Undercurrents

In Saco Bay, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Harold Johnson — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:39:50 GMT

Last week, residents of Camp Ellis in Saco learned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plans to save their community. The ocean has been carving away at Camp Ellis for a century. Between 1968 and 2000, 33 homes were lost. The April 2007 storm damaged or destroyed several more.

(Source for this and many other images of the storm's aftermath)

The remaining community has been threatened many times since (Note: video auto-plays).

Why?

A story of good intentions gone wrong.

In the mid-1800s the Saco River was a major shipping lane, with barges running up and down to ports in Biddeford and Saco.

(Source)

Shifting sandbars at the mouth of the river threatened to disrupt this traffic.

Enter the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1869 they built the first jetty at the mouth of the Saco. With it, they hoped to guide the force of the river further out to sea. This would drag out the sand with it, keeping it from accumulating & blocking transit.

(The jetties today, credit: Google Earth)

That part of the plan worked. But the Corps badly misunderstood the seafloor currents. Because surface currents travel north-to-south, the Corps assumed that seafloor currents did the same thing. They believed Camp Ellis’s beach sand came from points north, or was reworked material from just offshore.

They were wrong. It turns out, Camp Ellis sand came from the Saco River. By siphoning off all that river sediment to the deep Bay, the Corps had starved the local shoreline.

Within a generation, Camp Ellis was losing its beach.

In addition, the reflection of strong waves off the jetty added to the scouring of whatever sand remained. Now there is no beach at Camp Ellis anymore. Just riprap seawalls, and perhaps a little exposed sand at very low tide.

Worse, all that Saco River sediment was now landing elsewhere -- at the northern tip of Saco Bay, Pine Point in Scarborough. Formerly-oceanfront homes there are now well back of the ocean, and the small harbor at Pine Point Spit is under continual threat of silting up. Which means continual expense to keep it dredged and functional. At millions of dollars a pop.

There is one fundamental truth in ecology: You cannot do just one thing.

The coast works as a finely tuned & integrated system. When you go monkeying with part of it, you will cause knock-on effects.

After a century denying it, in 1995 the Corps finally admitted its mistake. Nearly 20 years later, it’s finally approaching a solution. Large-scale shipping on the Saco River is no longer a thing. So the sensible answer to save Camp Ellis & stabilize Pine Point seems to be removing, or at least shrinking, the jetty, right?

Wrong.

Instead, the Corps of Engineers wants to create a new breakwater off the jetty to dampen waves. And then it wants to dump sand on Camp Ellis periodically over the next 50 years -- at the cost to the City of Saco.

How much do you want to bet they get it right this time? As a taxpayer, this isn’t a rhetorical question.

Confessions of an Eco-Moderate

Harold Johnson — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:12:18 GMT

Last week I was called an “environmentalist” in scare-quotes on Twitter. As in, someone who claims to care about the environment but doesn’t really. Or not enough.

It was a good reminder of an old maxim: However far you will or can push yourself in a direction, someone will push themselves farther. There’s always someone smarter, stronger, more devoted to a cause.

It was also a good reminder that change isn’t about meeting someone else’s expectations. It’s about expanding -- then meeting, then re-expanding -- your own expectations.

Breaking with environmental purity, I still:

Sometimes drink bottled water if it's offered.
Like fast food & have some once a week or so.
Own glass straws, but often forget to bring them with me.
Use 6 plastic 1/2 & 1/2 packs for my diner coffee in a sitting.
Buy chips or plastic-wrapped candies. They're yummy.
Occasionally toss something I could've recycled.
Have been known to lose litter & not retrieve it.
Sometimes buy "cheaper" instead of "more eco."
Drive when I could walk.
Sometimes judge people who pollute more than I do.
Sometimes judge people who pollute less than I do.

Since picking up my first bag of garbage from a beach, more than 3 years ago, life has been something of a slow wake-up. I’ve come 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.

Still, I also recognize that grand gestures and cold-turkey quits aren’t a reality for most. Myself included. The great thing is: small steps are still steps. Consume less here. Waste less there. Reuse here, recycle there. Pick up a piece of litter. See it, notice it, don’t ignore it.

Your choices are noticed by those around you. They matter.

I write & think about the ills of waste & thoughtlessness. But I do so always 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.

But, hopefully, a little less today than yesterday.

Sittin' on the Dock of the -- Whoops!

Harold Johnson — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:38:56 GMT

Summertime on Maine’s coast.

(Source)

Nothing says the good life like freshest-of-fresh seafood, crispy fries, maybe some slaw, listening to the surf & the gulls, smelling the salt air, feeling the cool breeze.

It’s a Maine institution. Lobster shacks, clam huts, and open-air harborside restaurants dot Maine’s seacoast. Maine's very windy seacoast.

So I guess it’s little surprise that much of what I find washing in happens to come from such places. Such as ketchup packs with fish bite- and poke-marks:

I have a growing collection of these, as well as spoons, forks, straws, little sauce tubs, etc.

More unexpected is this:

This is a menu from a Kennebunkport restaurant that washed in a few months back. It's from 2007, and the restaurant is now defunct! One gust of wind 6 years ago as a couple or family dined happily (?) out by the harbor -- whoosh, plop!

But for now, the most amazing wash-in related to seaside eating in Maine is this:

I found this at Bay View beach in Saco a couple years ago. It had traveled all the way down from Bar Harbor, some 120 miles as the crow flies. I don’t know how long it had been in the ocean. By the time the menu had reached me, this restaurant too had closed down.

It’s good living, having a nice meal with family or friends by the ocean. But in a world where plates, cups, cutlery, sauce packs -- and now even menus -- are plastic, the remains of our good life last.

And last.

Ancient Ecological Marvel Threatened on Maine Beach

Harold Johnson — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:49:31 GMT

News spread this week about Kennebunk’s plans for removing dead wood at Gooch’s Beach. Storms and waves this winter battered the coast, tossing branches & tree trunks up and down Maine’s shore.

