Taking the athletic shoe industry to a much-needed new level for both performance and ethics, Adidas has created a prototype for a sustainable shoe that’s made almost exclusively from recycled ocean trash.

Adidas, which worked with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to source the trash during a 110-day expedition tracking illegal poachers, has launched the shoe in a partnership with Parley for the Oceans, a nonprofit organization working towards ending ocean pollution around the planet.

“We are extremely proud that Adidas is joining us in this mission and is putting its creative force behind this partnership to show that it is possible to turn ocean plastic into something cool,” Parley founder Cyrill Gutsch said to The Huffington Post.

According to the German company, Adidas’s new shoe’s upper is made entirely from illegal deep-sea gillnets and other ocean waste (there’s plenty of it to harvest). The shoe’s base comes by way of a sustainable cushioning material. “The concept shoe illustrates the joint commitment of Adidas and Parley for the Oceans and offers a first look at the kind of consumer-ready ocean plastic products that will be revealed later this year,” Adidas said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Adidas told The Huffington Post the shoe is not currently for sale, and the company is unsure whether it would be in the near future—but that’s not exactly the point of the shoe. “This is not a plan, this is an action,” she said. “We did this to show what we are capable of doing when we all put our heads together.”

Ocean trash is an increasingly severe problem impacting every corner of the world’s oceans. All marine life is affected by ocean pollution, as are the communities who rely on ocean fish as part of their diet. Research continues to show levels of plastic-based toxins in numerous fish species.

Countless pairs of shoes could be produced from ocean trash (and certainly other types of trash as well), which is not only a very good way to help remove the debris from the waters, but also takes aim at another highly toxic industry: leather.

The leather shoe industry is massive. It’s a huge source of pollution, from the resources used to raise the animals to the methane they produce and the dozens of chemical processes involved in tanning, dying, and processing animal skins into leather—not to mention the immense animal suffering.

If Adidas is capable of mass-producing shoes from ocean trash, it’s proof any shoe manufacturer can—and should—start doing it now, for the oceans, for the cows, for the planet, and for our (guilt-free) feet.

Find Jill on Twitter and Instagram

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Image via Adidas

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Most of us realize abstractly that plastic pollution is a real problem in the world’s oceans. We’ve vaguely heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or maybe at one time been dismayed to see plastic floating along a waterway.

It’s a problem that’s somewhat hidden because plastic is a huge industry that keeps pushing more and more plastic products in our faces. But the fact of the matter is plastic pollution is a real problem–a recent study revealed its full magnitude.

In all, 5 trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing 269,000 tons are floating in the world’s oceans, causing pollution beyond our wildest nightmares, according to The Guardian. Just to give you an idea, a blue whale (the most massive species on Earth) weighs 100-150 tons–so that’s 2,150 blue whales! Data collected by scientists from the U.S., France, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand found that most of the waste is in the form of “micro-plastics”, the kind that get ingested and make their way up the food chain and into our bodies. That’s a scary thing when you consider chemicals like phthalates and BPA that have already been found to be dangerous. And then there’s the larger pieces that end up straggling far too many marine creatures and birds.

“We saw turtles that ate plastic bags and fish that ingested fishing lines,” Julia Reisser, a researcher based at the University of Western Australia said to The Guardian. “But there are also chemical impacts. When plastic gets into the water it acts like a magnet for oily pollutants. Bigger fish eat the little fish and then they end up on our plates. It’s hard to tell how much pollution is being ingested but certainly plastics are providing some of it.”

The data was collected over a six year period and recently published in the journal PLOS One. Smaller fragments were collected in nets and larger pieces were seen from boats.

“You put a net through it for half an hour and there’s more plastic than marine life there,” she said. “It’s hard to visualize the sheer amount, but the weight of it is more than the entire biomass of humans. It’s quite an alarming problem that’s likely to get worse.”

