ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I think the first time I became aware of trash and the environment was when the Keep America Beautiful commercial of Iron Eyes Cody came out. (As drums pound and smokestacks puff out fumes, Cody looks at a highway coated in debris. A bag of trash is thrown at him. We won’t get into the utter exploitation of Cody’s Cherokee-Cree heritage.) It was the 1970s. Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush included the line, “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.” These lyrics I belted out with pride because they mentioned “the 1970s,” the decade in which I was born. Obviously, I hear the song differently now. Cody was a Hollywood talent who signed on for the part and forced that tear to pop out from his tear duct. I’m no actor playing a part, and feel them ready to pop often.

In my small neighborhood here on Cape Cod, I come home with trash in my hands.

Yesterday, while walking the dog, it was a McDonald’s bag with an empty sausage McMuffin breakfast container, a plastic bottle and some candy wrappers. I’d like to say that this was maybe because we had a windy day and somebody’s trash barrel wasn’t secure. That a raccoon found treasure and pulled the bag out for a late night snack, but the truth is, I always find trash. This is a middle class neighborhood, filled with many renters who might care little for place, but if I were to read into who lives here based on the trash I find, I would be more inclined to say: This neighborhood is filled with people who just don’t care at all.

The troublesome part is that this is not 1970. We are so much more educated about the environment, we’ve heard the drills about recycling, and we’ve seen pollution disaster after disaster. If I’m reading these trashy tea leaves correctly, we have many a miserable soul who believes  a Smirnoff nip before going home to the wife and kids can help take the edge off of a biting reality. That oversized styrofoam cups of extra sugared espresso concoctions deserve to pave our way home. That Subway sandwiches are made not only for “healthy” fast food consumption, but also for the wildlife here. That the reason why I daily find a bag of McDonald’s in the same place is because someone likes to live like a hobbit with Second Breakfast and Elevensies.

I remember when our local Wampanoag Indians won federal recognition a few years back (my town is considered “The Land of the Wampanoag”), and I picked up a massive pile of plastic bottles across the street from a house housing three Wampanoag families. All the bottles labeled with their federal recognition.

The tear.

I’m not picking up reusable bags with organic carrot tops inside, or vegan granola bar wrappers. It takes a certain person who just doesn’t care to litter. These are the people who feed themselves garbage, live with garbage, and treat the environment as a garbage can. It’s a cycle of abuse that begins with self-abuse that’s become so regular for so many, we consider it almost normal.

I refuse. So, I will continue picking up this trash. And I will believe there are those who care. I’m not certain this is a good approach at all. Maybe I should make signs asking people to pick up the litter. Maybe I should lead a neighborhood cleanup and have the ones who do care take a stand against the ones who don’t.

But who cares?

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: purplepix

Annie Leonard talks about the path to a healthy community, taking back our democracy and the three things that make people happy.

Annie Leonard has spent twenty years investigating where our stuff comes from, how we use it and where it goes. She is the creator of The Story of Stuff project, a series of films that discuss democracy, water bottles, cap and trade, electronics and cosmetics. She has traveled to 40 countries and visited hundreds of factories and dumps. Leonard has observed the effects of over and under-consumption all over the world, and is dedicated to building a clean, green, healthy, safe community for everyone.

We caught up with her recently to talk about how the Staten Island dump, Pacific Northwestern clear cuts and planned obsolescence helped fuel the passion that is now her career.

How did you start down this road of activism? What influenced you and when?

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and I went camping a lot as a kid. I loved the feeling of being in forests. There was something about it that felt so grounded and so good. So, when I saw these vicious, huge clear cuts, I remember feeling that something is wrong, so I planned to be a forest activist when I grew up. I went to college in New York City, which is a funny place to go to be a forest activist, but it turned out to be really smart.

I would walk to school every day, and there would be these huge, literally shoulder-high, piles of garbage. And I started wondering, what was in all those bags? So I started looking in garbage and I was amazed to see that it was almost all paper. My beloved forests are being chopped down to be made into paper, and the paper is going into the garbage, but where does it go afterward? So I took a field trip to the dump on Staten Island where New York City’s garbage goes. I really recommend everyone go visit the dump. It’s a fascinating thing to see the back end of where all our stuff comes out.

I’ll never forget this moment. I stood there as a sophomore in college looking out at this pile of waste. As far as I could see there were shoes and appliances and books and food and everything you could imagine, and I thought, “My God, we have a real problem. We have built our economy on the unsustainable flow of materials from resources to waste.”

So I decided to figure it out. I studied garbage and waste management in school. I went to Washington DC, worked for environmental groups and spent the next twenty years traveling around the world visiting factories where our stuff is made, visiting dumps, and interviewing people about toxins and chemicals and pollution and garbage and consumption and figuring out how to put the pieces together to understand what was going on. And that’s what I summarized in The Story of Stuff film and book.

When did you create The Story of Stuff and what was your goal?

For about ten years, I had been practicing different ways of talking about where our stuff comes from and where it goes, and I was finding that the more that I learned about it and the more my expertise grew, the less I could communicate with people in a way that they found accessible and relevant.

I tried to figure out if there was a way we could talk about environmental issues that’s fun and easy and welcoming and not all science, charts and graphs, and not all about guilt and fear and shame. Guilt and fear and shame are not powerful places to hang out, yet so many environmentalists bombard the public with those things.

