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

The post Wanting for Wastelands appeared first on EcoSalon.

At long last, the weather is good. After enduring a storm that has tested my physical and mental endurance beyond any limit I’ve previously experienced, the 5 Gyres crew has awoken to calm seas and brilliant sunshine. The longest I’ve been caught in a storm at sea is 72 hours, and this one raged for nearly 10 days. Ten days of serious weather that shreds sails and makes instruments fail feels like an infinity of time marinating in the worst of what nature can manifest. Your mind keeps telling you it will pass, but as you shiver, and shots of adrenaline whip through the body, you don’t know when. You can’t. Weather forecast information tuned to our position at sea is highly accurate for the first 24 hours, but gets progressively inaccurate by degrees for each 24 hour period beyond that. If we were just sailing we’d sail away from this horror, but we can’t; we need to stay put so we can get our sample at our intended mark. (Our goal is to get a 50 sample transect all the way across.)

Like a promise kept, the storm has passed and it looks like the high pressure system we’ve craved has stabilized. Now, it’s all sunshine and calm waters. We’ve arrived – the eye of the gyre in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. Until now we’ve been chasing an invisible mark in the ocean, a coordinate conjured from a computer model generated by 5 Gyres scientific advisor, Dr. Nikolai Maximenko. The mark is near the center of the gyre, known as the “accumulation zone” where the densest plastic pollution should reside.

With the sea calm, the ocean is beginning to show us our human synthetic stain, just where Maximenko predicted. All day crew spotting for garbage on deck have been yelling out sightings or large flotsam to our port and starboard. Beyond the universal plastic fragments found in our samples, we’re now seeing macro plastic pollution: laundry baskets, hard hats, ghost nets, pieces of air conditioner housings, and indiscriminate, half chewed (by fish) plastic garbage.

To capture this garbage is a difficult. Because we’re in a sailboat, we need a coordinated effort to slow the ship down in time to scoop the larger pieces of plastic pollution from the ocean. Typically at the bow we have a first spotter, someone who yells commands back to second spotter amidships, who then relies the commands to the skipper to steer Sea Dragon (our ship) alongside the trash so that the crew, armed with landing nets, can scoop it up. We don’t study the macro plastic garbage, but we collect it for education purposes and also document it with still photography and video in order to educate the public when we’re back on terra firma.

It feels like an organized hunt, but the kill makes us sick. Though we’re on a voyage of discovery, exploring a never-before-studied gyre for plastic pollution, I knew the garbage would be here. Unfortunately, I know from past experience. I’d have been shocked if we didn’t find anything.

And here, like everywhere in our oceanic gyres, it’s dense. Every few minutes we spot another piece. Maybe it’s a bucket, maybe it’s a water bottle – but what else? What might be an 1/8 of a mile to the north, or to the south? Or, or, or…even as a speck of machinery traveling through a massive space, we still just “happen upon it”, ubiquitous and sinister.

Finding a denser spot, we drop sail and get in the water to investigate. Underneath, you often find life beginning to colonize the plastic trash. Today, we observed crabs and fish calling the left side of an air conditioner unit home. It’s heart breaking, particularly in light of our recent findings about chemicals and plastic.

We swan dive into 5,000 feet of the clearest azure water you’ve ever seen – safe from the floating debris. It is a surreal experience. Even in the calm, the current is strong and one most swim fairly hard to keep up with the boat. Getting the photo and video assets are important, but making sure one doesn’t lose the boat is always in the back of the mind. After all, the garbage is near and familiar, but land is still 1,500 miles away.

Editor’s Note: This is part 5 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.

The post The Eye of the Gyre appeared first on EcoSalon.

Still, poor weather persists. Isn’t it supposed to be the onset of summer? Last night on watch, Marcus, Chelsea, Mike and Anna experienced heaving seas, sideways rain and wind gusts over 30 knots. By the time Bonnie, Rich, Mary, Max and I got on watch, conditions had eased a bit, but the wind drives into the noon hour.

