Moby-Duck (21 page)

I mentioned to him what Pallister had told me in his defense: how he'd like to expand GoAK's focus but didn't have the deep legal pockets to do so; how he planned to apply for Waterkeeper certification; how volunteers were expensive to insure and less efficient than his three sons. Shavelson conceded that it was hard for environmental groups to litigate against polluters in pro-development Alaska. But he felt that GoAK was only making the problem worse, draining public resources that might be put to better use and in the meantime giving polluters the opportunity to remediate their polluted reputations. In his opinion, the Gore Point cleanup was essentially a boondoggle verging on eco-graft. Beach cleanups could teach the general public to be “good stewards” of the environment, so long as you worked with local communities and enlisted lots of volunteers, which is something that the Cook Inletkeeper tried to do, but cleanups alone did little to solve the problem once and for all. To do that, you had to stop it at its source.

The evidence on this point seems to be unambiguously on Shavelson's side. Year after year, equipped with garbage bags and good intentions, hundreds of thousands of volunteers participate in the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), and year after year, the tonnage of debris is greater than before. Seba Sheavly, a marine biologist who ran the ICC until 2005, will happily admit that the Ocean Conservancy's cleanup “has never been about curing the problem of marine debris.” It has always been, she told me when I called her at her offices in Virginia, “a public awareness campaign.” Sheavly is now a private consultant who lends her expertise on marine debris to such estimable clients as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the UN Environment Programme. She's also worked for the American Chemistry Council, whose public relations department eagerly gave me her phone number. Sheavly considers the 2006 Marine Debris Act “the best chance we've had in years to make real progress.” Other environmentalists I spoke to regard the act as merely the latest in a long line of toothless legislative actions that have failed. “If you look at how much plastic is out there,” says Shavelson's boss, Steve Fleischli, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, current federal policy seems, “well, rather comical.” In the opinion of both Sheavly and the ACC, marine debris is mainly a local littering problem, and the primary value of coastal cleanups lies in the lesson they teach volunteers—“that what they're picking up comes from them.”

As I'd learned from Pallister, and seen for myself at Gore Point, only a fraction of the debris washing onto Alaska's outer coast comes from local litterbugs. On much of Alaska's 33,000-mile-long shoreline, in fact, there are no local litterbugs. On most Alaskan shores, as on those of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, or Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, there are no people at all. But there is plastic. I for one wasn't sure what edifying lessons to draw from all the flotsam and jetsam I'd helped bag. I hadn't thrown those water bottles into the ocean, or lost those derelict fishing nets, or sent containers of toys and shoes tumbling overboard.

“I've never known a six-pack ring to take itself off of a stack of cans, go out the back door, get out of someone's kitchen, and look for a bird to strangle,” says Sheavly. “It's about pollution, but people are the source of it, in terms of their actions and how they function.” No one doubts that people are the source of all the plastic in the ocean. The question is, which people? The answer is more complicated than Sheavly's six-packring scenario suggests.

According to Steve Fleischli, “some of the pollution originates at the beach. Most does not.” Data from the International Coastal Cleanup at first seems to contradict Fleischli's analysis. Measured by number rather than weight or volume, 81 percent of the “debris items” that ICC volunteers collected in 2006 came from two somewhat vaguely described sources, “smoking related activities” and “shoreline and recreational activities.” But the ICC collects most of its data on recreational beaches. Travel away from the sun-worshipping throngs and the results begin to change.

In 2001, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project sampled forty-three randomly selected beaches in the L.A. area and found that “debris density on the remote rocky shoreline was greater than on high-use sandy beaches for most debris items.” There was a fairly simple explanation for the discrepancy: municipalities periodically cleaned up “high-use sandy beaches” with beach-sweeping machines. The study's data set reads like the inventory of a really big convenience store: straws, 84,990; cigarette lighters, 5,810; toys, 2,159. But the single most abundant item—nurdles—had nothing to do with recreation, or smoking, or litterbugs refusing to give a hoot. Plastics manufacturers ship many kinds of virgin resin to extruders and molders in the form of little pellets. These are nurdles. If you're curious about what nurdles look like, disembowel a Beanie Baby. The toys are stuffed with them. Even when compared by weight, on beaches in the L.A. area, nurdles were fourteen times more abundant than cigarette butts, the fourth most common item found.

Although quoted in the press far less often than Moore or Ebbesmeyer, the man who deserves the most credit for discovering and mapping the so-called Garbage Patch is an oceanographer named Robert Day. In the mideighties, Day and a team of other scientists began trawling for plastic in the North Pacific, inventing the sampling and sorting methods that Charlie Moore would later adopt. Those surveys showed that most varieties of plastic pollution turn up in unlikely places, including the Gulf of Alaska. The largest concentrations were found north of Hawaii, in the Subtropical Convergence Zone, which Day, like most other scientists, has never taken to calling the Garbage Patch.

But things grew thornier still: Sponsors of the International Coastal Cleanup include a number of corporations that make and sell the sorts of products the volunteers most commonly pick up, corporations like Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, and ITW-Hi Cone, manufacturer of the notorious six-pack ring. Every year, along with funding and volunteers, these sponsors contribute inspirational homilies about saving the planet. “Working together we can keep our coasts clean,” ran Coca-Cola's contribution to the ICC's 2006 report, titled “A World of Difference.” Marine debris, declared Dow Chemical, is a “problem that we, the citizens of the world, have the power to stop.” Is it? Over the past two decades, the ICC has shown no sign of stopping it.