Plastic often accumulates in “ocean gyres” like the most famous one, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I wrote a while back about one particular island feeling the brunt of the plastic pollution. Midway should be an untouched paradise, but as a result of waste coming from North America and Asia, upwards of 10,000 pounds of plastic washes up on its shores annually. The island is filled with towers of plastic waste and the dead birds that perished after ingesting it. Each ocean has similar ocean gyres which amount to nothing but plastic.

“Lots of things are used once and then not recycled,” Reisser said to The Guardian. “We need to improve our use of plastic and also monitor plastics in the oceans so we get a better understanding of the issue. I’m optimistic but we need to get policy makers to understand the problem. Some are doing that – Germany has changed the policy so that manufacturers are responsible for the waste they produce. If we put more responsibility on to the producer then that would be part of the solution.”

Need a little more help understanding the scope of this much plastic? Check out this graphic courtesy of Grist that breaks down the tonnage into how many blue whales it equals. The number is staggering. 2,150.

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Image: prilfish

Graphic: grist

The post Global Plastic Pollution Revealed: 269,000 Tons Floating in the World’s Oceans appeared first on EcoSalon.

In an attempt to prevent shark attacks, the Australian government has proposed a plan that can only be described as horrific.

Shark attacks are scary. Despite what “Jaws” taught us, however, they’re also extremely rare. Global statistics show that wasps, toasters, chairs, domestic dogs and even falling coconuts kill far more people every year than sharks. But that didn’t stop Western Australia’s government from buying into the hysteria by proposing a plan that is both barbaric and ecologically devastating.

There have been six fatal shark attacks in Australian waters over the past two years. In response, officials in Western Australia have proposed a highly controversial “shark management” plan that calls for the slaughter of any shark longer than 3 meters (9.8 feet) found swimming anywhere near popular beaches. According to the Guardian, sharks unlucky enough to get hooked on baited drum lines will be ‘humanely destroyed’ with a firearm. Them the shark corpses will be then tagged and taken further out to sea and dumped.

For just a moment, let’s set aside the glaring fact that sharks have called the ocean home for over 400 million years, and that Australians are encroaching on their habitat, and not the other way around. Instead, let’s focus on huge impact this plan will have on the ocean ecosystem, and the very slim chance it will actually reduce attacks.

“As predators, [sharks] shift their prey’s spatial habitat, which alters the feeding strategy and diets of other species,” explains Oceana. “Through the spatial controls and abundance, sharks indirectly maintain the seagrass  and corals reef habitats. The loss of sharks has led to the decline in coral reefs, seagrass beds and the loss of commercial fisheries.”

Around the global, growing awareness about the sharp decline of shark populations has led to a surge in conservation efforts. Shark finning, spurred by the demand for shark fin soup, has been banned in several significant regions, and there’s been a successful push to establish shark sanctuaries.

“While the rest of the world is turning to shark conservation, our government is sticking his head in the sand, ignoring all the experts and employing an archaic strategy,” Ross Weir, founder of Western Australians for Shark Conservation, told TIME magazine. “What they are doing is illegal and violates 15 different United Nations conventions and treaties.”

There’s also nothing to suggest that killing sharks will actually stop shark attacks. “…what will the killing of this one shark achieve? There is absolutely no evidence to support the “rogue shark” theory, sharks are no more or less likely to bite a human if they have bitten before. It will not act as a deterrent for other sharks,” blogged Dr. Rachel Robbins, chief scientist of the Fox Shark Research Foundation.

“The way to reduce attacks is not to kill anything that poses a threat to us. It is to educate people on how to minimize their risk, the times of day and conditions under which attacks are most likely to occur, put warnings at beaches that these areas are known to be frequented by white sharks.”

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Image: steve.garner32

The post Australia’s Plan To Prevent Shark Attacks Is Totally Barbaric appeared first on EcoSalon.

Researchers at Baylor University in Waco, Texas studied an earplug that was extracted from a blue whale that had washed on shore in Santa Barbara, California following a deadly collision with a ship in 2007. They found that the whale had been exposed to several pollutants and experienced periods of high stress.

