Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
image to be horrified by, we can't approach the problem in our minds. But sometimes the
imagery distorts our thinking, or becomes a substitute for approaching the problem in the
first place. And when there simply is no adequate image, we substitute others, creating is-
lands where none exist.
No island, no carpet of plastic—yet we had without question entered the Garbage Patch.
We had sailed a thousand empty miles into nowhere, finally reaching this place. And what
did we find here, so removed from humanity? Far more trash than you see in San Francisco
Bay. More than you see in your own back alley. Every minute on the water, every thirty
seconds, a bottle, a bucket, a piece of tarp, a sprinkle of confetti, multiplied by the count-
less square mileage of the Gyre. And yet if you looked across the surface of the ocean, it
was unremarkable. Would-be debunkers need not resort to pointing out, as they do, that
you can't find an image of the Garbage Patch on Google Earth. They should point out that
you can't find images of the Garbage Patch
anywhere.
This is because it isn't a visual problem, and this conflict between the reality of the prob-
lem and its nonvisual nature is at the root of the plastic island misconception. A metaphor
is needed, a compelling image to suggest the scale and mass of the problem.
So let us explode the plastic island once and for all, and call it a
galaxy.
The Garbage
Patch is like the Milky Way, an impossibly massive spiral that, because of its very vastness,
is also phenomenally diffuse. Most of our galaxy is empty space. You could pass right
through it without ever bumping into a star or a planet. The most massive object in the uni-
verse visible to the naked eye is made mostly of nothing.
If you were trying to figure out what a galaxy was, you would be plenty interested in the
empty space between the stars, in whether or not it was truly empty, and in how the distri-
bution of stars changed as you passed through the spiral arms. Like this, you might start to
get an idea of your galaxy's shape, structure, and size. (Note: Your galaxy is many times
the size of Texas.)
Similarly, if we had been dragging sample nets and taking real data, a stretch of empty
Gyre water would have been just as interesting to us as one decorated with plastic, not
least because access to the Garbage Patch is so difficult. In all of history, how many re-
search missions had been to the Eastern Garbage Patch to study marine plastic? The folks
at Algalita tell me it's about a dozen. The pool of existing data is therefore so small, and
the character and dynamics of the Garbage Patch so poorly understood, that it felt negligent
merely to obsess about finding the highest concentrations. But that is what we were doing.
And if we were here to test cleanup methods, well, shouldn't those methods apply even in
more diffuse areas? We were missing an opportunity to help inch the science forward.
And the science needed inching. A few hours on bow watch were enough to leave any
thoughtful deckhand bursting with questions. Where were the plastic bags, for instance?