So I developed this talk and turned it into The Story of Stuff film. I must have given that talk a hundred times, and every time, someone would say, can you make a movie of this? So, after three years of resisting, I did the talk one last time and a friend of mine filmed it. We took the film to Free Range Studios, who are these absolute geniuses at capturing different issues in these do-gooder films online.

We put it online free in December 2007. Our goal – our dream – was that 50,000 people would watch it. We thought if we could get 50,000 people to watch this film, then we could really get people talking about this stuff. To our utter amazement, we got 50,000 people in one day. We are now at over 12 million views of the original film and we’ve made additional films and now we’ve had 20 million views total. All of our films are these short, fun films that look at really serious issues about what’s wrong with our materials economy.

I have been so excited about the response, because these are difficult issues to talk about, everything from planned obsolescence (where product designers make stuff designed to break) to corporate influence in democracy. We’ve found a fun way to talk about it and people are watching and having these amazing conversations all over the world. The films have been watched in over 200 countries, shown in schools and churches and synagogues and festivals and conferences – it’s so cool to see all the ways people are using them to spark much-needed conversation.

Where do your ideas for topics come from?

I have been looking at how we make, use and throw away stuff for a long time, so I have lots of things I’d love to talk to people about, but first we pick issues we feel are big chunks of the problem, things we need to be talking about. We also pick things that tend to be technical or there’s just not a lot of discussion about it – things like manufactured demand or planned obsolescence or corporate hijacking of our democracy. We also focus on what our viewers want to hear. We get hundreds and hundreds of emails every week and I really like to get a sense of what people really want to understand more about.

I would talk about how it is absolutely possible to build a safe, healthy, fair society – I am absolutely convinced of it. The technology exists, the research exists, we absolutely could do it, but people would raise their hands and say, yes, but we can’t because we are butting up against the coal industry and the oil industry and corporations have too much control of Congress and we can’t get good laws passed because corporations get mad. So we made a film about corporate power and some steps we can take to reign in corporate power in our democracy so we can take our democracy back.

Our next film is called The Story of Broke. Wherever I go and talk about how we can make a safe, healthy, fair and fun society, people write back and say, “There’s no money for that. It’s a nice idea, safe products and clean energy – but there’s no money for that.” But the truth is – there IS money for it. There’s a lot of money for it. It’s actually our money, because it’s our government and we’re giving that money right now to nuclear reactors, loan guarantees, and enormous subsidies for incredibly profitable oil and gas companies. So we should get involved with what’s happening to it. And right now it’s being used to prop up the dinosaur economy and what we should use it for instead is to build a healthy, fair future.

We have more ideas and requests that we can possibly do. We want to watch the response to each film and pay attention to what’s happening in society, and we really want to respond to our viewers. We’re trying to provide the information that they need to engage in the conversation. One of the things we definitely want to look at in one of the next couple of films is solutions. We want to really focus on how many solutions are out there – there are so many, it’s just incredible how possible it is to make clean, green, safe, healthy stuff.

What direct impact has The Story of Stuff had?

It’s interesting with online work is that you don’t really know what direct impact it has really had. Part of what we do know is anecdotal. We hear lots and lots of stories from people who say, “I never thought about where our stuff comes from and where it goes until I saw your films. And because of that film, I am rethinking the role of stuff in my life. I am looking for ways to buy stuff used, to share things, to find happiness through other ways than going shopping.” Thousands and thousands of incredibly heartwarming stories like that make us really happy.

We can track how many people watch it online and people have watched it in every single country except one in the middle of Africa. We can track what resources they download and those materials have been downloaded tens of thousands of times. So we absolutely know that we are contributing to thinking and talking about these issues. The only way we’ll really know if it’s working is if we can build up enough power in this country to demand a clean, green and healthy economy. Then we’ll know that we’ve won.

If you could tell everyone in the world (or just the U.S.) to make one change in their lives to make the biggest impact, what would it be?

I think if I could just pick one, what I would say is to develop the infrastructure and culture for sharing. There are lots of solutions to the problems we face that are very complex and technical, but there are also some that are very simple, and bringing back sharing is one.

As we’re in tough economic times and as we’re bumping up against the planet’s limits, we are going to have to learn how to live well with less stuff. It’s crazy in this country for EVERY single house to have a wheelbarrow, a power drill and a lawn mower and a cupcake tin and all these things that you only use a few times a year. So if we share, it means we have to mine less metals, cut less trees, we can make our resources go further if one lawn mower or power drill can serve six families instead of just one.

Perhaps the most important part of sharing is that it’s better for our happiness. Because if you’re going to share something, you have to talk to people, you have to have friends, you have to have community. And the more we can develop friends and community and get out of our social isolation that this country is experiencing, the less we’re going to feel the need to go out and go shopping because we can find fun and meaning in our sense of community. It’s better for the planet, better for our economy, and way more fun.

Speaking of possessions, what is your most cherished possession?

You know what I really love? I love my clothesline. Because I’m often so busy, having a clothesline in my backyard makes me pause twice a day, in the morning and in the afternoon, to just spend ten minutes standing in my garden. It makes me feel connected to the natural environment because the sun is drying my clothes. It just makes me slow down and take a breath and just have a moment to reflect on my day and have gratitude for all that I have. When I travel, I even take a little clothesline with me.

Who are your real-life heroes?