Shavelson asked me if I remembered the old “crying Indian” ad, an anti-littering public service announcement that ran on TV in the seventies. Of course I did, as would any sentient TV-watching child of the seventies. If you were born too late, or if your memory's fuzzy, or if you were alive and sentient in the seventies but didn't watch TV, you can now view the crying Indian ad as often as you like thanks to the magic of the Internet. The preservation of pop-cultural ephemera is perhaps one of the most underappreciated blessings the Internet has bestowed on humanity; reviewing the crying Indian ad, I find myself experiencing something akin to those time-traveling intimations of immortality ignited in Proust's mind by a petit madeleine.
¹¹
Said Indian was played by an actor who went by the stage name—ironic for a crying Indian—of Iron Eyes Cody. Even off camera Iron Eyes Cody tried to pass as an Indian of Cherokee-Cree descent. In truth, like many of my Greenwich Village in-laws, he was descended from Sicilians. Irony Eyes Cody he should be called, for his real name was Espera Oscar De Corti. What, in the ad, makes him cry, is a bag of trash tossed onto a highway shoulder from the window of a passing car.

First broadcast on Earth Day in 1971, the ad appeared to be the heartfelt if heavy-handed work of environmentalists. It wasn't. It was part of the Keep America Beautiful campaign. If like many Americans you thought that Keep America Beautiful was an environmental group, you'd be mistaken. It was created by beverage and packaging executives in 1953. By organizing volunteer cleanups and running public service announcements, the group has over the past half century managed to present pollution as an aesthetic problem for which litterbugs, not industries, are to blame. Meanwhile, the group's sponsors—the American Chemistry Council among them—continue to lobby against regulatory actions.

In Bob Shavelson's opinion, GoAK was comparable to Keep America Beautiful. It was an Astroturf group, a Trojan Waterkeeper. Politicians and corporations “love beach cleanups,” he told me, “because of the metrics.” By metrics he meant measurable results. Results that lend themselves to spectacular photo ops. Results that can be reckoned in tons, rather than in parts per billion. Show a scientifically illiterate layperson the chemical formula of bisphenol A, or try explaining to them the phenomenon of lipophilic bioaccumulation, or endocrine disruption, and their attention will drift off on currents of boredom or doubt. They'll seek refuge in pictures of Jessica Alba or go dipnetting in Bird Creek. Show them photographs like those Pallister had taken at Gore Point, before and during the cleanup, and wallets begin to open. “I have a friend who used to be a Democratic congresswoman,” Shavelson said. “She says, ‘You know, there's nothing that resonates more with senators than that stuff.'” It's no wonder, says Shavelson, that Ted Stevens, Alaska's famously pro-development Republican senator, cosponsored the 2006 Marine Debris, Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act.

Nor is it any wonder that the commercial fishing industry supported it. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing funding, the director of another Alaskan environmental group would later tell me, and I would later confirm, that the largest Alaskan beneficiary of the Marine Debris Program was the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation (MCAF), the group from which Pallister had just won a $50,000 grant. Since the MCAF had been given the power to disburse an outsize portion of the federal funds allocated to Alaska for marine debris programs, this unnamed environmentalist was, like Pallister, beholden to their largesse. Hence, her request for anonymity. Like Keep America Beautiful, and Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling, the MCAF is no more a conservation group than Iron Eyes Cody was an Indian or GoAK a chapter of the Waterkeeper Alliance. It's a taxexempt nonprofit created in 2005 by the commercial fishing lobby.

“A lot of what they lobby for favors the big guys,” this environmentalist told me. By big guys she meant the owners of the factory ships and processing plants, as opposed to “the little guys,” the “cowboy” fishermen like Larry Calvin who own a boat or two. To the MCAF, she said, “beach cleanups are a PR issue.”

A few days later, I flew down to Juneau to meet with representatives from the MCAF. Their spokesman, Bob King—an erstwhile radio news anchor who'd crossed over to the journalistic dark side of public relations—readily acknowledged his employers' connections to commercial fishing. The connection was logical and legitimate, King argued. The fishing lobby could more effectively than mistrusted outsiders teach fishermen how to prevent gear loss. Then he took me to the Alaskan Brewing Company, where a flack named Amy Woods plied me with brochures and beer. The beer, I will admit at the risk of product endorsement, was quite tasty. The brochures, less so.

Teaming up with the MCAF, the Alaskan Brewing Company had committed “1% of all proceeds from Alaskan IPA to provide grants that support the cleanup and preservation of the Pacific Ocean and its coastlines.” When the word
proceeds
replaces the word
profits
, you know you've entered the realm of smoke and mirrors known as PR. How, exactly, would the Alaskan Brewing Company support the cleanup of the Pacific Ocean and its coastlines? Perhaps by endorsing a bottle bill exacting a deposit on Alaskan IPA? Or perhaps by endorsing a ban on disposables? Or perhaps by opposing more insidious polluters—those that generated greenhouse gases, for instance? Or those that spilled oil or mining tailings into watersheds? Nope. The Alaskan Brewing Company would sponsor cleanups and decorate its packaging with public service announcements.

About half the debris befouling Alaskan coasts is derelict fishing gear, and although most of that gear appears to be foreign in origin, much of it isn't. The MCAF with some truth claims that Alaska's fishermen are, compared with their foreign competitors, exemplary stewards of the waters from which they earn their living; they work with scientists to prevent overfishing, adhere far more faithfully than their foreign competitors to anti-littering laws such as Marpol Annex V, and in fact there is some evidence to suggest that marine debris prevention efforts have had more success in Alaska than elsewhere, slowing the rate of accumulation if not reversing it. Regrettably, under the rough conditions Alaskan fishermen encounter in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, some amount of accidental gear loss is inevitable, but it would be unfair, the MCAF contends, to hold law-abiding Alaskan fishermen accountable for debris that is accidentally lost or foreign in origin.