But at Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk, the storms did something else. They peeled back much of the sand, exposing what lay beneath.

That isn’t driftwood. That’s the well-defined root system of an ancient tree. And it’s not alone. I took this photo of a small patch further south this morning:

You can see in the photo at least three ancient trees peering out from the sand. Here’s a close-up of one, the denuded stump on top and roots spreading outward:

More stumps and roots are poking out of the sand all over. Gooch’s Beach at Kennebunk holds a marvel -- a drowned forest.

Living in our own small worlds and short lifetimes, we easily forget how ancient the earth is. And how it’s changed in the past, and is still changing today. Hundreds of years ago, what is now a beach was a living, thriving woodland. The ocean would have been hundreds of yards -- even miles -- farther to the east.

In fact, a stump exposed at nearby Middle Beach in 1959 was carbon-dated at 3000+ years old!

These roots and branches poking up out of the ground at Gooch’s Beach are not recent cast-offs. They’re an incredible piece of a lost world. We could learn from them what kinds of trees they were, exactly how old they are. We could study what’s left of their growth rings to learn what the climate was like. How the earth was changing. What it means for us living today in a changing world.

Also, anybody who visits a beach throughout the year knows that beach profiles change with the seasons. Beaches erode in winter storms. Gentler spring and early summer waves restore the sand, tide by tide.

That’s why these organic remains have survived intact for, in some cases, 3000 years. Every time nature exposes them, nature reburies them. It will again.

So I would urge the town of Kennebunk to move cautiously in its beach cleanup. Take the driftwood, sure. But leave the forest. It is an ecological & geological gem. It’s a direct link to the early history -- or even deep prehistory -- of our state, and a goldmine of information waiting to be studied. Ripping out any of it, after it survived so long, seems exceptionally short-sighted.

And if the purpose is to remove any possible hazards for swimmers at high-tide, it should be noted that the town has a very big job on its hands.

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I am deeply in debt to Sharon Lichter Cummins of Southern Maine Old News for links, old photos, and background information!

The Blame Game

Harold Johnson — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:11:18 GMT

Maine of course is hardly alone in its struggle with plastic pollution. It’s a scourge the world over. And as expected there’s lots of finger pointing, buck-passing, dodging responsibility, assigning blame.

But while regular folks bust their backsides cleaning up plastic litter everywhere, the international plastics industry knows who to blame for the state of things.

You.

Over the past few years, I’ve surfed various ecology/litter Web sites from around the world. Here’s one from South Africa.

"Plastics don't litter - people do!" This particular Web site has had the same tag line up for at least two years. The marine debris prevention partnership that international plastics industries wish to create goes like this: “Our products are not the problem, you are.”

Here’s a little plastic life-cycle chart I put together a while back:

(A full-size version is available here. If you'd like, it's yours to use as you wish.) There are at least a dozen steps from plastic formulation to ultimate burial/incineration. You -- the consumer -- are responsible for one, maybe two. Yet the plastics industry wants to put 100% of the burden, blame, & responsibility on you.

So, let's see what you've done.

Did you identify, clean, sort, & put out your recyclable plastics? Did the bin get blown over, scavenged,^ hit by a plow, poorly emptied by a recycling truck? Your fault.

Did you take your family out for a picnic? Did your snack packs have tear-off tops? (Of course, that’s how industry makes them now.) Did a torn-off top blow out of your hand, or baggie, or trash bin, despite your good intentions? Your fault.

Are you finding it harder & harder to reduce plastic use because even “green” manufacturers switch to persistent plastic? Your fault.

Did you point out that single-use plastic bags burden the environment? You may find yourself sued. (In 2011 bag-maker Hilex Poly and others sued ChicoBag for pointing out the obvious.) And when that bag you tried not to use gets blown out of the recycling bin you put it into, it's your fault.

Have you ever been victim of a flood, a hurricane, worse? All that plastic material in your car, your office, your home -- it washed into the environment, and will stay there. By countless tons with each disaster. Your fault.

Do you have friends or family in a developing nation like Indonesia? A major multinational ramped up capacity to deliver single-use plastic bottles to Indonesians by 30% in 2010-2011 (PDF file). Never mind the country's waste management infrastructure can't handle what it already has.*

(Source)

Tons of waste, no means to manage it, corporate profit, citizen cost.

Your fault.

The theme is clear. The plastics industry would like to shed as much responsibility & burden for the mess its products create as it can. And so far, they've done a good job of it.

Right now, what labels are multinational corporations assigning to you? Do you agree with them?

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^ This image comes from just down the street from me in Saco back in winter. Drive around any neighborhood after trash collection, you're bound to find more of the same.

* That same multinational bottler, Coca-Cola, was top-tier sponsor of 2011’s 5th International Marine Debris Conference (http://5imdc.wordpress.com/sponsorship/). In the 1980s, these conferences had no corporate sponsorship, and the term was “marine plastic pollution.” In 2011 Coke and the American Chemistry Council (plastic trade group) were top-tier sponsors, and the word “plastic” had disappeared.

Bagging the Rhetoric on Plastic Bag Recycling

Harold Johnson — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:52:01 GMT

Plastic shopping bags are making news these days. People are tired of seeing this:

So of course the bag industry is ramping up its “recycling” campaign as an answer.

But last week the Bangor Daily News reported a sobering reality: Maine’s largest recycling company, ecoMaine, grosses barely $4-5 per TON for recycled plastic bags. That’s when they’re lucky enough to find a buyer.

That’s not an economically real market, despite bag makers’ constant refrains. It’s a smokescreen.