People often ask how I remain so hopeful and it’s because there are so many people helping to make the world better in so many ways. But for me, the real heroes are the everyday moms who are just trying to get dinner on the table and get their kids to do well in school, who are standing up and taking a stand against corporate polluters. People like Lois Gibbs. She was the mother at Love Canal (a town near Niagra Falls, New York).

For decades, a chemical company had poured their toxic waste into a canal and covered it up with dirt. Then they sold it to a school district for some nominal fee. Lois Gibbs and the other moms began noticing a very high rate of rare and very serious diseases, a lot of miscarriages, and kids getting really sick. She figured it out, about this toxic waste that was seeping into the school as well as into a bunch of the basements in this town.

She was a mom without a college degree in any of these issues, and no scientific training. She started putting together the data and faced enormous ostracism from the community. She risked threats of violence and she still demanded that the government come and clean up the mess, and move the people out of there whose houses were built on this toxic waste site.

It’s people like that, who, when life is hard enough, are able to still find the strength to stand up to the forces against us, and demand something better. They inspire me so much. I just feel like if they can do it, I can certainly do it.

What accomplishment are you most proud of?

Two things. I am very proud that The Story of Stuff has been so well-received. I am enormously happy that we figured out a way to talk about complex issues in a fun way.

I am also happy about how I have been able to integrate many of the lessons I’ve learned into my own life. So that my life, while far from perfect, has been made better by changes I’ve made because of the things I’ve learned from doing this research. For example, there are six households on my block that are very, very good friends and we share everything from childcare to cutting each other’s hair to a pickup truck.

When people ask me how do I know sharing and having community is better than having massive credit card debit and going to the mall, I know because I live it. I can speak with a real authenticity, that sharing, that taking meaning through community and making the world better is just way more fun than being on this hyper-consumption, consumer mania treadmill. I’m happy with my work and I’m happy with my community.

I watched Citizens United v. FEC. It is particularly relevant since we are facing an election in the next year. Do you think that people will stand up and demand change, or are they so discouraged that they won’t try, and no change will happen for a long time?

I think, both. I think people are already starting to speak up, like this amazing protest in front of the White House last month about the Tar Sands pipeline. I watched it feeling so hopeful, because they weren’t just Greenpeacers and Rainforest Action Network types, there were people who said they never attended a protest before, but they just couldn’t take it any longer. They realized that corporations all over Capitol Hill are making their voices heard, and if we are going to make our voices heard, it is time for really dire action. I saw one interview with a rancher who said he’d just had it with the government’s inability to act on climate change. I saw a grandmother from Texas. It was just so inspiring to see regular folks saying “I’ve just had enough. I’m ready to put my body on the line to have my concern for the climate be heard.”

I feel very hopeful about that kind of things that’s happening all over the world – people getting involved. I also think people are frustrated, especially after this last presidential election when people volunteered and donated money and knocked on doors and did all this work for change, and there hasn’t been enough change. And so I’m worried that people are going to choose to check out of the political process and I appeal to them – this is NOT the time to do that. The most important battle that we will ever face in our lifetime is wrestling back our democracy from the corporate interests. We have got to stay engaged, we have got to not hand over our democracy.

We have to really encourage people we know to get involved in making our voices heard. It is absolutely true that these super-rich, big companies are controlling the dialogue right now, but there are more of us, than of them. So every day that we do not voice our opinions, we’re actually voting for the status quo to continue. We’ve simply got to engage.

This country is way too incredible and wonderful and valuable to just hand off to people who don’t actually care about it. So we need to take our country back. And then, once we’ve done that, we can deal with the kinds of issues that I talked about in The Story of Stuff. We can make our products safe and our schools good and our environment clean. But we’ve got to get the power so our government is working for us, instead of the big companies.

What is your idea of true happiness?

It’s hard for me to separate my own ideas and thoughts from all the data that I’ve read. I’ve done a huge amount of looking into what actually makes people happy. I was very interested in the fact that we have more, better, cooler stuff than at any time throughout history, but our happiness levels are actually going down.

It turns out that there are three things that make people happy. The first one is the quality of our social relationships and having friends and family and community. The second thing is having leisure time and not working around the clock. We work so many hours in this country. We work about 300 hours more per year than our counterparts in Europe do. So we’re exhausted and socially isolated. The third big one is having meaning in life.

That resonated so much with me. For me, true happiness is if everyone on the whole planet has those things. A healthy, strong community, some leisure time, so we can invest in art, in community, in family, the environment, civic activities, and having a purpose in life.

Visit The Story of Stuff to view the videos and be notified about new topics.

Images: The Story of Stuff Project

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

QuoteDaily quotes at EcoSalon.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it. – Alan Watts
Image: Lucente Designs

7 truths you need to know about China’s environmental notoriety.

As I’m writing this, I’m preparing for my return trip to Chongqing, China after a two-month vacation living at home with my parents in beautiful (albeit morbidly freezing) Fargo. While I’m reveling in the fact that I’ll be going to a place with weather over zero, I’m a little less psyched than last September when my boyfriend and I first left for China, with hearts full of hope and three suitcases full of dreams.

Hope and dreams aside, it’s principally the glamor of living in a foreign country that was crushed in the months that ensued after my arrival, during which I studied my brains out, Chinese style (I’m studying Mandarin – learning 30 completely different hieroglyphs daily and being tested on them the next), got to do my laundry by hand, and slept “comfortably” each night with my boyfriend on a lovely spring-loaded twin mattress.