“It’s difficult to recover time-specific information on chemical exposure for almost any animal,” says Stephen Trumble, a biologist at Baylor and a co-author of the study, published in the Sept. 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It might be the only life history of any free-ranging animal,” he told NBC News.

Whale ear wax is a fat-rich deposit that stores native and foreign chemical data, as well time. “It’s keeping a journal,” explains Trumble. The wax records time with light and dark bands, similar to the rings of a tree trunk. Each band roughly correlates to a six-month period.

The 10-inch earplug,  recovered from a 12-year-old male blue whale, has 24 bands that alternate between feeding and fasting seasons. Researchers discovered that he came into contact with 16 pollutants, including pesticides and flame retardants. Exposure was greatest in the first year, suggesting maternal transfer of pollutants – as is known to occur in seals and humans.

“Some of these chemicals are no longer in use, such as flame retardants that were outlawed in 2005, but they can stick around for 50 or 60 years,” says Sascha Usenko, an environmental scientist at Baylor and lead researcher on the study. Other contaminants found in the ear wax were picked up along the way. They noticed two spikes in the whale’s mercury levels – one at five years and the other at 10 – suggesting that the whale swam through polluted patches of ocean during a few months of his life.

Blue whales are known to cover thousands of miles of ocean in their lifetimes. They witness and record more about the world’s oceans than researchers could ever hope to. Tremble said, “The large whales … you can’t ask for any other kind of steward to let us know what’s going on.”

The team’s research was so successful that they are already planning their next study.

“We have a female earplug from 1964 we’re really excited about,” he said. They hope the whale’s chemical signatures will tell them how many calves she had, and at what age she gave birth.

More than 1,000 whale specimens sit in museums all over the world waiting to be studied. The Smithsonian alone has over 400 earplugs from fin, sei, humpback and gray whales.

Researchers hope that whale ear wax will provide a telling account of our changing oceans and how man-made pollutants affect marine life – even decades later.

This article appears courtesy of Ecorazzi

Ecorazzi covers news and gossip on celebrities and notables in support of the environment and humanitarian causes. You can follow us on Twitterand Facebook.

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The post Blue Whales & Earwax: What Can They Teach Us About Ocean Pollution? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Kids these days. Texting with one hand, solving the world’s problems with the other.

Meet Boyan Slat, a 19-year-old Dutch student who has plans to remove more than 7 million tons of plastic waste currently polluting the world’s oceans. Slat created the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization that’s helping to develop his novel idea, which he revealed at a TEDx event last year.

The Ocean Cleanup Array is a device Slat developed that includes an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms capable of being delivered to large areas of the ocean where plastic debris has accumulated, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a gigantic floating area thick with plastic waste that may be as large as twice that of the U.S.

Among the challenges in dealing with these plastic islands is that the debris is often dispersed over hundreds or thousands of miles, and can be found floating just beneath the ocean’s surface—so the areas are not necessarily visible to the naked eye. But the new technology seems to be capable of working with these conditions and removing the plastic in a low impact and feasible method. Once in the troubled area, the Ocean Cleanup Array would work much like a funnel, forcing plastic towards the platforms where it would be filtered out and later recycled.

Slat’s idea came about through a school paper he wrote that analyzed the plastic particles common in the oceans for size and amount. The paper won him praise and prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology.

If dispatched to the oceans, the technology could help to save the lives of countless marine animals and fragile ecosystems impacted by the plastic debris. As well, it could reduce human health risks by eliminating common causes of toxicity in fish including DDT and PCBs.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Image: Tyler Ingram

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The Nagasaki mushroom cloud rendered in cauliflower. Provocative or tasteless produce? 

Within the four months of the bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, 80,000 people had perished. Most of the dead (civilians, the lot of them) died on the first day from flash and flame burns, others from falling debris. Those who lingered eventually succumbed to radiation sickness. It put a cataclysmic end to a war that left the world shocked and stilted.