We’ve been in the mid-twenties ever since leaving Brazil. As we gain longitude eastward, conditions should improve. But right now, we’re confronted by low pressure systems spinning around Cape Horn and after 72 hours of this, the crew is ready for some sun and some organized seas.

With this wind, we could be in Capetown within a couple of weeks. But of course, this isn’t a race. We’re sampling every 50 miles for plastic pollution, but with these messy sea states, getting good samples is difficult. The plastic that floats is not neutrally buoyant, but it’s close, so when sea state goes up, plastic is driven down into the water column. Best case conditions are calmer, flatter seas for a more accurate picture of density. When the wind goes over 25 knots and the seas get ugly, we cease sampling, and either hove-to (a technique in sailing where the sails are backed to keep the nose into the wind, but slow down the boat’s progress), or sail in the opposite direction having marked the next sampling area, turning around to find it again when the weather has passed.

After about 10 more samples, we should be getting into the high pressure for quite some time until conditions will most likely worsen as we approach Africa. It’s important to keep from getting a gap in our data because this expedition is the first ever to sample this area of planet earth, and much like how Algalita’s work in the North Pacific was the impetus for Scripps to conduct work there, it’s our hope that our work here will inspire oceanographers the world over to concentrate not just on the northern hemisphere, but understand that this issue of plastic pollution is global.

For the few trawls that we have conducted, it’s clear that plastic is an issue here, too, even though we’ve yet to reach the accumulation zones, i.e. the gyre. Each gyre has its own DNA of garbage and we’re interested to see what Africa and South America’s offerings will be. We’re also wondering if it will be denser or lighter based on several vectors. How will lower GDP of countries affect their garbage impact on the ocean? How many watersheds contribute? What kind of plastic pollution will see? Will lack of waste management infrastructure for processing plastic affecting how much gets dumped? It all remains to be seen.

From the sailing side of things, we have yet to repair the mainsail as the sea is too choppy to get the sewing machine on deck or trust ourselves with large needles doing careful work. For now, we sail with the smaller staysail and the big Yankee. Or Jenny, as it’s called in the States.

The crew that’s been battling seasickness seems to finally be getting the upper hand on it. That’s good news. No more misery. Soon, we’ll all be enjoying enforceable mid afternoon dance parties aboard sea dragon.

The post Sea Dragon Day 3: Plastic Dreams appeared first on EcoSalon.

The team assembled, we’re making last minute preparations for our month-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre. In total, we’ll spend some 30 days at sea looking to discover (or hopefully not) the South Atlantic Garbage Patch. Yesterday, we shot press images of our team in a bay at Ihle Grande, one of the most beautiful places this writer has ever seen. Taking a quick ferry around the island, we searched for waves with pro surfers Mary Osborne and James Pribram, two 5 Gyres ambassadors looking to spread the word about plastic pollution to the surfing community when they return.

Hiking up through the jungle, then down, on a path that would be a nightmare if it started to rain, we found a wide open beach with pure clean water and beautiful waves. It was my job to get photos of them, but for this surfer, there are few things on earth harder than watching people having a blast while surfing. Soon, I got my shots, and had a go.

We awoke to a beautiful morning of clouds over the stiff jungle peaks and readied the boat for our trip to Angre Dos Reis (anchorage of the gods) where we’ll pass immigration, fuel up, and do last minute fresh food shopping. Fresh food will be a distant memory in a week’s time, as very little survives in a hot, salty climate for a length of time.

This will be my longest journey at sea; some four or more weeks without land, a reality that both worries and excites me. Our team is dynamic, heavy on science, activism, and pro athletes with great networks for the cause. We’ve got events scheduled on the other side with the South Africa press, and we’re hoping for strong media attention. Our mission is to demonstrate that this is a global problem, not something that just exists in the North Pacific.

Here we go.

The post Special Investigative Series: Sea Dragon Sets Sail, Day 1 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Rio de Janeiro

It’s day one of a three-and-a-half month sailing adventure from Rio de Janeiro to Capetown, where I’ll spend three to four weeks at sea and a month in South Africa before sailing north to Walvis Bay, Namibia and back again to Montevideo, Uruguay. I’ll be with a dynamic team of scientists, activists, professional sailors and surfers, and seasoned documentary filmmakers. I’m supposed to make sure we have the money to do all this, bringing sponsorships and grants and documenting the whole thing in words and pictures. Yup, it’s me again, out in the world looking for plastic trash in yet another oceanic gyre. If you’re asking, “What the hell is a gyre?”, read on.