The great thing about international travel is that you learn what you can truly live with (and without). In this case, I learned I can live with all of the aforementioned, plus long layovers, 14-hour flights, ten-times-crazier-than-New-York cab drivers, and much much more. In retrospect, I can even laugh about most things.

But this is what I can’t laugh about: pollution boogers.

I’m sorry, dear reader, but the thing I am dreading above and beyond all else, is waking up with my nose plugged full of black, coal-sooty, shall we say, “organic matter”.

You may have heard all about China’s pollution problems. You may know that China is the biggest net CO2 emitter, having overtaken the U.S. in 2007. You may have even heard that 16 of the world’s 20 most disgustingly grimy, unlivable, unbreathable cities in the world are in China. But nothing compares to actually waking up to the lovely smell of pollution.

Here are seven things you need to know about China’s environmental problems, from an un-seasoned, non-scientist, pollution-breather. For these purposes, forgive me if I wax a little more serious, but let’s be honest: this is serious stuff.

1.  The human cost of China’s pollution woes is concretely and directly related to astronomical cancer rates and unforgivably low quality of life in many areas.

Take a look at China’s infamous “cancer villages,” villages and towns in China where the entire population has experienced the effect of pollution-linked cancer either personally or inter-personally. These horrifying areas of China reflect the degree to which pollution has directly harmed not just the land and the air, but the people as well. Cancer is China’s #1 cause of death. Only one percent of China‘s 560 million urban dwellers breathe air that the European Union’s standards would consider breathable. While Cancer Villages are poor examples of the whole, they are microcosms of the thousands if not tens of thousands of towns and cities where China’s coal reliance, unclean industry and waste practices have left their mark by a layer of soot and grime that most Chinese treat as a standard feature of the urban landscape.

2. When individuals speak up about this human cost, especially if they tackle environmental problems as a human rights issue, they put themselves at great risk.

One risk is being targeted by rich factory owners and industrial moguls whose wealth is a powerful tool for bribery and an incentive to all around thuggery. The other, more remote but very crushing risk is being deemed subversive and inimical to state stability and becoming a political prisoner for it. It’s downright sad that the greed and corruption underpinning the risk of pissing off the powerful, undermines and reduces environmental advocacy and results in little to no change. It’s even sadder that beneath the risk of becoming a political prisoner there’s a fundamental irony: stifling the voices of people who don’t want heavy metals in their children’s food or have no desire to see their neighbors drop dead from pollution-caused cancer could, even more than letting people advocate for human and environmental rights, become a truer risk of social breakdown.

3. Most of the worst pollution is concentrated in comparatively poorer Northern and inland areas.

Collectively, these areas are the engine that is moving total economic progress forward. They are where coal (China’s life support) is mined, heavy metals are extracted, heavy industry is booming, and domestic goods are produced. They are also the nexus of growing inland-coastal inequality that correlates to urban-rural and poor-rich disparities. Heavily polluting industry is kept away from the wealth and health of coastal poster cities like Shenzhen, not to mention from the newly rich who live there and the tourists who come to see the glossy side of China. There are no aforementioned “cancer villages” on the Southern coast.

4.  The U.S. and China are both part of an import-export machine that drives the global economy, but goods aren’t the only thing we trade.

While the U.S. exports more and more black money-making chunks of carbon to fuel China’s coal dependence, China exports its fair share: acid rain and particulates. If you take a look at this graph, you can see that coal exports from the United States into China sky-rocketed from 386,950 tons in 2009 to 4,071,837 tons in 2010. That’s more than 10 times in one year, proof that pushing to green public policy is not enough- we need to be global. That’s not all, if you’re reading this in Los Angeles, you’re breathing multinational pollution, and some of it is from China. As the New York Times put it, “China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.” 

5. The central government actually has some comparatively brawny environmental regulations, hefty fines for non-compliance, and significant investments in green technology, and to a degree, it’s helped. But it’s not the whole story.

While a degree of mistrust is certainly appropriate, for the most part media reports about China’s greening efforts are reporting the truth. In 2009, China’s state council ambitiously stated that it plans on reducing its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 (from 2005 levels). Its newly released 12th, five-year plan  (China’s centrally-designed map toward continued progress in 2011 to 2015), clearly indicates a continuing commitment to reducing its environmental issues, including big investments in green energy aimed at kicking its carbon habit and expanding what’s now in place. For example, China has not only overtaken the U.S. in carbon emissions, but according to the Guardian, it has also left the U.S. in the dust with its wind-power generating capacity. 

Here’s the part where we tend to fall prey to China’s image machine: While the central government is by all appearances trying, it isn’t trying that hard. The problem is that centrally designed incentives for local governments are structured around the economy not the environment. Social (re: economic) stability (re: growth) trumps environmental concerns. If a regulation will harm the local economy–say the expense of alienating factory owners by forcing them to put caps on a factory’s smokestacks, a local official just won’t follow it. And the central government, big investments aside, just isn’t willing to change its incentives.

6. Most Chinese feel for the environment and recognize that its destruction is a bad thing, but hope for continuing economic ascension trumps the fear of environmental decline.

