fact), to gather plastic and make vacuum cleaners. Yep. Vacuum cleaners from the sea. (I so bet you never experienced that sentence before. Probably won’t ever again.) They’re even calling it that. Kinda. The company’s “Vac from the Sea” program “aims to bring attention to the issue of plastic pollution and at the same time combat the scarcity of recycled plastics needed for making sustainable home appliances.”

“There are plastic islands, some several times the size of the state of Texas [See! Everyone loves to say that!], floating in our oceans,” says Cecilia Nord, Vice President, Floor Care Environmental and Sustainability Affairs, Electrolux. “Yet on land, we struggle to get hold of enough recycled plastics to meet the demand for sustainable vacuum cleaners. What the world needs now is a better plastic karma.”

Unfortunately, we’re all not going to be able to buy into the program, as they plan to only make a limited number of these suckers, which will be “put on display to decision makers and consumers as part of spreading the word.” The plastic debris will be “harvested” from the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic (which has its very own “patch,” recently fearlessly explored by one of our writers), and Mediterranean oceans, as well as the Baltic and North seas, by diving, fishing and scavenging. It’s hardly an assault on the mainland of that floating Texas, but it’s a start.

If you’re looking to get involved or follow the program’s progress, check out their blog and Facebook pages. Oh, and there’s a cool little video posted over at Crisp Green, too.

We’re approaching the part of Louisiana where land and water become indistinct. South of New Orleans, approaching Grand Isle, we’re driving a series of elevated roadways and bridges, traversing a mammoth, venerable estuary the likes of which I’ve never seen. The likes of which I never knew existed. This area serves as a natural buffer between the Gulf and New Orleans, an ecosystem that not only provides vital habitat for waterfowl and other aquatic life, but a geography that protects the city itself from storms. It has been threatened by years of development of channels for commercial ship navigation that transect the estuary. And it’s always threatened by oil.

On the island proper, we’re meant to meet up with U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Search and Rescue. Unfortunately, our tour of the bay structure, where distressed, oiled birds are captured and then taken to a rehab center nearby, was not to be. We’re in the height of hurricane season now, and though we’re not looking at such a storm, we’re looking at a massive wall of gray just on the horizon and the official is telling us that the mission is officially standing down.

I ask the search and rescue team leader how bad the spill is, after her tells us he’s worked on three other spills. “Monumental,” he says. I’m with a reporter from my hometown newspaper and he’s unsatisfied with the answer. He presses. The official speaks in gentle equivocations – it’s not his job to argue, it’s his job to get the media out to these places, to see what is what and get the story to the public.

His body language says what his reticence doesn’t. Besides, monumental is a monumental word.

We take the opportunity to tour Grand Isle. I haven’t been here before but it looks like a middle class summer wonderland, a place where families fish and fight the the oppressive heat by bathing in the placid sea. I’m constantly texting pictures to a friend of mine who has a strong connection to the place, and I’m sad she’s not with us. It feels weird to translate this place myself, without her knowledge as guide.

We eat lunch at the local eatery where a serious rush is underway. Coast Guard, Louisiana officials, BP workers and boat captains eat gumbo and fried oysters in relative peace. We sample boiled peanuts for the first time, and I’m not a fan. Standing in line, waiting for my sandwich, everyone gets along. But there is tension. Some of these people literally can’t talk to each other – they can’t tell each other what they know, or what they do. The subject on everyone’s mind is avoided; the room lacks the levity lunch usually brings.

Barrier islands make this area surfless, which makes for perfect bathing. But the beaches are closed. The houses are mostly unoccupied, and many of them are still in disrepair from Katrina. Frisbees are getting dusty, beach balls are deflating.

We walk the beach – no one’s here to tell us not to. Akimbo check point tents are empty. There are a few locals crabbing and fishing, but largely, the beach looks as empty as Coney Island in the wintertime. What’s astonishing is the lay of the beach – uniform and unnaturally level. It has been scrubbed by machines. This area had been entirely covered with oil not long ago.  Every time it washes up, machines comes through and takes the top layer off and then haul it away to where the oil and the sand is separated. I want to see this place.

As the storm approaches, the locals on the beach say that the oil will come back, and the skim will happen again. And again. And again. This is a common theme when I speak to people here. At a bar in St. Bernard’s Parish, New Orleans, I talk with a woman named Donna. St. Bernard’s Parish was the only total devastation zone in New Orleans – meaning everything flooded. Her house was under 17 feet of water only six weeks after she bought it.