In fact, there’s little market for any #3, #4, #5, #6, or #7 plastics. ecoMaine’s website has great public information including monthly sales totals. Here is their latest (PDF file):

Since July they’ve averaged $8.78 per ton for all #3 - #7 plastics. That doesn’t count the costs of payroll, electricity, maintenance, etc. Only #1 bottles and #2 bottles/jugs have real value. All those yogurt containers, SOLO cups, toy packages, shampoo bottles -- nearly worthless, despite the rhetoric and despite your effort in cleaning and binning them. Worse, often the only buyers are developing nations with lax laws, little oversight, and growing environmental nightmares of their own.

We’re told we’re doing something amazing by “keeping all of that plastic out of the waste stream.” Yet really, often we’re just passing the junk-buck.

Out of sight, out of mind. “Away.”

Back to the plastic bags. Bag makers will tell you they recycle tons annually. But dig for the details; you come up empty. That’s because shopping bags are lumped into a catch-all recycling category: “Polyethylene Film.” What else is polyethylene film? Bubble wrap, paper-product packaging, and most importantly, industrial pallet wrap.

Because of this lumping, I can find no solid data showing exactly how many shopping bags are returned, how many are actually being reused, and what they’re being turned into.

The bag makers may well not want us to know. Shopping bags are dirty. They’re often in contact with liquids & food residue & grime. All of which lower or ruin their value. But the other categories of film are typically kept dry & clean, used briefly (often excessively), and then funneled through industrial channels back to recyclers.

Recyclers use a small portion of the cleanest of this mixed film to put back into shopping bags.* The rest -- if it even stays in the US -- is only fit for dirty uses like plastic mulch for factory farms, or plastic lumber for the building industry. From there, it's generally a one-way road to the landfill.

A decade ago, nobody had heard of plastic mulch or plastic lumber. They only became viable when plastic became ultra-cheap. Plastic mulch & lumber became ultra-cheap because of recycling.

So here's my argument: Recycling our plastic bags hasn’t created less plastic in the world. It’s created more.

If anyone has evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.

(Source: Photo linked from ‘Pick Up America’ -- look through their blog and see what these dedicated volunteers found on roadsides all across the nation last year.)

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* Those “recycled” shopping bags are at best ~35% recycled material, meaning that some 65% of each ‘eco’ bag is virgin material, added to the world’s plastic burden.

Every Day Is Earth Day

Harold Johnson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:09:01 GMT

When you think about it, isn’t it kind of sad that we have to muster up energy to give a nod of thanks to Mother Earth just one day a year?

But then, it really is so easy to take this miraculous machine for granted. It feels like it’s always been there, always will. That nothing we do can change that.

But of course the things we do can and are changing it. 365 days a year. That’s how Earth Day began, with a national wake-up to where our choices were leading. Sadly, it seems like 40 years later we’re falling asleep again. Plastics washing up with each tide are just one symptom. Deforestation, ocean acidification, extinctions, mountaintop removal, draining of water tables...

The list can go on, and get increasingly dreary.

So for that reason, it’s great to see people all over the world pausing their regular lives one day a year to think about something larger than themselves. And to reconnect to the beauty of the planet, and how vital its health is for the health of us all.

For me, I didn’t do anything particularly special on Earth Day. I turned over soil and pulled weeds in our community garden. Picked up a few small pieces of winter-blown garbage down there. Baked a delicious loaf of bread. Helped my daughter scour the train tracks behind our condo for old broken glass for a collection.

Today, if the drizzle breaks, will be more of the same. Hopefully another trip to the beach to see what the tide’s left behind this time.

Earth has made a home for me every day. Every breath I take, every cool glass of water, every scenic vista or bounteous harvest, is a gift. In return, I just try day by day to keep her in mind. Little, normal, daily acts, in place of grand & lonely gestures.

Celebrating Life

Harold Johnson — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:24:19 GMT

In the middle of a traumatic week, I spent a little quiet time down at the cove. After a long and lingering winter, I found something amazing. Life.

From a cheeky little fellow ignoring the warning...

...to countless tracks in the sand...

...the word was out: spring had arrived!

I strolled the sand down to the muddy low foreshore. I turned & explored the large rockpools, now high above the low tide. Amid boulders and bedrock, the pools swarmed with periwinkle superhighways.

Hundreds of those trailblazers huddled at the water’s edge, enjoying the best of all worlds.

Higher up, behind the rockpools, lay a thin -- and rare -- strip of emerald brilliance.

At Curtis Cove, this thin belt of marsh grass grows strong, just steps from the ocean. A sign of how sheltered Curtis Cove is (barring the occasional nor’easter).

Just beyond the head of the cove, large outcrops bar the entrance.

Most of the ocean’s violence dashes itself to bits on those rocks, leaving the cove remarkably calm and proected.

Poignantly, that same calm water allows tens of thousands of small plastic flecks from our modern culture to settle out on its sandy shores. That’s part of the double-edged sword of this place. Here, there’s no denying what we’re actually doing to the ocean; it’s all on view.

Yet things grow here that couldn’t elsewhere. And on this bright Spring day, it teemed with birdsong & life.

What Is a Sustainable Fishery?

Harold Johnson — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:59:38 GMT

“Sustainability” is today’s big buzzword. Every industry wants in on the sustainability wagon. Buzz sells.

So it’s not surprising that the Marine Stewardship Council recently created big buzz by declaring Maine’s lobster fishery sustainable.

The MSC doesn’t examine fisheries itself. It works with third parties, who do the actual vetting. For the Maine fishery, an industry group, “The Fund for the Advancement of Sustainable Maine Lobster,” hired a UK consultancy, “Intertek Moody Marine,” to study the fishery and prepare a report.

The final report, dated January 2013, can be found here.

At 247 pages, it would seem at initial glance to be thorough. It delves into lobster biology, stock assessments, fishery management practices, ecosystem information, bycatch mitigation, etc.