Just as in the United States, when it comes to daily decision-making, whether it be by average, everyday people or by high level local officials and factory owners, “the bottom line” is what most people think about. And the bottom line in China is this: Now is the time to get rich (er, “moderately prosperous“) or die trying.  While the die trying part will likely come from destroying the environment, the reward is success in a society that desperately wants to prove its global clout after a century and a half of humiliation by Western powers. 

It’s also important to know that there’s just not the same level of “green” awareness in China as there is in the West and Japan right now. For example, in Chongqing there is a series of slogans run by the charismatic and well-connected mayor called “the Five Chongqings,” which are five visions of Chongqing’s future that are meant to guide its development into a global metropolitan city. One of them is translated into English as “Green Chongqing,” that is, a Chongqing with more trees. More trees is good, but the goal is not necessarily undertaken from an environmental standpoint. In this case, the vision is aesthetic. More trees means a prettier city that more people will want to visit, which means more tourism, and more inflow of capital.

While an expanded notion of “green” and an expanded sense of responsibility toward the environment would be great, most Chinese don’t see themselves as having the luxury to place that above its long economic project that has to date raised millions and millions of people out of abject poverty. And as far as they’re concerned, that project is nowhere near complete.

7.   We are implicated, and in a more complicated way than you may think. It goes without saying that China’s industry produces our products and supports our consumption. There’s no denying it. Just go to Wal-Mart and check every plastic thing you can find. But while we cannot escape this fact, self-flagellation isn’t quite the right response either. Our imports from China have been the linchpin in China’s export machine, the very mechanism that has supported the incredible feat that some call China’s miracle; its aforementioned poverty-elimination project. 500 million Chinese escaped poverty between 1981 and 2004, and in just the 3 years after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, poverty was cut by another 3rd. Our consumption, while we often lament its destructive facets, is a huge part of China’s ability to make that happen.

Let me put it in real terms: Tomorrow I may wake up with black boogers, but in a few months I’ll go home to my country, go to Target, and buy a Chinese-made plastic storage bin so I can organize all of the crap I bought while I was in Chongqing. And while I’m fueling the environmental cause of the current source of my sticky goober dread, I’ll be contributing to a global supply chain that is exploitative, harmful, and has performed the previously unimagined feat of building for my Chinese friends a system in which they can support themselves economically without the need of a communist leadership to give them an “iron rice bowl.” Oh, the ambivalence.

Images: Justin D, Lance Webel, Robertg6n1, blacksmithinstitute, malouenfrankinchina, J_Ensley

ExclusiveThe final chapter in a voyage through the Atlantic gyre.

It’s not what you think, but it is true that I go both ways.

I’ve just finished an epic three-point, five-month voyage that had me sailing from Brazil to South Africa to Namibia to Uruguay. We crossed the Atlantic twice, traveling some 9,000 nautical miles by sea in a rugged sailboat. Along the way, I’ve recorded the adventure – and trials – here at EcoSalon, sending my dispatches to our editor at all hours via satellite. For those of you who are just joining the saga, in addition to journalism, I work with an NGO called The 5 Gyres Institute that hunts the world’s oceans for plastic pollution in areas that no one else studies. We maintain a constant presence at sea, and this expedition completed the first two research transects of The South Atlantic Gyre sampling the ocean surface for plastic every 60 nautical miles.

Here’s what I can tell you right now: There’s a lot of plastic between South America and Africa that no one has ever talked about, and I’ve just spent 63 days at sea staring at it firsthand.

At home in the States, I listen to politicians debate the importance of bag bans in my hometown of Portland. I watch science organizations and universities that study marine plastic pollution fight for supremacy on the issue, along with various NGOs vying to be the dominant voice of the movement. It makes me ill. Out there, in the wide blue frontier, ego is irrelevant. The west coast of the United States, where the vast majority of people who work on this issue reside (and where their research vessels are moored), is roughly 1,400 miles long. But there are millions of miles of beaches in this world with plastic on them and 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface with particles of plastic stratified to the depths. Despite what we hear, it has nothing to do with islands of plastic the size of Texas. It’s a soup, not a tarte.

And it’s crazy, isn’t it? That’s what this job impresses upon me everyday – that we are crazy to be so careless and inconsiderate with a material so resilient and toxic. Yet reflection inspires me, because I’ve also witnessed NGOs, scientists and politicians championing the cause in an ethical, selfless, passionate manner. These people matter, and we owe them our gratitude. They have mine.

All of us, humbly or arrogantly, started using plastic in earnest about 40 years ago. As a global society, we are head-over-heels in love with the stuff. Widespread utilization of plastic started, among several reasons, as a way to help women get out of the kitchen – believe it or not, single-use plastic adoption has roots in feminism – but the result has become a pernicious addiction to a wonder material that no one can figure out how to handle once it’s used. And so, in 40 years, we broke the ocean.

That’s a lot of space to break. In terms of pollution vectors, plastic is just another threat, but it’s a big one and as far as the amount of people working on the issue, it’s the underdog in terms of ocean advocacy.

What is big?

It is difficult to really convey how much space we’re talking about. Until you two-time (yes, I’m a sea slut; I’ve done the North Atlantic, too), crossing an ocean by ship, it’s almost impossible to grasp. Flying over the sea doesn’t exactly do it. You need the unique vantage of being that person on the bow of a ship chasing the horizon endlessly for months on end. You need to leave Africa and notice she’s out of view within six hours – and you won’t see anything but light blue on blue or dark grey on grey for a month. You might spot a couple of albatrosses or storm petrels, perhaps the occasional whale or dolphin. But for the most part, you don’t see anything other than a color pallet study for 30 days. Thirty days is a long time.

