The Long Road

My friend Danielle of It Starts With Me and her family have picked up over 40,000 cigarette butts from Wrightsville Beach, NC. And counting.

This, by any measure in a sane world, would be insane. Knowing this, Danielle and the Cape Fear branch of Surfrider helped organize a town meeting last night to push for a ban on smoking at the beach.

Surfrider's campaign posters
are top-notch

Despite a packed house filled with a sea of supporters in blue shirts reading "Breathe Easy / Keep it Clean" (some 90% of the room supported the ban), the council voted 3-2 against.

In Portland, Maine it took until February 2012 for the city even to acknowledge that a plastic cigarette butt, loaded with a cocktail of toxic chemicals, was litter!

Monument Square, Portland, ME
(image from the Portland Press Herald online)

Let that sink in for a moment. The first rumblings of the ill-effects of cigarettes came in the 1940s. By 1970, cigarette advertising was banned from TV. The Tobacco Wars of the early 1990s ended with the universal understanding that cigarettes are dangerous, and deadly. Yet it took 20 more years for Maine's largest city to identify a cigarette butt as litter.

Last week I visited the Maine Fishermen's Forum up in Rockland at the beautiful Samoset Resort, overlooking rocky cliffs and a foggy sea. The fishing industry in the Gulf of Maine has reeled from one crisis to another for decades. Pollution, overfishing, acidification, sea-temperature rise -- these are putting tremendous pressure on fish stocks. So much of this comes back to simple mistreatment of the fishery & the environment. Yet judging by the view I saw out on the covered walkway...

100 more all around the can and snowy sidewalk

...care for the environment isn't high on the radar.

Since I started the Flotsam Diaries, I've pulled about 1/2 mile of fishing rope from local beaches.

200 more feet pulled up at Curtis Cove, Biddeford
on March 7, 2012

It's all plastic -- nylon or polypropylene. It will last forever, in some form. What I've retrieved represents the tiniest percent of what's certainly out there. I've also recorded several dozen derelict lobster traps washed up. Here's 30 or so from Goose Rocks Beach, Kennebunk, last year:

Each trap is vinyl-coated, and each slowly releases 1000 chunks of toxic polymers as the steel rusts. Conservatively there are half a million derelict lobster traps on the seafloor in the Gulf of Maine. The number is probably far higher.

Yet Maine has no regulations for monitoring lost rope. If a lobsterman loses a trap, they fill out a form. But that paper form goes into a stack, with nobody really examining where it was lost. Even if the location was known, there are ZERO funds in the state to recover any of the gear.

So the problems grow. And heads remain firmly buried in the sand.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. More and more cities are taking cigarette litter seriously. Even Portland, finally. More and more are taking grocery-bag and other plastic litter seriously. And the state of Washington has just passed ground-breaking regulation to monitor and help clean up fishing debris. There are fingerposts and guides the world over showing the good that can happen when you admit a problem exists & then fight it like you mean it.

Change can be a long road. I know all too well that it can feel sometimes like a hopeless road. But at least it's a road. Can you imagine life if there were no roads to take you somewhere beyond where you are?

Hope, Despair, and that Strange Place In-Between

People ask me, as I explain my passion, "What hope do you have to change things?" I tell them the truth. I have little. The problem is vast, the politicians are feckless, corporate interests are rich & entrenched. And the 100% predictable result has already happened.

Tromsø, Norway; 200 miles north of
the Arctic Circle (photo: Bo Eide*)

So. Hope? No. Not really.

Then why keep picking litter off the beach, writing stories, trying? Because there's a difference between losing hope and giving in to despair. Despair is paralysis. Despair is also extremely arrogant -- it presumes that we can know with certainty that our actions are useless. Despair is Denethor, throwing himself onto a pyre rather than face a future that to him can only be black & bleak.

I'd rather cast in my lot with Theoden, riding headlong into overwhelming odds because it's simply the right thing to do.

That sounds like bluster. But, in truth, it's the opposite. It's deep humility. For all that I think I know, and think I've learned, I don't know how the story ends. So I do what I do because I love my daughter and I think the world is beautiful and I want to preserve it. It's my path.

And there is a strange freedom & clarity that comes from leaving both hope & despair behind. It's re-energizing. "Hoping" puts the burden on someone else. "Doing" puts the burden -- the control -- in my own hands. So no, I can't change the world. But I can change my part of it. And no, I can't make it better forever. But I can make it better for today. This one moment when the beach is deserted and the gulls are crying and the surf is pounding and the breeze is carrying salt on the air... and the sand is clean.

