Ah, sailing! With the natural elements finally aligned, the wind-powered potential of the Sea Dragon is finally on display. (I never would have expected the North Atlantic to be as placid as an empty swimming pool, but much of our journey otherwise has been rather windless.) Now, however, three full sails above advance us speedily past Madeira and farther toward the African continent. At six people, we’re a rather small crew for this boat, and our four-hour shifts make me feel like a newborn baby — constantly put to bed and soon awoken abruptly, given food and drink, and thrust from my cocoon of a hammock-bed into a precarious waterworld above, strapped to the ship by a safety leash. But the crew is healthy and able, the weather’s been gorgeous, playful-seeming dolphins dance along the boat during the day, and magical-seeming bioluminescence dances along at night, and there’s no sign of human life in any direction. One has the sensation that we’re truly alone; that we can survive completely independent of the rest of the human world.
Such a sensation would be inaccurate, of course. Food and fuel from ashore is key to our journey and, were we for some unfortunate reason to run into real trouble, we’d rely once again on assistance from the humanity that otherwise may seem irrelevant. Not only is no man an island but, perhaps, that adage about a butterfly flapping its wings — the one that suggests that no life, human or otherwise, can act fully independent of other life — is equally true.
Adam’s research will, I’d expect, support such a theory. Each day we trawl the ocean for zooplankton and take various samples of the catch. The purpose is for Adam, and his associates back at the University of Exeter, to measure whether and to what extent such zooplankton in the wild consume the microplastic particles now found throughout the sea. From what I understand, it seems likely the research will bear out that query in the affirmative.
With the results of this research, we’d have evidence that human-made plastic ends up in the bellies of among the most abundant life-forms on earth: plankton, the basis for the vast majority of the ocean’s life and the world’s oxygen. Other research likely would establish (or in some cases already has established) a number of resulting harms: for example, that zooplankton, by consuming the plastic, gets a false sense of satiation and subsequently loses energy and even starves to death; that other sea life consuming plastic-filled zooplankton inevitably consumes such microplastic in turn; and that, as microplastic makes its way up the food chain, sea life in general shall dwindle.
Plastic is a quintessential example of mankind’s inventive genius — an incredibly durable material with countless applications, many life-saving. The boat itself has plastic components everywhere. Most of the research equipment Adam’s using on board seems to be made of plastic. Plastic makes our lives more convenient, more independent, and in so many apparent ways, better. But what’s the likelihood that these benefits come at a cost, admittedly not yet fully understood, that will destroy future life? Does our pursuit of independence ignore the reality of our interdependence with other life?
At this moment in my hometown, so many of my fellow New Yorkers are engaging in a most beloved ritual: ordering take-out. There’s arguably no better place in the world to obtain the best of any cuisine you desire delivered directly to your couch. But, as the restaurant industry isn’t incentivized otherwise, the majority of these meals are delivered to us in an overwhelming amount of packaging — a kind-of Russian nesting doll sequence of single-use, disposable layers: a sandwich wrapped in plastic, then within foil, and that within a hard plastic container, sealed with plastic tape, all within a paper bag, and all that then inside a plastic bag, also containing disposable silverware and condiments. We don’t need it all, most of us would readily concede. But what are we supposed to do? Not order take-out? Plus, even if all of New York ceased ordering take-out for a year, might not one factory in a less-regulated region or one rogue container ship counteract all those efforts by what it dumps or loses in a single day?
With the ocean so far removed from most people’s daily lives, few of us have the opportunity to experience the effects of plastic waste in a tangible way. Not many people get to, as we’ve been doing every afternoon on the Sea Dragon, drop a net into the middle of the Atlantic and hold in their hands the appreciable amount of plastic that we’re pulling out; never mind that we’re trawling for a mere twenty minutes at a time and that we’re hundreds of miles from human settlement. Still others might have a hard time believing that this evidence is enough reason to adjust our personal behavior — that we should avoid a piece of single-use plastic for the seemingly remote possibility that it ends up killing a fish or even poisoning our own food supply.
More science is clearly key to helping us understand whether and to what extent we’re producing a problem. Advocacy is key to communicating the issue to the public. And human ingenuity must hold the key to a workable plastic alternative. But to my mind, there’s no real fix without economic incentive for changing behavior. Guilting consumers into recycling and reusing doesn’t seem like a realistic way to make the big changes, especially among the set who struggle to deal with other issues in their day-to-day lives, or who can’t be convinced quickly enough that their behavior is causing a problem. I believe that we need producers to produce less disposable plastic-based packaging, by giving financial reward for doing so (ultimately still powered by consumer demand) and financial penalty for not doing so (taxation and regulation, again stemming from citizen demand) if we agree that the big changes need to be made.
And it would take a big change, I suspect, to reverse what we see here on the Sea Dragon. In a world that generally rewards the most productive members of society, it’s hard to sell a campaign to produce less. But producing less plastic (along with producing more of a better alternative) is exactly what we should reward.
Anyway, we’re all doing great on the boat, apart from the odd sleeping regimen and a busted generator. We have the gorgeous sunsets and sunrises all to ourselves, powered only by natural phenomena harnessed by human ingenuity. And it’s bliss.
– Seth Shelden, Gyre to Gaia II, August 4, 2015