With the exception of windless days when we can dive and make repairs or conduct additional research, we’re constantly moving forward doing at least 155 nautical miles a day. 30 days, 24/7 moving, 8-9 miles an hour.  There is nothing to hit, nothing to see, no one to meet, with one exception: every hour, we saw plastic. You can get remote as you want to get, and you’re still going to find plastic.

It is no exaggeration to say that we know more as a species about outer space than we do about our own shared oceans. We know it’s really big, so consider the size in the context of an additional ocean reality we now know: on average, there is a pint glass-full of plastic particles scattered over something the size of a football field with the occasional bucket, toothbrush, water bottle or bleach bottle on the 50 yard line tossed in. Over 315 million square kilometers on this planet, this is an almost incomprehensible amount of pollution.

While the media love to run Texas Sized headlines about the North Pacific Garbage Patch, which confuses the public about the true nature of this problem (and some NGOs too), our team and others working with us everywhere in the world are finding the same plastic everywhere – without exception. Density varies, but frequency does not.

It doesn’t matter who owns the issue. A global problem needs a global solution, and this is absolutely a global problem. We need to go beyond the North Pacific, beyond the USA-centricity, beyond the ego and the get. We must start engaging each other as a species, worldwide, and stop this madness made real by something as absurd to our true needs as mere convenience.

Editor’s Note: This is part 14 in an exclusive series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the latest each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.

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

ExclusiveTouring St. Helena and beyond.

“He died of stomach cancer,” are nearly the first words that come out of our tour guide’s mouth. The guide, a diminutive woman of no more than four and a half feet, is adamant on this point. We’re standing in the drawing room of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile house on one of the remotest islands in the South Atlantic. After the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was captured by the English and was exiled to St. Helena, one of only three inhabited islands in The South Atlantic Ocean. The Saints, as they are called, maintain that Napoleon’s death at age 51 was of natural causes – not of arsenic poisoning which many of the French believe – in parting, our guide might as well have said, “we really, really, really didn’t kill him…really!”

St. Helena is home to about 5,000 residents most of which live in a small town called Jamestown. This island is rarely visited by tourists, as there is no airport. Leaving or visiting the island means boarding a ship. Supplies come every six weeks by ship from South Africa.

A British Protectorate, St. Helena served as an important resupplying point for The East India Trading company in days of yore. The streets are cobblestone and the architecture British colonial. Just off the key, a mote stands in front of a castle gate that extends across the valley floor to the steep cliff sides that rise on either side of the town. Along the cliffs are decrepit bunkers and batteries used for defending Jamestown from attack. Dying of natural causes or murdered didn’t matter, Napoleon wasn’t going anywhere.

Our crew was on a stop over enroute from Walvis Bay, Namibia on our way across the Atlantic to Montevideo, Uruguay. St. Helena sits about 400 nautical miles directly north of the northeast border of The South Atlantic Gyre, the area where my crew is sailing through to study plastic pollution.

Arriving in the morning, we swam from our ship waiting for customs and immigration to clear us. From the deck I spotted a massive Whale Shark cruising the anchorage. Standing on the bow-sprit of our sailing vessel, Sea Dragon, I could see her speckles, her leviathan, ponderous bulk, wallowing in the clear cerulean water below. Witnessing such creatures in a place known to few on the planet is to enter another dimension, one more like the place a child’s mind manifests when in enthralled in a fantastical storybook.

It’s at these moments nature makes me present, illuminating for me the phantasmagorical industry that she really is, that she wants to be, if we just let her. A degree of respect pays for itself in aesthetic truth and bounty preserved. Conservation itself is an investment in the bank of wonder. For me, everyday on the sea conjures such revelations. It’s truly a gift to be 37-years-old and feel my baseline notion of purity deepening, when many believe the world is or already has gone to shit. 24-hour news cycles be damned. Give me mother ocean, a stiff breeze, dawn and dusk. I will navigate my own way.

I was off to the landfill and to the one beach to look at washed up plastic. Yes, our taxi driver was surprised. There are few taxis on the island and typically they’re only used for tours. There is nowhere else to go than Jamestown. To me, seeing waste from a community of 5,000 people who consume products of the modern world in a limited space is a fascinating enterprise. It’s akin to geneticists studying pure bloodlines of indigenous peoples. Self-reliance and limited space can often make proper waste management not a moral responsibility but a practical need.

The dump was better than many I’ve seen. One of the things I look at as a plastic pollution researcher is how the stuff enters the ocean. Often, island landfills will be situated just adjacent the sea where winds will blow a river of plastic trash out at the same break-neck speed with which humans consume it. St. Helena’s was no different than other islands with regard to how its landfill was sited, but I could tell by how the tree line leaned that the dominant wind was onshore and constant under-tilling of the earth stopped the vast majority of blow-trash from entering the ocean. However, the location was atop of what would be a watershed when the rains came.

It’s a funny concept, burying trash that doesn’t biodegrade. It’s not really going anywhere. There is no “away” in “throwaway” as they say. Living on a small island reminds you of that immediately. The plastic buried here are the dinosaur bones of tomorrow. And to tomorrow the anchor comes up and the quest continues. South America, here I come. How dirty are you?

