Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This is a lot like what happened in Chernobyl, where radionuclides followed the same
pathways as nutrients to become incorporated into vegetation, and presumably animals. As
the journalist and author Mary Mycio has written, in Chernobyl “radiation is no longer 'on'
the zone, but 'of' the zone.” Perhaps we can already say the same of plastic in the oceans.
It is not only a fact of life, but part of it.
How then to clean it up? To remove a billion large and tiny pieces of the ocean from
itself? A cosmic coffee filter? And then, how to avoid also straining out every whale and
minnow in the sea, every sprite of plankton?
It was no surprise, then, to find that organizations devoted to this issue tended to avoid
the idea of cleanup. Charles Moore's Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a leader in the
budding field of Garbage Patch studies, has a bent for “citizen science” that hearkens back
to science's roots as a discipline founded by amateurs. Rather than speculate about cleanup,
it produces peer-reviewed research for journals like the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Moore
has been openly scornful of the idea of cleaning up marine plastic. Appearing on the Late
Show with David Letterman, he swatted down his host's hopeful questions about cleanup.
“Snowball's chance in hell,” he said. (Letterman told Moore his outlook seemed “bleak”
and proposed they get a drink.) Other organizations focus on finding garbage patches in the
other ocean gyres of the world or on raising awareness to combat the overuse of plastic on
land.
So Project Kaisei is special. “Capturing the plastic vortex” is more than its motto. It's
a succinct mission statement. Not content to tilt at the windmill of keeping plastics out of
the ocean in the first place, Kaisei has chosen to go after the biggest windmill of them all:
finding some way to clean them up.
The force behind Project Kaisei is Mary Crowley, a toothy woman in late middle age
with a warm smile and an unshakable belief in the possibilities of marine debris cleanup.
She has gone so far as to envision ocean-borne plastic retrieval as an actual industry. “Fish-
ing for plastics, so to speak, is not that different from fishing for fish,” she told me, leaning
on the Kaisei 's starboard rail. “And unfortunately, we've so overfished the oceans. I think
it would be a wonderful employment for fishermen to be able to get involved in ocean
cleanup, and give fish a chance to have a healthier environment and restock.”
We can only hope that one day the fishing industry will be rescued by fishing for plastic
instead of actual fish. (Indeed, a proposal to subsidize fishermen for debris pickup has even
been floated in the EU.) In any case, let's state for the record that in the early-twenty-first
century, when most people said cleanup was impossible, Project Kaisei kept the dream
alive. May they be proven prescient.
This summer's mission, though, had been shrinking in scope almost since it was con-
ceived. There had originally been plans for two trips, in quick succession, as well as a short
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