But here is a list of terms not found in any of the 247 pages: “vinyl,” “litter,” “garbage,” “debris,” “rust,” “hazard,” “beach,” “ingestion.” The word “pollution” does show up 3 times, but only in terms of oil/chemicals. The word “plastic” shows up only 4 times. Again, just in terms of material used, with no cautionary words anywhere of plastic as a pollutant.

In short, in calling the Maine lobster fishery sustainable, MSC/Intertek seem to have nearly fully ignored the ecological damage caused by the tons of plastic gear lost to the Gulf of Maine each year.

Section 6.3.1.3 of the report (pp. 63-64) states that there is no record of the amount of gear lost. That is not true. Beginning in 2009 the Dept of Marine Resources began requiring that lobstermen file a report when applying for replacement tags for lost traps. Since then, DMR has seen an average of 38,000 replacement-tag requests per year.~

Some lost traps are retrieved. Some wash up. Most likely don’t. Instead they slowly rust, releasing little vinyl coating flecks as they do. Here's what I've found in recent weeks:

Feb 19 - 410 pcs

March 22 - 405 pcs

March 31 - 958 pcs!

Since Feb 29, 2012 I’ve retrieved 6608 of these little bits of shiny, bright, sharp-edged ruined trap bits. From the same 150 feet of shoreline at Curtis Cove, Biddeford.

That’s enough to put back together perhaps 5 lost traps. Again, 38,000+ traps are lost each year. The Gulf of Maine is probably now home to countless millions of vinyl lobster trap flecks.

These vinyl bits sink. On the seafloor, they then bounce along, attracting & interacting with marine life in ways no one has yet studied. At calm, protected coves like Curtis Cove they wash up, fouling the shore, threatening shorebirds, littering tidepools.

Beyond the traps themselves is the plastic rope lost by the fishery. Again at Curtis Cove, since Feb 29, 2012 I have collected 4523 pieces of rope, conservatively 7300 feet! More washes in every week.

(Strands of plastic rope dangling out from seaweed, March 22)

Scenes like this were impossible a couple generations ago. Today they’re unavoidable. Plastic gear does not go away. More & more is dumped/lost in the Gulf of Maine each year.*

So yes, Maine’s lobster fishery has invested much time, energy, and expense into watching over the lobster stock, protecting the breeding females, mitigating harm to the endangered Northern Right Whale. All of which is documented in the MSC’s 247-page report.

But just because a fishery isn’t as harmful as it could be, does that mean it deserves to be called sustainable?

If lobster continue to be fished the way they are now, what will our grandchildren's beaches and ocean look like?

I have twice invited the Communications Director of the MSC to come visit Curtis Cove with me at his convenience, to show him firsthand what washes in. I’ll let you know if and when he or one of his associates accepts.

_________________________________________

~ The number of lost traps is probably higher, since not every lost trap is replaced. But it’s a good start.

* Maine’s lobster fishery is of course not alone. Nearly every commercial fishery in the world now uses plastic & plastic-coated gear almost exclusively. Fishing debris is a huge & growing problem in ecosystems around the globe.

Bucking the Plastic Trend

Harold Johnson — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:29:55 GMT

With so much plastic creating so much plastic garbage, it’s easy to get demoralized. But there are actually very simple things anyone can do to start reducing the amount of plastic junk we generate.

Step One: Be aware. Stop and look around. What do you see that’s made out of plastic? Once you start seeing it, it’s hard to stop.

(Source)

Now consider, at some point every last plastic thing around you will be trash. Either intentionally -- thrown into a garbage can/dumpster; or accidentally -- carried off by a storm or flood, fallen out of a car window or off the back of a pickup truck.

Trash escapes. It always has. Now that it’s plastic, it persists. Nothing in nature knows how to get rid of plastic. Nothing digests it, dissolves it, melts it away. The more we generate, the more we’re bound to lose. The more we lose, the worse our oceans get.

The ocean is, after all, downhill from everywhere. (The above image is from Superstorm Sandy's aftermath. How much washed into the ocean?)

So the less plastic we have in our homes, offices, and cars -- and the less we use -- the better.

Which leads to Step Two: Reduce.

* Bring reusable bags to stores. Single-use plastic bags are on the wrong side of history. Help make them history.

* Lose the bottled water. Keep a reusable in your car, at the office.

* Bring a carry-out box to restaurants. And skip the plastic straw. The US goes through 500 million a day! Insanity. Buy one of the top-quality high-impact glass straws now on the market. Buy some for your friends!

* Frequent stores that are plastic-conscious, and avoid ones that aren't. Get coffee from places that let you use your own mug. Or at least that prefer paper cups over styrofoam.

* Rethink the single-use coffeemakers and the little plastic servings of half-and-half. 3-5 empty plastic containers for every cup of coffee? Really?

* Keep a travel kit of small containers. Forget the single-use travel-sized toiletries.

* Buy in bulk. One bigger jug of detergent, yogurt, etc. generates far less plastic than multiple small ones.

* When buying toys, look for ones that aren’t overpackaged. And consider the good-old traditional toys. Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs are as much fun now as they were generations ago.

* Reuse. Get over the stigma. Use a plastic baggie for chips once? Wash it & use it again. Even if each one only gets used twice, you’ve cut the waste in half. Same with plastic forks & spoons. The plastic industry wants us buying & wasting as much as possible. We don’t have to.

* Buy local. Less travel usually means less plastic. And often local sellers at farm markets will gladly take back plastic packaging to wash & reuse.

* Bake a loaf of bread now and then. No, seriously. It’s ridiculously easy, makes the house smell awesome, and avoids the plastic wrap.

What isn’t on the list above? Recycling. There’s a reason. Plastic recycling is not what it is made out to be. Much that is plastic now wasn’t plastic just 10-15 years ago. It’s now made from plastic because of today’s dirt-cheap recycled feedstock. Arguably, plastic recycling has increased the amount of plastic in the world, not decreased it. (Much more on this in a future post.)