Above is the famous mushroom cloud rendered in cauliflower; below is the very real cloud rendered in smoke and flames from high above.

The dropping of the bomb was both a Japanese and American tragedy, and one of the most famous explosions man has ever made. Photographer and designer Brock Davis has been getting a lot of attention across the blogosphere recently for recreating Nagasaki and several other famous tragedy’s explosions through an unexpected medium: cauliflower.

The Hindenburg exploding over a salad bowl, and New Jersey in 1937. 

The post Conscious Questions, Art and Purpose appeared first on EcoSalon.

The rains coming in mean bad news. In Gugulethu, the shanties here are on dirt and when the water comes, this equals mud. But even though the rain has poured during what is typically the dry season, people are out and about preparing for the Christmas tradition. Here, there are no gifts. No decorations. No blinking lights or packed car parks. The “better off” people of this area are buying live chickens and preparing Christmas meals. What characterizes the holiday is open doors and closed doors. A closed door means you have nothing to offer in the way of food to passersby. An open door means anyone can come in for a snack. Children roam the dirt and mud corridors, going from door to door, stuffing their faces with good eats. When they get full, they put food in their bags and carry on. It’s like a like a savory U.S. Halloween with no ghosts.

This was how Laura, our guide described Christmas tradition. But as we drove with her, the meta-stories turned more personal. Though she’s what anyone would call a survivor – educated, powerful and kind – she’s had a tough year. Many in her family have died from all sorts of ailments and she’s been looking after a ten-year-old girl with HIV whose parents passed away earlier in the year. The child doesn’t know she has HIV and her parents made Laura promise she would not tell her. The girl takes anti-retro viral drugs but is told that the drugs are for asthma. What concerns Laura is that the girl is looking to start drinking and when drinking happens with women, it means sex. Yes, we’re talking about a ten-year-old girl. Many are mothers by 13 and 14, and eager boys will use inebriation to initiate sex with their young counterparts. Laura is concerned about the HIV and doesn’t know what to do. She’s concerned about the girl drinking and having sex too, but much is out of her power. Drugs and alcohol are big problems in the slums.

The men are the ones who typically drink. They brew a crude beer there and spend the days drinking it. With so much unemployment, there is little else to do. Meth is an issue and so is something new: Smoking anti retro viral drugs. The HIV medication is so plentiful and cheap here that apparently one can smoke it and get a crack-like high. The come down, I’m told, is extremely painful and thus the drugs used this way are highly, highly addictive. But again, Laura invites to look at the good things we see – the children laughing, the young girl playing a game called Puca which involved drawing a circle and placing stones inside it. The goal is to throw one stone in the air and remove one from the circle before the stone is then caught with the same hand. Once all stones are out of the circle, they replaced in the same but opposite fashion. If successful without dropping the thrown stone, the player wins. Imagination holds children’s minds here – there are almost no books (the pages of books are often used as toilet paper), and definitely no soccer fields. The family dwellings are squatted illegally, but no one kicks anyone out. There is nowhere for them to go. Power is supplied but there is no plumbing. Several families share what amounts to a stone outhouse with a bucket. Once a week, if they are lucky, a service comes round and empties the bucket. With the sun beating during our visit, the evidence of too many people sharing the same bathroom lingers thick in the air.

On the outskirts of Gugulethu, just before a Muslim camp, we come across a circumcision shanty situated between the freeway and the off ramp. When boys are 18 they are sent here to be circumcised without anesthesia as part of a ritual into manhood. The shanty amounts to what look like several igloo shapes, only made of old tarps and plastic bags. They are hot and dirty and unsanitary. Laura explains that many boys get infections from the procedure.

But there are no hospitals. Well, there are, kind of, but ordinary people can’t walk into them and be treated. One hospital serves two million on the outskirts of Cape Town and I’m told that people fear it as it is a place where you go to die. There has been some aid from Doctors Without Borders, but two million people is a lot. Much of the resources that would go to help people here are cutoff by corruption in government. Corruption happens at a very low level and as soon as someone gains a bit of power, he looks to siphon money from aid. There are crackdowns occasionally, but officials are rarely, if ever, prosecuted.