Editor’s Note: This is part 12 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

Guess what? Jeans aren’t really green. The most sustainable pair you’ll slip on are the blue jeans that feel like cardboard boxes on your legs or the pair you find at the thrift shop; otherwise it’s a crapshoot as to how they get distressed like you want them to be.

Sustainable? To a degree, depending on what the company wants to tout as “eco,” with initiatives ranging from the use of natural reactants vs. toxic indigo baths to planting trees or giving back to countries that have suffered at the hands of the denim industry.

On that note, we turn our eyes to images like these released recently from Greenpeace on Ecotextile News. The site claims that “Two Chinese textile factory towns in Guangdong province, that together make millions of pairs of jeans and underwear, are now heavily polluted with chemicals released from textile production.”

Situated on a tributary of the Pearl River Delta, Xintang is a huge denim producer. Its jeans and apparel business began in the eighties, but thanks to our unquenchable thirst to look like rugged Americans, the last thirty years has enabled an entire economy to become completely dependent on the denim production chain in Xintang. According to Greenpeace, the town produces over 260 million pairs of jeans a year, equivalent to 60 percent of China’s total jeans production, and 40 percent of the jeans sold in the USA.

This is a satellite image of what Greenpeace caught flowing out of Xintang.

Denim pollution flows from Xintang into the Dong River, then on to the Pearl Delta

Apparently, in Xintang, the “jeans capital of the world” and Gurao, heavy metals in 17 of the 21 soil and water samples tested, indicated extensive heavy metal contamination throughout both cities, says EcoTextile News.

Greenpeace even cited that “In one sample, cadmium exceeded China’s national limits by 128 times.” 128 times?! Come on!

Will China get wise to stricter monitoring of discharged chemicals in their water and soil? Do they even care?

Greenpeace hopes so (as do we) and has called on not only the Chinese textile industry and government to shape up but for society as a whole to take a closer look at what fast fashion is doing to China’s environment and beyond, to you.

They’re building national parks, protecting endangered species, revealing environmental injustice and making crucial decisions that will affect the future of our planet. Or, maybe they’re just making it cool to be vegan. But in all their varied contributions, these 20 women – from global environmental leaders to community activists – are using their power, fame or sheer will to make the world a greener place.

Vandana Shiva

Perhaps no woman alive fights harder for the rights of female farmers than Vandana Shiva, an Indian philosopher, physicist, ecofeminist and environmental activist. Shiva is an outspoken critic of industrialized globalized agriculture and proponent of traditional, sustainable farming methods, and has written about the impacts of corporate international trade agreements in books like Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit as well as Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. She founded the Navdanya movement to counter corporate seed control in 1991.

Lois Gibbs

In 1978, Lois Gibbs’s picture-perfect suburban life in Love Canal, New York turned into a nightmare when she realized that her neighborhood was built on top of a toxic dump, making residents sick and causing birth defects. Outraged, Gibbs organized a community effort against local, state and federal governments, leading to the evacuation of Love Canal and the creation of the EPA’s Superfund program, which locates and cleans up toxic sites around the nation. Gibbs later founded the Center for Health, Environment and Justice and wrote several books about the effects of toxic waste.

Daryl Hannah

No Hollywood armchair activist, Daryl Hannah isn’t afraid to get dirty – or arrested – for environmental and social causes. She was jailed for chaining herself to a walnut tree to protest the demolition of the nation’s largest urban farm in South Central Los Angeles, drank biofuel to prove its safety, got arrested again for her role in a protest against mountaintop removal mining and dipped her hands in oil-contaminated water in Ecuador. Hannah, who lives on a sustainable farm in Colorado, vlogs about sustainability weekly at her website DHlovelife.com.

Simran Sethi

Simran Sethi is a familiar face in the world of environmental journalism, appearing to give green tips and discuss sustainability on programs like The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She’s also a contributing environmental correspondent at NBC News, co-host and writer for the Sundance Channel’s The Green, creator of Sundance web series The Good Fight and co-writer of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.

Wangari Maathai

The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental organization advocating for human rights, good governance and peaceful democratic change through environmental stewardship. The Green Belt has assisted women in planting over 20 million trees on farms, school properties and church compounds and spurred a tree-planting initiative across Africa. The former Kenya Parliament member has gained much-deserved worldwide recognition for all of her hard work.

Frances Beinecke

Frances Beinecke might not be a household name, but she’s more influential than you realize: she’s the president of the National Resources Defense Council, and has been involved with the organization for three decades. Beinecke has helmed some of the NRDC’s most ambitious and successful campaigns, fighting to protect polar bears, preserve our offshore environment and safeguard the health of children.

Majora Carter

Not so long ago, Hunt’s Point Riverside Park in South Bronx was an illegal dumping ground. Now, it’s a beautiful place along the Bronx River for local residents to enjoy green space and fresh air – thanks to Majora Carter, an environmental justice advocate and writer, producer and co-host of several radio and television programs. Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx), a non-profit organization that spearheaded a number of Bronx cleanup initiatives and started a green collar job training program. She’s now an environmental consultant.