In 2-3 generations, we have become a disposable, plastic world. Sometimes it feels like it’s impossible to live a modern life while bucking the trend.

It’s not!

Beach Cleanups - The Endless Cycle

Harold Johnson — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 18:16:35 GMT

A follower of my Flotsam Diaries FaceBook page asked a good question last week. He wondered if I had side-by-side images of my favorite beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, from a year ago compared to now. To see how much better it looked after a year of clean-ups.

I told him that I did have pictures. But they wouldn’t show any difference.

The Gulf of Maine (like oceans worldwide) isn’t fouled with a little bit of junk. It doesn’t take a year to refoul a cleaned beach.

It takes a day.

Here is a breakdown of what I’ve found at the cove, week after week, during my first full year there (Feb. 29, 2012 - Feb. 26, 2013).

Since lobstering debris is fully 75% of what I find, I broke down the specific types of lobstering gear that wash in. The other 25% makes up the rest of the plastic world -- bottles & caps, plant pots, balloons, forks & spoons, sewage discs, cable ties, broken records. Everything.

Week after week, the deluge comes.

This is why I have a love/hate relationship with annual ocean cleanups.

On the one hand, people visiting the beach to clean it -- and seeing first-hand the garbage there -- is a good thing. On the other hand, thinking it’ll take a whole year for the beach to look trashed again -- that’s a bad thing. It teaches the wrong lesson, that ocean fouling is manageable. That we can keep our environment clean without really changing our plastic throwaway society.

Which just isn’t true.

I’m proud of the work I’ve tried to do at Curtis Cove. But by itself, it does nothing. When I stop cleaning it up, it will go back to being ruined in a matter of days.

But the pointlessness of it is the point. It shows, viscerally, that the answer is not in beach cleanups. And it’s not in pie-in-the-sky “ocean cleanup devices” either.

The answer lies in keeping plastic out of the ocean in the first place. Changing a culture that fishes, shops, transports, and plays in disposable, losable plastic -- and pretends that recycling a fraction makes it all OK.

That change will require a relook at how we choose to live our lives. What we think of as “progress.”

Otherwise, our kids & grandkids will think this is “normal.”

“Plastic Beach” - Kamilo Point, Hawaii

The Sands of Time - Holding Half a Billion Years in Your Hand

Harold Johnson — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:53:04 GMT

Strolling a beach, have you ever stopped and thought about just where all that sand has come from? A handful of sand can contain 10,000 stories. Some of them half a billion years old. Here’s the story of one grain.

It starts 600 million years ago, back when North America looked very different.

Maine didn’t even exist yet! Nor the rest of the eastern seaboard.

Somewhere near modern Ottawa, a storm brewed. It burst against an aged, weathered stump of a mountain. Rainwater lashed the dead granite,* seeping into tiny fissures.

A freezing night followed, cracking free a massive block of stone. Mid-morning’s thaw brought the block down, exploding into a thousand fragments. All tumbled into an ancient river, which tore them apart, setting a grain of sand free. For years that grain bounced and rolled down the river, eventually finding the Iapetus Ocean (the precursor to the Atlantic).

There it settled to the seabed -- near the modern New York/Vermont border -- and was buried deeply by more & more sand. After millions of years, pressure & chemicals fused it into sandstone.

Seemingly lost to time.

But the world is never still. Tectonic forces grind plates past each other, into each other. Oceans widen, oceans shrink. By 450 million years ago, large land masses were closing in on North America’s east coast. They squeezed the Iapetus Ocean, to death. As the seabed buckled, our grain of sand -- locked in its sandstone -- suffered under incredible pressures and heat. It bent, folded, and turned into a metamorphic rock called quartzite.

This rock rose, along with the rest of the newborn Appalachian Mountains, as North America slammed into Africa and Eurasia. By 250 million years ago, Maine existed as dry land. But it was in the middle of a huge supercontinent, Pangea!

The Appalachians towered as high as the modern Himalayas. Our grain of sand, now 1 mile up, was still buried by another 2 miles of material above it!

~200 million years ago, the same forces that pulled the continents together started to tear them apart. But they tore apart further to the east from where they had been welded.^ North America separated again from Africa and Europe. And Maine was part of it, its coast lapped by waves from the brand-new Atlantic Ocean.

(The Atlantic Ocean is still widening. Every year Maine gets about an inch further from Europe, thanks to the mid-Atlantic Ridge.)

Our tiny grain of quartz now lay 100 miles away from Maine's new coastline, still trapped high up in the Appalachians. Over the eons, erosion whittled the majestic range to low humps, and our seam of quartzite was exposed. But quartzite is tough. It resisted further erosion, and our grain of sand remained locked tight.

Then, 1.8 million years ago, the glaciers began arriving. 20,000 years ago, they reached their greatest extent, covering Maine in a mile-high wall of ice!

That glacier’s terrible weight dragged, ground, and pulverized the rocks beneath. It rode up and over the mountain holding our sand grain. It scoured the surface, freeing & carrying off the little fleck of quartz. 10,000 years ago, when the glacier finally receded, the sand grain lay 50 miles west of the coast in the Saco Valley, amid a heap of “glacial till” 500 feet deep.

Since then, the Saco River has steadily carved away this debris. 200 years ago the sand grain fell into the river, and traveled the last 50 miles to the ocean. The ocean then tossed it up onto a local beach. Where maybe you’ll scoop it up. Along with 10,000 other grains with their own tales to tell.

It’s a remarkable thing, holding half a billion years in the palm of your hand.

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* The oceans already teemed with life, but there would be no life on land for another 150 million years!

^ The Hudson and Connecticut River Valleys are two false starts of this tearing & opening of the Atlantic.

Point Source Pollution - A Story of Wayward Discs

Harold Johnson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:23:35 GMT

Ever find one of these on your beach?