“You learn to roll with the punches here, and you roll through, but it ain’t never gonna get back to normal.”

She’s upbeat, but she looks beaten. Hardened by a hard life and hard times.

Life in this region has been in such trauma for so long. Pre- and post-Katrina are the temporal boundaries by which people understand reality. The oil only makes things worse. Locals have come to expect the abnormal as the normal. There is no other life here than spills and storms. It feels like a strange pathology. It makes me sad.

For better or for worse, the oil industry isn’t going away and no one even thinks about that as a possibility. Things don’t change here, but the landscape varies in degree of toxicity.  Walking here, seeing oil at the tide line mixed with dispersant, I too believe that this will never, ever go away. A storm will bring it up. A current will make it known again. It’s an unsettling feeling.

One thing is certain – no one here believes what the government and BP are saying about the oil going away rapidly.

At one time fish was my go-to food choice when I was feeling worried about supporting the corporate meat industry. Hey, it made sense. Not only was I “voting with my fork” by not supporting large-scale beef producers, like say Tyson Foods, I was also eating healthier, benefiting from such heart-friendly nutrients as Omega-3 fatty acids. Studies have shown societies who eat more fish have fewer health problems, right?

True, eating fish makes for healthier living. Or at least it used to be. This may no longer be the case given the barrage of recent reports about toxins in fish. While it may not exactly be “new” news – pregnant women have long been urged to avoid fish due to worries about high mercury levels – the din of new reports seem to be echoing the high toxic levels themselves.

A recent article reported on stratospheric toxin levels in whales, and not just mercury. Cadmium, aluminum, lead, silver, titanium, and chromium were found in dangerous levels and all purportedly entered the food chain due to human related activities. Another report focused on seawater and its natural ability to retain mercury in its more toxic form.

In an earlier post I wrote about over-fishing and the idea of eating fewer fish in order to play a part in promoting the end of such practices as a consumer. As it is, you may not even want to eat the fish – period exclamation point!

Image: hoyasmeg

It’s been an interesting few weeks. UN meetings, talks with major film and television networks about filming my nonprofit’s expeditions as we sail around the world studying plastic in our oceans. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the concept of global pollution in terms of scale. The scale of problems is often so big that the numbers cease to have meaning for the vast majority of people because they’re incomprehensibly large. So how do you do? Well, the answer is, you geek out. You run statistics and you do the math. So that’s what I did all weekend.

It’s no secret by now that I’m all about reducing synthetics in our lives. I try like hell to avoid plastics, even when I travel where water is sketchy. I’ll be reporting on a portable water radiating device I’ve obtained for my surf trip to Mexico in a few weeks – yup, I’m going to attempt to drink tap water to avoid plastic bottles – but why? Why are you so pathologically devoted to plastic pollution Stiv? Well, we all know there is garbage in the ocean that collects in places, and stays there forever. But we don’t know how much, because the amount is hard to noodle on. Here’s a an attempt to paint a picture for you.

The Scale of Global Plastic Pollution

Sailing across North Atlantic taught me something that all oceanographers know, but don’t necessarily say: the ocean is big and running the numbers on how much garbage is out there, proves to be a difficult task.

According to one prominent ocean scientist, SEA’s Giora Proskurowski, plastic is extremely diffuse and calculating its density isn’t very easy. Giora’s data states that concentration in The Atlantic gyre is about 50,000 .1g pieces per square kilometer on the surface. If we apply big math to that simply for the sake of getting an idea of scale, we get five kilograms per square kilometer or roughly 11-pounds per square kilometer on the surface. There are 316 million square kilometers of ocean surface. This makes for about 3.5-billion pounds of degraded plastic fragments fewer than 5mm in length on the surface of the ocean worldwide. Again, this is an extremely conservative estimate, extrapolating from a local data set to show the scale in the world. Giora’s work, for example, shows that plastic doesn’t just exist on the surface, it gets stratified within the water column, close to 90-feet down (not to mention all the types of plastic that sink, too, which is about half of the types manufactured). This estimate doesn’t include all the big pieces you find in various garbage patches within the gyres, but we’ll leave that weight out for now.

So, for the purposes of argument, let’s say that for each of those 90-feet of stratification, there is roughly the same weight per foot. Now we’re up to 315 billion pounds in the ocean. For comparison, The Gulf Spill is spewing roughly 2.5-million pounds of oil per day.