And it just might stay clean long enough for the next lonely wanderer to look down. And notice.

Sometimes, the point isn't to do the right thing because you hope or think something awesome will come from it. It's because, it's the right thing. And because "even the wise cannot see all ends." As I've witnessed, the actions of one person have a funny way of reaching beyond them in ways & times most unexpected.

I have ideas, plans, contacts, and goals for 2012. I'm going to expand my work, meet new people, do what I can, and increase what I can do. Not because I have hope, but because I don't despair.

---

* For more images in and around Tromsø, please check out Bo Eide's fabulous blog: Life Up North; this image (saved originally from Facebook) comes from this post: http://lifeupnorth.posterous.com/collecting-marine-litter-above-the-arctic-cir

Confessions

I sometimes drink bottled water instead of tap.

I sometimes eat fast food.

I use a plastic throwaway straw once a week or so.

I occasionally buy bags of chips, or plastic-wrapped candies.

Once in a while, I toss something I could've recycled.

I've been known to lose litter & not retrieve it.

I've bought "cheaper" instead of "more eco."

I fly in airplanes long distance for fun.

I drove an oil-dripping muscle car.

I then drove an oil-dripping rust-bucket V8 pickup truck.

I then drove a 4-wheel-drive SUV.

I shun our local public transporation because it's inconvenient.

I sometimes judge people who pollute more than I do.

I sometimes judge people who pollute less than I do.

Now and then, what I crave most of all is an ice-cold Coke.

The past couple of years for me has been a slow wake-up. A chance to realize that there is such a thing as sustainable, sensitive living. That it matters -- that it's imperative. I realize now the level of damage that comes with some of the choices & options of modern life. Both to my generation and to the next. I see it, and pick it up, every week. Washed in, left behind. I admire the people who bend over backwards to put a full stop to it in their lives. I read their blogs, and nod in appreciation.

Still, I also recognize that my world is one of baby steps. I find a new way to consume less here. Waste less there. Reuse here, recycle there. I pick up more of what I see, which helps me see more to pick up.

But I've never been the one to make the grand gesture, the bold pledge, the cold-turkey quit. That, I leave to others.

I take pride in the choices I make now compared to a few years ago. But as I write on the ills of waste & thoughtlessness, I do so with a sense of my own limits. With the humility that, for all my talk and efforts, I too have been -- and continue to be -- part of a mainstream culture that most highly values the impulse of the moment over all else.

Snapshots of a Moving Target

A wise old Greek once said, "The only constant is change." He also said, "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on."

He may as well have been describing the beach at Bay View.

Each week I step onto the sand, the scene evolves. Wind, waves, paws, feet, fingers, trowels. The timeless mechanics of moon and tide. The crumbling sand towers of a child's imagination. A "bonfire log" that makes its way up and down the beach from week to week.

Or a wrecked lobster trap that washes ashore with all its annual tags still intact...

(as seen on June 8, 2010 - no idea when it actually arrived)

...to a week later, when all the tags had been torn off and lay amid the wreckage...

(June 15, 2010)

...to a week later, when it was moved alongside a heavily wrecked friend...

(June 22, 2010)


...to a week later, when it was again by itself and all the tags had been stripped away except the owner's nameplate (found the tags dozens of yards away in the sand)...

(June 29, 2010)

...to, finally, a week later, when it was gone and forgotten:

(July 6, 2010)

All of which is to say that the beach is a dynamic place. A guy and a trash bag can't hope to understand everything that's happening, because it's happening all the time, day and night. It moves on, regardless of the schedule of a Flotsam Diarist.

And that's OK. Sometimes the best stories are the ones that don't answer all the questions, but instead leave you free to think up new ones to ask.

As a side note, I've started a page of all lobster trap tags I've uncovered in my wanderings. So far I've found tags identifying 14 unique traps lost to the sea and eventually washed up on shore. Here's the thing, each year the State of Maine issues licenses for some 3 million lobster traps. By some estimates, tens of thousands -- perhaps more than 100,000 -- are lost each year in Maine waters. (Like most "marine debris" issues, there's more guessing than facts. But the folks at the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation have started gathering the data, and are finding hundreds of old pots at a time.)

If the actual number of derelict lobster traps is only 1/100th of the worst case, that's still 10,000 traps lost over a decade. As the grills rust, and the plastic coatings tear and break loose, how many more of this...

or this...

...can you expect to find on your day at the beach?