I am, without a doubt, a garbage enthusiast. You can learn an a lot about people by the things they throw away.
Garbage is also a permanent record of the wastefulness of our society. The Pacific Garbage Patch is the prime example of this. It's a symptom of a broken system--we create things that we'll use for minutes (like plastic straws or paper cups) and then we throw them away.
When I first read about the Garbage Patch in The Week I was completely astounded. First, that the topic gained so little press--the "article" I read was about three sentences long. And second, that this floating garbage soup was twice the size of Texas.
We now know that the garbage patch is over twice the size of Texas and that that oft repeated quote simply refers to the area that the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has studied. The entire Pacific Ocean is bigger than North America and so the garbage patch may be even bigger than we'd imagined.
After I read about this toxic plastic soup, I started following the story. I read everything I could get my hands on. I wrote about it while I was a reporter in Argentina and told everyone I knew about floating "landfill."
When I drove up to Stanford last year I stopped off at Algalita's research foundation in Long Beach to meet the staff and learn everything I could about the their latest research. Captain Moore now says that in some parts of the Pacific trash out weighs plankton 46 to 1 (by weigh).
My trip to the garbage patch is intended to shed light on how the garbage is affecting humans. Most articles have focused on how it's affecting animals--an important issue--but they haven't focused on how this is ultimately affecting us. What happens when you eat a fish that had a belly full of plastic?
There has also been a lot of debate about whether I'm qualified to do this report and there have been questions about why I have to pay so much to cover the story. I do feel I'm qualified to take on this project, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. And the money goes to pay for my portion of the trip--food, medical supplies, etc. No one else is directly benefitting from the money I raise.
I hope over the next few months, as I continue to blog, you'll see that this story is not just a chance to sail out into the middle of the Pacific--it's something I'm passionate about. Writing about garbage has become my focus and this summer brings one of the best opportunities to shed light on tone of the biggest environmental disasters of our time.
Posted by Lindsey Hoshaw on 07/12/09