As Laura drives us back into the colored and white part of Cape Town, we see the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping by those who can afford to do it. We’re getting dropped off at The Two Oceans Aquarium and I’m talking about the work on pollution that 5 Gyres does; we have a display we have at the aquarium. Laura mentions that she’s never been to an aquarium. When she says this, I can’t believe it. She’s educated, she’s a home owner, she makes a living. But the stigma things such as aquariums being for people other than her is pervasive. I tell Laura to park the car and come in with me. She’s like a child in a candy store looking at the sharks. She’s amazed. She’s heard about these creatures but has never seen them. We are together and still worlds apart.

Merry Christmas Laura. You’re an inspiration to the world you serve. And beyond.

Editor’s Note: This is part 9 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

The post Christmas in the Slums of Gugulethu: Part 2 appeared first on EcoSalon.

I travel the world looking at garbage. Plastic garbage. This is my job. Our NGO quantifies plastic density in the oceanic gyres, but because all would-be plastic patches are land born, we study garbage wherever we can. When I arrive in a new country, I’m keen to investigate waste management infrastructure because I believe, as does our organization, that pollution is a symptom of poverty and poverty is a symptom of pollution. Environmental catastrophes are created by humans and require solutions that have a positive effect on human quality of life. This is my mantra.

Cape Town is an extremely diverse and complex city. Eleven different languages are spoken in South Africa, and the population is composed of African blacks, whites and “colored.” Colored has a different meaning here – it denotes being of non African descent and of mixed race. It’s not derogatory. Coloreds speak Afrikaans and English as do Whites – for the most part. Blacks speak several languages including Xhosa, the language of Nelson Mandela and this the language we hear in the slum villages. But language can change from block to block at times. Many of the the coloreds are of Malaysian slave descent and comprise the Muslim community and some of their communities are within a stones throw of the shanty towns, though the two cultures rarely, if ever, mix in the townships. Affluent blacks, whites and coloreds do mix in the higher income parts of the city, as well as in the workplace and in politics.

What characterizes any metropolis in South Africa is this shantytown slum situation on the outskirts of the city. It’s quite possible to go from Dolce and Gabbana to abject dirt floor subsistence squatting in tin shacks within a five minute drive. America is very good at making poverty invisible, but here, squatter villages line the highways and are the first thing a traveler is confronted with driving from the airport into the city.

Cape Town in general has security issues – mainly theft rather than violent crime (but confrontational robberies are not uncommon) which is to be expected when have nots live close to haves. As a white person, it is unwise to go into the shanties without a guide. But I was not content to see these places from locked car doors at fifty miles an hour.

Laura the Amazing.

We met Laura outside of a ritzy shopping center in the money part of Cape Town. She grew up in the townships (slums) and was lucky enough to get a scholarship for a university education. Laura has been guiding for over a decade. Her presence commands respect and she has an exceptional power and charm that exudes from her being. For 350 rand, about $50 US, she agreed to show us around the townships. This is how she makes a living. And some of the money goes to support a breakfast program she runs out of her house to feed children before school. No school means no free breakfast and the incentive is enough get kids motivated. As she sees it, the only way to break the cycle of AIDS and poverty is through education – 60 percent of blacks are unemployed and there are 9 million people that have HIV (that have been tested) in South Africa – that’s about 1 in 5.

At first, Laura was trying to figure out what we could handle. We explained that we worked for an NGO on pollution issues and said that we didn’t want the sanitized tour. As I sat in the front seat of her white Mercedes driving north, she started explaining all that we would see. Her knowledge of her country, it’s complexities, issues and histories were out of this world. School was in session as I feverishly took notes on my iPhone as we drove.