Sylvia Earle

She’s been called “Guardian of the Sea”, and says she’s happier in a wetsuit than on land. Legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle is 74 and still actively exploring the oceans, recently getting an up-close-and-personal view of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence has led more than 400 undersea research expeditions and was named Time Magazine’s very first ‘hero for the planet’ in 1998. Author of a cornucopia of books on the sea, Earle is also executive director for a number of environmental organizations including The Conservation Fund and Ocean Conservancy.

Jane Goodall

Nobody in the world knows more about chimpanzees than Jane Goodall, who spent 45 years in the jungles of Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park observing their lives and challenging conventional notions about their diet and behavior. Goodall pioneered the belief that chimps were capable of rational thought and emotions and has since become a global leader in the effort to protect them and their habitats.

Laurie David

A longtime trustee on the Natural Resources Defense Council, Laurie David is most renowned for producing the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which played a big role in focusing America’s attention on global warming. David also produced the HBO documentary Too Hot to Handle, and regularly plays a large role in environmental projects like the Stop Global Warming Virtual March.

Mei Ng

“What kind of world will we leave to coming generations?” That was the question that led Hong-Kong born Mei Ng to enter the world of environmental activism, a path that has led to her current position as director of Friends of the Earth. Ng’s volunteer work as a housewife in the 1970s brought her into contact with victims of childhood cancer, sparking a passion to protect children from environmental toxins. Her work earned her a spot among the United Nation’s Global 500 Roll of Honor in 2000.

Julia Butterfly Hill

Can you imagine caring so much about a single tree, that you’d spend two years of your life among its branches, your feet rarely touching the earth below? Julia Butterfly Hill did just that in 1998 and ’99 for the love of “Luna,” a 200-foot redwood tree that was in danger of being felled by loggers. She didn’t come down until an agreement was reached with the logging companies to give Luna a 600-foot buffer to protect her from destruction. Hill’s dedication brought nationwide attention to the problem of deforestation.

Alicia Silverstone

The lovely Alicia Silverstone – perhaps best known for her role in iconic ’90s flick Clueless – is much more than just a model and actress. This animal lover, who lives in an eco-friendly solar-powered home in Los Angeles, is an avid animal rights activist and appeared in a memorable 2007 ad for PETA. But these days, Silverstone has been winning a lot of converts to the vegan lifestyle: her book, The Kind Diet, topped the New York Times bestseller list.

Marina Silva

She was the 2010 Green Party candidate for President of Brazil, gaining an impressive 19.4 percent of the votes cast. She was a colleague of renowned environmental activist Chico Mendes, who was assassinated for defending the Amazon Rainforest. But Marina Silva’s work for the environment is what really makes her stand out, earning her a place among the United Nations’ Champions of the Earth in 2007. Silva, a native Amazonian, fought for environmental protection of the Amazon during her time as a senator and as Brazil’s Environment Minister and remains one of the country’s top activists.

Carol Browner

Few people have more say in some of America’s most crucial decisions about the environment than Carol Browner, current Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and former head of the EPA. Her pragmatic approach to environmental issues has won both praise and criticism from environmentalists, but there’s no doubt that she has and will continue to make a big impact. As EPA administrator, Browner started the Brownfields Program which cleans up contaminated land and facilities and brings them back into productive use.

Alice Waters

Crusader for organic and local foods, chef Alice Waters pioneered the fresh style of California Cuisine and has been hailed as a ‘foodie hero’. Owner of Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, Waters successfully launched the bid to start a food garden on the White House lawn and created the Edible Schoolyard Project, a hands-on educational initiative teaching kids to raise, grow and prepare their own food using fresh ingredients. Waters is often credited as a major driving force in the current popularity of pesticide-free, fresh, healthy foods.

Habiba Sarabi

In 2005, Habiba Sarabi made history when she became Afghanistan’s first female governor, appointed by President Karzai to run the province of Bamiyan. It was a bold move, but Sarabi had no intention of meekly maintaining the status quo despite her country’s views on women in power. Knowing that Bamiyan is one of Afghanistan’s most beautiful areas, known for the massive Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban, Sarabi has campaigned to turn the natural charm of her home into a money-making tourist attraction. Her work includes the establishment of the Band-e-Amir National Park.

Lisa Jackson

Fighting against the big businesses that pollute our air, waterways and communities is no easy task, especially when they’ve got billions of lobbying dollars on their side.  And whether you agree with her even-handed approach or wish she would take a bolder stance, Lisa P. Jackson, the current head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of our most important allies. With nearly 25 years of environmental leadership under her belt, Jackson looks for ways to compromise with corporations and is without a doubt one of the leading female influencers in our nation.

Sangduen Chailert

Known as Thailand’s Elephant Queen, Sangduen ‘Lek’ Chailert developed a deep love for endangered Asian elephants as a child when her grandfather adopted a baby elephant named Tongkum, or ‘Golden One’. So it’s no surprise that she is now one of the most prominent advocates for the animals, which are threatened by poaching and habitat encroachment. Lek’s conservation work has been highlighted in documentaries by National Geographic, Animal Planet and the BBC.

Images: wikimedia commons,  ohio citizen, dhlovelife.com,  simransethi.com,  center for neighborhood technology, treehugger, mospeaks,  noaa.gov,  wikimedia commons,  lauriedavid.com, women of china,  juliabutterfly.com, peta, wikimedia commons, wikimedia commons, david sifry, white house archives, wikimedia commons, mikka22