Underwater photographer Joel Paschal spoke with me while I was onboard the Alguita as it was being loaded with unripe fruit, supplies, and was passing Coast Guard inspection for its voyage west to California from Hilo, Hawaii. Joel worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to document the cleanup of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, including Midway and the French Frigate Shoals.
Hilo is one of the wettest cities on Earth—the wettest in the U.S., as a matter of fact–and Joel and I bunkered down below as rain pelted the deck. This dispatch tells the horror of our impact on distant places—places we don’t see.
“It’s tremendous to think about how remote you are. You’re on an island far away from any people but you see our impact. Somehow the Earth is so…connected. You can go to the most remote island on Earth and there’s garbage on it,” Joel says. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands begin 300 miles northwest of Honolulu and extend for 1200 nautical miles.
President Bush in 2006 declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a marine national monument. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t trash on them. Fishnets, some 20 miles long wash up. Bottle caps, lighters, pieces of toys and parts of an airplane from World War II, are just a few of the things Joel says he found there—on a cleanup trip that lasted three months.
The most disturbing find: refuse ingested by seabirds, killing them. More than 10,000 seabirds are killed annually, according to the WWF, because they ingest trash or get caught up in fishnets. Indeed, more than 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises die each year along with a quarter million sea turtles because of long line fishnets.
We’re still sending tons of trash into the seas. We have rampant disregard for marine life. We can easily make better choices to lessen our effect on the marine eco system. We just need to know how. We need to be better informed. We need to make it stop.
According to one study conducted two years ago, 90% of the fish and shellfish species that are hauled from the ocean to feed people worldwide may be gone by 2048.
We should be celebrating our ocean life, not killing it.
We need better policies to enforce clean up measures.
Thomas M. Kostigen is The New York Times bestselling coauthor of
February 28th, 2008 at 2:41 am
This has been a long standing problem here in the Philippines where foreign vessels dump their trash to our seas which have resulted to lower fish catch throughout the years. Despite regular coastal clean ups by the communities, trash keeps on coming in as long as the rest of the world keeps on dumping trash to the ocean… because the ocean is just one. I don’t know about better policies regarding clean up measures but I am advocating for values here which is respecting and care for that which gives us life - nature. Or else, we just have to evolve into something else in the future that makes us adapt to a world without ocean life or even without the ocean.