Langa was our first township. We entered a typical apartment shared by three families. Three twin beds in a single room, windows without glass, exposed wires and heaps of garbage outside. Residents here pay 20 rand a month (about three dollars) to rent these places. Everything is dirty but the tap water is clean. Though meager, an exceptional amount of care is taken in the dwellings. Beds are made and the floor is swept. But the close quarters make for hard relations – sex for example – sex is something that often occurs in front of children, or as Laura describes it, “they are witness to deeds that exceed their tender years.” Typical motherhood occurs at 14-16. HIV is a major problem and as Laura says, “We bury 100 people every Saturday.” But she’s quick to say it’s not all doom and gloom. Twenty years ago the beating of women and child molestation were common practices. But now, there are legal consequences for such actions, an improvement made from having women in political power. Still, the poverty is pervasive and most here subsist on 500 rands a month ($70) or less. In order to be considered a “worker” by a bank, a family must make ten times that a month. Then, credit and things such as a mortgage becomes possible. For most families here, this not an achievable goal any time soon. But what’s dominant here, beyond the plastic garbage and dirt, are the smiles of children – something that is beautiful anywhere in the world.

Part Two – Christmas in a squatter’s camp.

Editor’s Note: This is part 8 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

The post The Slums of Cape Town: Part 1 appeared first on EcoSalon.

After a journey that was punctuated by storms and unfavorable wind directions, the 5 Gyres crew arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. 31 days, 4100 nautical miles and plastic all the way.

But I am proud. No one has ever explored the South Atlantic Gyre for plastic pollution before. We never batted an eye at the cost incurred when sailing 13 people across an ocean. We believed, we found the resources, we executed. We made it. 67 samples taken every 60 nautical miles all positive for what has become the vomit of land upon our blue planet: plastic. It is of course a bittersweet accomplishment. Acrid because we found what we anticipated what would be there, sweet because we have the data to prove it. We have the assets now to show the world that this human born problem is global. It is an issue that not only affects the environment, but also the quality and standard of living for all beings on earth.

Driving north of Cape Town, we see the residue of apartheid, the slums of Langa and Gugulethu. There it is again, strewn on razor wire, crammed between the corrugated tin shanties, piled and discarded, the ubiquitous calling card of convenience: plastic. It is the alpha land of the sea’s omega. Full circle.

Land ho. Security is ever present in Cape Town, especially in places like ritzy harbors. The approach was hairy: fog, darkness and 50 ships all converging for safe haven on the Cape Of Good Hope. My first walk on land in 31 days was difficult. After so much time at sea the leg muscles tend to atrophy a bit. I couldn’t walk straight. We arrived late – just after 2 a.m. local time trumpeted only by the bark of resident fur seals. But attempting to stroll, wanting for the smell of green flora, I was approached by security. From all appearances, my gait was that of a drunk. Attempting to explain my extreme sobriety of a month without alcohol was fruitless. I was raw, dirty with an unkempt beard – hell I hadn’t worn shoes in twenty days! I was asked to return to my ship. Politics, civil code – land life all set in. I had arrived.

We are docked in front if the Two Oceans Aquarium where we’ve held press events and public education forums. Here we have a bit of celebrity. It’s exciting. I like that the 5 gyres directors are the front (wo)men. I do not like the camera from the other side, but I do like documenting worthy people. My role is perfect here – all I want in my heart is for everyone to see and feel what I saw. Understand the complexity and scale of the issue. The speed by which it worsens. The horror that it wreaks. But also the hope I carry that the problem can and will be solved. It may not be solved by us, but we are laying a foundation that will empower this and the next generation. Life feels good when you think these kinds of things.

And life feels better when you remember why you fight. About a week before we landed, we cruised with a Minke Whale. She found our ship and swam along side, not more than 200 feet from us, breaching and sailing along with us at the same speed. She must have been with us for a half hour at least. Dolphins encounters bring glee to the crew, whales bring ecstasy. Joy.

A Minke is a Baleen whale which means it filters water for food constantly with its mouth. The device by which we scour the ocean for plastic is 25 by 60 centimeters wide, deployed for an hour over about one nautical mile. And every time we have a handful of plastic. Now take a 35 foot whale’s mouth sifting like we are but always, always, always. There is evil math in that. Ugly math.