Gyre 101

The nonprofit I work for is The 5 Gyres Institute. Unless you’re living in a cave (which you aren’t), you know that our single-use-synthetic-everything lifestyle wreaks havoc on our land. You may also know that this lifestyle is destroying our oceans, and maybe you’ve even heard of something called The North Pacific Gyre…or, more accurately if less academically put, The North Pacific Garbage Patch.

A gyre is a swirling vortex in the ocean formed by opposing trade winds at higher and lower latitudes that are affected by this thing from science class called the Coriolis Effect. Basically, the Coriolis Effect makes these winds bend in an arc because of the earth’s rotation and thus, you get a massive circular wind pattern whose energy is transferred to the sea. And it’s big, like North America big. (And, you now know what a gyre is, which means you know more about this than most people.)

I often explain it in simpler terms: A gyre is a toilet bowl without a drain. Anything that comes off land or ship will likely enter it, spinning towards the center. Plastic, because it’s so resilient, will remain in the ocean for thousands of years. And, while there has been much hype about the North Pacific Gyre and the Texas-sized trash heap that resides there, what about the other four?

There are four more giant plastic gyres.

In fact, there are 11 such gyres, but “The 11 Gyres Institute” isn’t as sexy. (Kidding aside, the other six are much smaller, but eventually, we’ll go to them, too.) There are five major subtropical oceanic gyres in the world: North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and Indian. The 5 Gyres organization is interested in looking at the other four  The New York Times doesn’t know about. (Sailing across the North Atlantic last year, we found acres upon acres of junk in another gyre. It was horrendous enough to compel me to quit my previous job; I’m now plastic trash at sea guy.)

As a surfer, I was also weary of the years of plastic trash washing up on my home beaches of Oregon.

Fast forward to today, as I am preparing to sail more of the world with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. We’re hunting for garbage. How bad is it? The pill to swallow is more like a single use latte lid: Not one of us will ever walk any beach in the entire world during our lifetimes and not see plastic washed up on it.

The South Atlantic Gyre

In a week’s time I’ll sail from Rio to Capetown aboard our vessel, The Sea Dragon, operated by expedition partner, Pangaea Explorations. For this project, we’re essentially joined at the hip for several years and thanks to sponsorship by ChacoUSA, Patagonia, Quiksilver Foundation, and EcoUsable water bottles, we’re solvent and will be able to document what’s never before been studied: A subtropical oceanic gyre for plastic pollution. Plastic garbage in the ocean isn’t just a North Pacific issue, it’s a massive global environmental problem on par with climate change. Yes, it’s that bad.

It is also almost unspeakably sad. Sea turtles and marine mammals get entangled in the standard six pack rings and choke to death; countless birds ingest tampon applicators and syringes and desperately feed these toxic items, regurgitated, to their hungry young.

Plastic in the ocean absorbs persistent organic pollutants that enter via runoff and watersheds from land. Plastic is like a sponge for these pollutants: Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (from the oil from cars), DDT, PCBs, flame retardants, you name it – plastic is so effective at absorbing this stuff that fragments of plastic have been shown to have a million times higher toxicity than the ambient sea water around it.

Fish eat plastic, and the real concern is that these toxins are transferring to fish tissues and bio-accumulating up the food chain all the way up to that spicy tuna roll. If you drew your own blood and did a toxicology screen on it, you might be surprised to find these contaminants in your very own bloodstream.

Enter Chelsea Rochman, a scientist I’ll be with at sea who studies this issue. She’s working to see if there is a one-to-one connection of toxic plastic to fish tissue. Already, we have anecdotal evidence that it happens; a lawsuit was recently filed in the Superior Court of California suing the makers of fish oil supplements for not disclosing the high levels of PCBs in the pills. But we don’t have enough data yet.