Cost of Cleanup, Hypothetical

A supertanker’s dead weight (amount of weight it can carry) is 500 million pounds. That would mean that to clean the ocean, you’d need to fill 630 oil supertankers to the brim at a cost of about $56,000 per each a day to charter (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). Therefore, to cleanup the gyres (assuming there is actually technology out there to do it which as of today, nothing has been proven to work) we’re looking at a cost of at least about $35 million a day or roughly $13 billion a year. And about 17 percent of all the oil tankers in service in the world would have to be full-time devoted to cleaning it up.

Now let’s talk about the scale of waste. As of 1992, the world (5.5 billion people, which today has grown to seven billion) dumped 14 billion pounds of garbage in the ocean each year, with over half (at the very least) being synthetics. If we apply this statistic over 40 years – the plastics era in the limelight – we get a very similar number to the 315 billion pound number stated before of overall plastics in the ocean. Worldwide, we’re looking at one to three percent recycling rates on plastic, a number based on an industry that is governed by supply and demand. The plastics industry produces 250 billion pounds of virgin raw plastic pellets per year. Okay, so now we at least have an ‘some idea’ of what we’re dealing with.

Great! Now that I feel sick to my stomach, what can I do?

One American’s ‘garbage in the ocean’ footprint is about 600 (as of 1992) pounds annually. If you want to know precisely what your plastics in the ocean footprint is do a simple experiment: throw all your waste in the same bin for a week. Separate organic materials and synthetics. Determine the percentage of synthetics and apply that percentage to that 600 pound number, and you’ll know roughly how much damage your lifestyle causes on the ocean in terms of weight. Now, take some action. Look at your own waste stream and see which items you can avoid all together or replace with reusable alternatives. I promise you, you’ll be surprised at how much difference you can personally make. Now go to it!

I love fish. Poached salmon. Bouillabaisse. Absolutely sublime sushi. How can I say no to seafood? And why would I?

Sylvia Earle, an awe-inspiring scientist and oceanographer who has studied the ocean for over 50 years, helped change my perspective in her most recent book, The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One. She covers a lot of ocean ground, but one particular bit stuck in my craw with regard to over-fishing.

“Ninety percent of many fish common [in the past half century] are now gone, consumed by eager diners unaware that in their lifetime they might witness the disappearance of some of their favorite wild-caught fare, from tuna and swordfish to lobsters and crabs.”

Slow Food in San Francisco has instituted Meatless Mondays. I began to wonder what we could do for fish. I thought of Fishless Fridays, but that suggests we’re eating fish all the other days of the week. Fish Friday comes to mind, but I believe that’s a Catholic tradition. Maybe it could be more like one day a month, a celebratory day called First Fish Friday, the only day of the month we allow ourselves a special treat from the sea.

It may seem extreme. But what’s more extreme? Reducing personal intake of an endangered food source, or gobbling it down as fast as you can while you watch it disappear? As Earle quoted John C. Sawhill: “In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.”

Image: Nicola Zingarelli

What is the Pacific Garbage Patch?

Simply put, it’s a swirling mass of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean that is big enough to qualify as the planet’s largest landfill. Roughly located in an area between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N, much of the world’s trash has accumulated into this part of the Pacific Ocean based on the movement of ocean currents.

A rose any other name applies to the Pacific Garbage Patch – you’ll also hear it called the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the “Pacific Trash Gyre,” the “Pacific Trash Vortex,” and the “Oh My…What Have We Done!?” among other names.

How does all that plastic get to the ocean?

The simple answer: Humans + Ocean Currents = Trash Vortex.

People create, consume, and carelessly toss plastics and the litter ends up in the water ways. As the plastic reaches the shoreline, currents carry it out into the ocean and a convergence of currents swirl the plastics into one general area.

No one is guiltless when it comes to the Pacific Garbage Patch – if you consume and discard goods, you are responsible for some portion of the plastic that is ending up in the ocean, even if you live hundreds of miles from the seaside.

To read more about the Pacific Garbage Patch and to watch a great slideshow explaining how trash from the middle of the continent can end up in the middle of the ocean: check out Planet Green.

Editor’s note: Article by Jaymi Heimbuch. Originally published by our friends at Planet Green. Planet Green is an offshoot of Discovery that covers every aspect of green living, from tofu to tattoos. Be sure to visit them and say hi, and follow Planet Green on Twitter, too!

Image: Kevin Krejci