But though the equation gives us pause, the Minke’s inspire us to keep sailing and attempt to help give the earth back what she deserves: dignity.

Editor’s Note: This is part 7 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his month-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre.

Images: Stiv Wilson

The post Arrival In Cape Town appeared first on EcoSalon.

With just over 700 nautical miles to go before landfall, the worst of the large debris appears to be behind us. Still, we’re pulling up plastic in every sample, though the amounts have dropped off somewhat. It confirms our hypothesis of where the densest plastic pollution should be located. Slowly, we’re sailing out of the South Atlantic Gyre. We’ve been becalmed for several days, only getting a few bursts of speed from sporadic winds. For days, the motor, which we refer to as the donkey, has been chugging away scratching longitude for us eastward. We’re nearly out of fuel and on a sailboat, there is no fuel gauge. We’ll need to kill the donkey at some point and wait until the wind comes.

Sailors never wish for wind, as you don’t know what you might get. Scientists are practical, objective, methodical. Sailors are not. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and it’s been comical to see the mix of different personalities coalesce on this voyage. Sailors don’t leave on Friday; they avoid the color green, bananas and women onboard. Scientists ask sailors, “Why?” Sailors say, “I don’t know, you just don’t.”

For the most part, our science work is over and we’ve been spending the last week scripting a short documentary and making sure we have all the photos we need to portray our story clearly to the public. We’ve also been conducting crew interviews. And more swimming with garbage when we come across it. There’s no experience quite like watching half-deteriorated plastic garbage floating by. It’s so dispersed, but occasionally you’ll come across concentrations of plastic pollution, tangled together, some of it recognizable, some of it not. At first glimpse the ocean doesn’t really look polluted in many areas, but once one investigates a bit deeper, sieving the cerulean blue, the stain is revealed.

It’s our job to document it. When swimming, we take our photographers and filmmakers into the water, in an attempt to get assets that show just how incongruent plastic floating thousands and thousands of miles from land at random is. Frankly, it’s just plain bizarre. Aesthetically, it’s the only thing unnatural out here.

The last stretch homeward is bittersweet. We’re not even navigating anymore. We’re heading almost due east, and bearing 97 degrees, a course that will take us straight into Capetown.

Over the past month, traveling some 4,100 nautical miles, we’ve discovered what we thought we would – plastic, ever present. But finding it is no less of a blow to our collective hearts simply because we hypothesized it. Seeing environmental degradation of this magnitude (the distance we’ve traveled is roughly 1/5th of the way around the world), everyday, for over 30 days isn’t easy on the spirit.

In five days time we’ll reach land, docking at The Two Oceans Aquarium where we’ll hold media events, public outreach/education events and ultimately present to public our findings as well as let interested people tour our ship.

Arrival is bittersweet, as part of me yearns for land and the other part loves to be out here – the simplicity, the beauty, the self-reliance and community. But it’s also the not knowing where your keys, or phone, or wallet is – and not caring. Just as I’m writing these words, I hear, “Whale!” shouted from up on deck. I run up the gangway; not 30-feet off our starboard beam is a minke whale, about 35-feet just cruising with us at our exact boat speed. The water is so clear we can see the outline of her under the water, and then slowly, the head rises, thar she blows, then the sharp, unmistakable dorsal fin before she drops below again. For twenty minutes, she swims along side our vessel, not 50-feet away. Then, just as she disappears, our fishing line zings and we’ve got a 25-pound tuna on. Sashimi.

In a month, I’ll return to the ocean for another month at sea, studying another transect of the gyre, to gain a bigger, better picture of the pollution we’ve now come to call common. Somewhere in this kind of life is the key to solving the environmental nightmare we study.

Out here our lives waste not, want not.

Editor’s Note: This is part 6 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his month-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre.

Images: 5 Gyres and Jody Lemmon

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