It’s got quite a story.

On March 6, 2011, heavy rainfall hit NH’s Merrimack Valley.

A few days later, towns around the mouth of the Merrimack started reporting these strange 2” plastic discs washing up on their shores.

It turns out, the deluge overpowered the sewage treatment plant at the small town of Hooksett, north of Manchester. The plant couldn’t handle the flow, and it released 300,000 gallons of sewage into the Merrimack River.

But it wasn’t just sewage.

Hooksett had been trying out a new system to boost efficiency. It had placed millions of these discs into the sewage tanks. Their surfaces would give new habitat for the natural bacteria that breaks down sewage. More bacteria = more efficient treatment plant.

It all worked wonderfully. Until it didn’t.

When the deluge came, some 4.3 million discs were released into the Merrimack. Being buoyant polyethylene, they floated quickly downstream, and out into the Gulf of Maine.

There they dispersed, winding up on beaches farther and farther from home. The story of the spread of these disks is told by this Google Maps Web site. It was maintained through much of 2011 (I helped), with updates of the farthest-away sightings of these discs.

By March 11 they were seen all around Newburyport, MA. By the end of the month they had traveled to Cape Cod. By mid-May they had rounded the Cape and reached Nantucket. By June they were invading Rhode Island!

The northward trend is more interesting. By mid-April a few had reached York and Ogunquit, Maine. But then they stopped. The reason is simple. Maine & New Hampshire coastal currents run southward.

(Source)

Currents on our coast tend toward Cape Cod. From there they split, parts hugging the New England coast southwest, others turning east. (Sometimes going far east, to Ireland & England!)

Yet in the summer of 2011 -- almost all at once -- the discs started appearing all up and down the Maine coast. In July the first one was spotted in Saco. By early August they were in Casco Bay; a couple weeks later one was all the way up at Lubec!

What happened? The SCOPEX gyre happened.

(Source)

Just east of Cape Cod, this counterclockwise circulation grabs objects from one place and spits them out in another. Depending on where said object (like a sewage treatment disc) gets spat out, it can be on its way anywhere up and down the coast.

Of the original 4.3 million lost, the best estimate is that 400,000+ were never recovered after the initial cleanup. Every couple of months I find some. The blogger “Old Boatshoes” finds them in Marshfield, Duxbury, and Plymouth (http://oldboatshoes.org/2013/03/01/the-disk-2/). The “Trash Paddler” has found more than a thousand on Massachusetts rivers, and counting (http://www.trashpaddler.com/2013/02/riverside-visits-looking-for-spring.html). And look at them. After 2 years in the harshest of elements, they still look brand new. Our great-grandchildren will probably be finding these.

The tragedy of a plastic world is that every single accident like Hooksett dumps more nondegradable plastic junk into our ocean. But with this one, for once we know exactly where it came from, and when. That can help us tell the story of how plastic gets into our seas, how long it lasts, how it travels, and what on earth we can do about it.

Maine's Shifting Sands - What Lies Beneath?

Harold Johnson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:57:37 GMT

When last week’s nor’easter finally blew itself out to sea, it left behind a vastly changed shoreline up and down Maine’s coast.

The huge waves and high tides peeled back countless tons of sand and gravel, revealing things long buried.

The Press Herald ran the story of the 18^th-19^th Century sloop exposed at Short Sands Beach in York.

Unreported in the article* was another shipwreck exposed at Kennebunk’s Mother’s Beach:

This hull is believed to be that of the Industry, wrecked at Kennebunk way back in 1770! It last came to light in early 2010.

Old shipwrecks are cool, and predictable at a shore. What you might not expect is to see the root system of an ancient forest!

This phenomenal photo, taken at Kennebunk’s Gooch Beach, comes from the “Southern Maine Old News” FaceBook page.

This tree is part of a “drowned forest.” One of many along Maine’s modern seashore.

We have this way of thinking that how the world looks today is how it’s always looked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Especially our coasts. Coastlines are always on the move. Thousands of years ago Maine’s coastline was much farther out to sea than it is now. Stumps at Wells Beach, exposed in 1955, were radiocarbon dated at 3,000 years in age!

(Great photos & stories of ancient Maine coastal forests at the Maine Geological Survey website.)

But coastal change isn’t just an ancient thing. It’s of course happening today, and accelerating with a rapidly rising sea. Here is Ferry Beach in Scarborough:

The lush living forest lies just behind the beach. These sad remains may have been living trees on dry land just a century ago. (This photo is found at Maine Climate News, a terrific resource for understanding the changes along Maine’s seacoast.)

I visited another Ferry Beach, Saco’s, after a violent no-name storm blew through in June 2012, and found this:

This tree had been a living, growing pitch pine within living memory. Its sawed-off remains now sat some 20 feet shoreward of the bluff. June’s storm carved back that bluff at least another 2-3 feet.

Our coastline is forever changing, and amazing stories lie under the sands. Sometimes it takes a wild storm to bring those stories back to light.

So tell me, what have you discovered at your beach?

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* Originally this just read "Unreported." An astute reader rightly nudged me that I should clarify.

Storms of Change: Erosion and a Rising Sea

Harold Johnson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:45:20 GMT

No beach or coast in the world is a static thing.

Coastlines are always changing and evolving. Some are “depositional,” meaning that sediment is being added faster than it’s being taken away. Others are “erosional,” where sediment is being removed faster than it's replenished.

Whenever a house -- or town -- is built on the beachfront, the ocean waves are going to move naturally farther from it each year, or closer.

It’s always true, but it becomes more viscerally true after a storm.

Lately, the pace of that evolution has increased. We are living in a warming world. Which makes it an age of rapid sea-level rise & coastal change.

(Image from NOAA’s Sea Levels Online site*)

It’s also an age of more unpredictable and ferocious weather patterns. More heat energy in the oceans drives more moisture in the air.