For the next three-and-a-half months, I’ll be writing about what we find, what life is like at sea studying this stuff, what we’re really doing to our oceans. I will be transmitting my reports via satellite connection, and EcoSalon’s editors will be filing the articles on my behalf.

Until next week, here in Rio, I’m sitting on the seventh floor of a rather elegant hotel that I’ve treated myself to for the first two nights I’m on this adventure. Life after this will be unpredictable and rougher, a life I’m accustomed to and love, so this place with its ocean view and safe place to store my camera equipment and drink cold beer is a splurge for me.

Already, in the span of seven hours I’ve been offered sex, a “friend” to take me to a club, cocaine, and weed. I think that’s what happens when you’re an American traveler by yourself wearing big sunglasses and Vans drinking espresso in a café in the land of pleasure. (No, I’m not one for any of these things.)

I’m sad and happy about what is to come. Until next time.

The post Her Name Is Rio, and There Is Plastic on the Sand appeared first on EcoSalon.

Yes, that’s an N.W.A. reference. Here’s another, less controversial one:

“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all the plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”  – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I’m barely getting through my days right now without the aid of antiquated gangsta rap and John. I’m in the hustling trenches. Wake up. Write, then market. Phone call, email, phone call, email, wait, wait, email telling you to wait, phone call, rinse, repeat. Support our mission! Give us money! Yes, you’ll get pro photo assets. Yes, we’ll shout you out. Yes, we work with the UN, yes, big media is going to cover it. Yes, we’ll rock your brand as long as you give a demonstrable, objective crap about the earth. We’re here. We’re epic, we’re leaving soon. Give us money.

This is my life for the next four weeks. It’s good, though: I believe in what I do. Perennially on the road, I’m fund hunting via iPhone (I once filled out a 12-page grant application on it). Red into the black, that’s my mission. Float the boat.

So, no reports this week from far flung locales. I’m at home doing the dirty work that makes this plastic trash studying in the ocean work possible. And I’m antsy. I can’t hunch over my computer saying “I need to do more yoga” one minute longer, reading about Sun Chips ditching their compostable bag because it’s just too noisy. Or Coburn, the small-minded bastard, not having an issue with shark finning. It’s crazymaking. Forget ethical integrity so we can snack quietly and enjoy a tipple of exotic broth.

November 1, I leave for Rio De Janeiro, Brazil to join my 5 Gyres team to prepare for our departure to Capetown, South Africa, aboard our trusty lady, The Sea Dragon, to study plastic pollution in yet another oceanic gyre. Then I’ll hang in South Africa doing events and presentations (and surfing) for the month of December. Next, it’s up the coast of Africa to Walvis Bay, Namibia, to an island named St. Helena, then to Montevideo, Uruguay. I’ll be “home” February 11, 2011.

The crew will consist of our usual suspects and we’re in the throes of selecting the fresh meat. Sailing across an ocean is no joke, and you need to vet your crew if you’re going to occupy a 72 by 15 foot space for 30 days straight. And our ship is a working vessel. No whiners or dilettantes allowed. We take journalists, artists, pro surfers, industry reps, students, teachers – if you come back and fight for the cause, then it’s worth you seeing something that very few people on earth even imagine exists: A plastic trash vortex in the middle of the ocean.

If you’re a plastic warrior and have some skills, talk to the Ed. at EcoSalon and I’ll get you on the ship. It’ll change your life. It did mine.

These are the areas we study. What you’re looking at here is a computer model of buoys that drifted in the ocean for 10 years, pinging their locations everyday. This is their path. The gyre, as we say, is the red parts. Some are more concentrated, some are more diffuse. All have an incredible amounts of plastic in them.

If you have an interest in this subject (which I so warmly refer to as our little marine disaster of incomprehensible scale), I’m going to be reporting via satellite on what we find “out there” in an area of the world’s ocean that has never been studied for plastic pollution a few times a week.

Stay tuned. And fight everyday. Even just a little.

The post F@$K tha Plastique, Goin’ Straight South Atlantic Bound appeared first on EcoSalon.