What this means for our coasts is that more are switching from depositional to erosional. And that erosion is increasing. This astounding set of three photos -- reproduced with permission from meteorologist Dave Epstein’s public Twitter feed -- shows what is happening to Plum Island, MA.

My favorite beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, wasn’t spared by last week’s storms. The wall of rip-rap (huge granite boulders) protecting the road at the headland has slumped down. The waves pummeled the underlying sand hard, eroding it out from under the wall.

Down at the actual cove, many of the cobbles & pebbles that usually line the backshore were now strewn all over the Timber Point trail head.

Fixing this will be expensive for a city with an already tight budget.

As erosion accelerates the world over, we are left with two stark choices: Spend ever more money on beach replenishment and seawalls, or let the world change.

We don’t like change. When we build our houses and towns on the coast, we want them to stay on the coast. We want our memories to last, and to become our children’s memories, and their children’s.

That has always come with a cost. The cost is now increasing, rapidly.

Plum Island, MA; source

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* If you visit this NOAA site, check out Alaska. You’ll see the relative sea levels there seem to be plummeting. When Alaska and Canada were covered with glaciers, the weight of that ice actually pushed the land downward. Now with the ice melted, the land is rebounding upward faster than the sea is rising. The world is constantly changing!

Looking and Seeing - The Beauty of the Maine Coast

Harold Johnson — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:23:30 GMT

Spending week after week studying beach debris has its upside. It also means really seeing the beauty there. Life's full of background noise. But when you stop, look around, and really see what's in front of you, the natural world is incredible. It’s filled with art & artistry, which too often we take for granted. We forget to see it.

No more so than at the Maine coast.

Catch a sunrise.

Mark the last high tide.

If it's low tide, wander out and admire the ripples in the shallow water. Sound energy is waves. Light energy is waves. Bands of clouds in the sky are waves. Wave energy shows up everywhere - including in the sand at your feet if the conditions are right.

Up at the backshore, if it was a windy night, maybe the dunegrass was bent low, dragging delicate blades back and forth in the soft dry sand, creating its own art.

Or maybe you’re at a rocky shore, exploring the outcrops. All that gorgeous striped metamorphic stone was once bent and bowed under tremendous heat & pressure in ancient days, many miles underground. And there it is, uncovered, for us to visit and play in now.

The rocks of Maine’s shore also hold countless miniature ecosystems. Little tide pools and habitats that are the engine of life in the ocean. Spring sunshine on a piece of “sea lettuce” explodes into vivid green, as periwinkles huddle around.

A ray from the low sun of a winter’s afternoon might just strike a singular piece of rockweed, holding tenaciously to a boulder amid barnacles and gravel.

Even in the heart of winter, you may find a splash of color gracing the shore. Like this tiny scrap of coralline algae, still red and vibrant, not yet bleached to cold bone white.

The beach is always changing. New sand washing in, collecting, over weeks and months. Then a brutal winter storm batters the coast and scoops the sand and gravel away again. The cycle repeats as it has for billions of years.

The beach also changes in a matter of hours. Or minutes.

Look around, and you’ll start to see those little, beautiful heralds of change. A purple rivulet cuts a canyon through brown sands, as seaweed dumped high up decomposes back to the nutrients that will feed the crabs and krill and zooplankton in the tide pools.

With every tide, the canvas is refreshed, and the artwork is renewed. Nature makes another masterpiece, to survive barely 6 hours before it too is gone forever.

Tolkien said every story -- every piece of art -- is a leaf on the tree of tales. When we look, we start to see.

What better way to see the tree of tales, than at the beach?

A Vinyl Tide

Harold Johnson — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:15:21 GMT

February 19^th -- a banner day at the cove.

The air was in the mid-30s, but snow & ice still blanketed the biggest part of the beach.

Only a thin line -- marking the reach of the last high-tide -- was unburied and thawed.

In that thin band of exposed sand and wrack, along barely 150 feet, I found all of this:

These are the remains of dead lobster traps. They’re the vinyl coating that peels and bursts off a derelict trap on the seabed, as the steel underneath rusts & bubbles out over many decades. All told, on that raw day I collected 410 bits of it. From the same beach I clean week after week.

The big switch from traditional wooden traps to vinyl-coated steel happened en masse in the 1970s. Steel is sturdier, can take more punishment & be put into rockier places. More can be strung together to make lobstering more efficient.

But since steel rusts, it needs its protective plastic coating. And when traps get lost, all that plastic doesn’t just disappear. Plastic never disappears. (The same is true of plastic rope, bait bags, trap bumpers, bag cleats, buoys.)

In the past year, at this same small stretch of beach, I’ve collected a total of 5237 trap scraps.

More wash in each week.

5237 scraps is enough to put together maybe 3 ½ lobster traps. According to the Dept of Marine Resources, Maine alone loses at least 38,000 traps to the Gulf each year.

Almost breathtaking, that until a generation ago, this sight would have been impossible. Now it’s inescapable on some beaches.

Before pointing the finger at industry, we should point it back at ourselves. We consumers demand more! Cheaper! More! Of everything. That’s true of lobster too. A lobsterman who doesn’t use (what seems like) the cheapest & most efficient gear soon becomes an ex-lobsterman, squeezed out of an incredibly competitive business.

Yet the plastic gear used to catch our food is not cheap. It only seems cheap because we haven’t actually started paying the cost yet. Instead, we create a legacy of fouled beaches & damaged ecosystems that may take lifetimes to clean thoroughly.

Meanwhile we pat ourselves on the back for the good bargains we find.

For the Maine coast, the choice is stark. Business as usual, in which tens of thousands of plasticized traps (and countless miles of plastic rope) continue to add up in the Gulf every year. Or a switch to biodegradable & sustainable gear. Gear that will cost a fisherman noticeably more, and will bring that cost to our plates.

No matter what choice we make, the bill we’re ringing up needs to get paid. Do we have the courage to start paying it today, or do we leave it for our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids?

Shotgun Swells

Harold Johnson — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:59:56 GMT

Of the stuff that I find washing into various beaches here in Maine, one that perplexed me the longest was this:

I’m forever picking up old plastic shotgun shells, and the plastic wadding from inside shotgun shells. (This is a small part of what I've found.) Occasionally I’ll find a fairly fresh-looking shell, but many or most have been out in the ocean for a long time.

I wondered for years about the source. I asked around if the fishing industry used shotguns for any reason. But nobody I talked to had heard of such a thing. Maine permits seabird hunting. But it’s small scale. And most is done from islands and shorelines -- only a small percent, centered around sea ducks (scoter, eider, and long-tailed) seems ever to be done from boats. Not enough to account for all the debris I found.

I then wondered if these shells were from inland hunting -- ducks in saltmarshes, or deer/moose in the woods? But again, it seemed strange to find so many that had obviously managed to get into the ocean itself.

Then, out of the blue, I got a fascinating story* from a fan of my Flotsam Diaries Facebook page who lives in the Scottish Isles. He said that in the 1990s plastic shotgun shells started washing up in Shetland. They were of a gauge illegal in the United Kingdom, so the police were alerted.

As more shells washed up, fears of gun smuggling swirled. It was quite a to-do! Eventually forensics specialists traced back the batch numbers on some of the shells to gun shops in Newfoundland, Canada.

And that’s when the truth broke.

For centuries, Labrador and Newfoundland have had a traditional at-sea autumn hunt of a particular seabird – the murre (known also as a “turr”). Murre meat helped many generations survive the Maritimes’ long & biting winters. The hunt remains part of coastal culture. Into the early 1990s as many as 900,000 murres were shot and killed (mostly from boats traveling in open water) each year!

Regulations put into place at the beginning of the 21^st Century have dialed that back to maybe 200,000 to 300,000 birds per year. Shot by about 8,000 licensed hunters. Which still means a fearsome amount of shotgun shells entering the ocean.

Thanks to the divergent ocean currents off of Labrador, some travel along the North American coast and wash up on my shore. Others ride the North Atlantic current all the way to Scotland’s northernmost isles. The Orkney Beachcomber has found these North American-sized shotgun shells on his shores:

If you find a shotgun shell on your beach, perhaps it’s a local drop. Or perhaps it’s come from somewhere very far off, and has quite a story to tell!

Wherever its source, no spent plastic shotgun shell that goes into the ocean really goes away. In a plastic world, there is no “away.”

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* As he rightly warns, such stories tend to "grow in the telling." This one cannot be independently verified. Yet. Regardless of the details, it ended up pointing to the fact of the Newfoundland/Labrador murre hunt, which was a big find!

A Plastic World

Harold Johnson — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:34:05 GMT

Undercurrents’ subheading is “Thoughts on a timeless coast in a plastic world.” Up to now there hasn’t been that much discussion of this plastic world. I wanted to change that.

As I mentioned once, I visit a small beach in Biddeford weekly and collect all the trash that has washed in along the same 150-foot section. Between late February 2012 and late January 2013, this is what I’ve brought in:

All from one small section of one small “protected” and untouristed beach.

This photo doesn’t include the mounds of fishing rope. It couldn’t hope to. I have retrieved 3699 pieces, a total length now of over 6,000 ft! Here’s a photo I did take of my rope last May when there was less than 1/4 of that:

All told, I’ve collected 12965 pieces of debris, from one small part of one small beach, in under a year.

Nearly all of this debris is plastic. The Gulf of Maine is remarkably fouled by both industrial & consumer plastics. Plastics don’t biodegrade. Nothing digests them. Stomach acid doesn’t break them down. In fact nothing in nature knows how to destroy them. Sunlight will make plastic brittle, so it breaks into small pieces. But they’re still pieces of plastic. They last forever.

Disturbingly, much of the plastic that washes into my shore has bite & claw marks all over it.

Whatever effect this is having on our ocean, it cannot be good.

Some ask how all this plastic could get into the ocean. How could it not? In order to give us the "cheap" seafood we demand, our fishing industries use (and lose) plastic rope, buoys, bait bags, vinyl-coated traps, almost exclusively. Our households are filled with plastic: Bottles, chairs, toothpaste tubes, shower curtains, phones, picture frames, TV remotes, clothes hangers, flyswatters, combs, toys. Our open-air seaside restaurants -- on a windy coast -- use plastic cups, forks, ketchup packs, sauce cups. Our nylon/polyester clothes shed thousands of plastic fibers into sewer systems with each wash.

Even our wooden pencils are now often sheathed in plastic, so TV characters can be printed on them and marketed. These shavings will never go away:

Since our lives are now so plastic, almost everything we throw out is also now plastic. Look at the garbage in your trash can. Aside from coffee grounds and rotten food, how much is plastic? Every week, in every city, at least one garbage bin spills its contents. Here’s Saco a couple weeks ago:

This happens, it's life. It could be your trash, or mine. It could be from wind, an animal, a car sideswipe, or careless collection. The bits that blow away will wash into gutters, through storm drains, and straight to the ocean. Picture just one bin, per city, per week.

You can see results around your feet at many beaches.

As a wrap-up, please check out this striking blog. Last week in NC a Bull Dolphin was caught, pudding cup & squirt gun lodged in its gut.

In the Caribbean a deep-sea research team is finding human debris 3 miles down, in places humans are only now starting to explore.

It is now a plastic world. And that has consequences.

Water, Water Everywhere

Harold Johnson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:07:05 GMT

So we’ve all seen Senator Rubio’s “Water-Gate” moment.

What struck me wasn’t “the chug.” It was the bottle.

The US’s public water supply is one of the safest, cleanest, best-regulated water systems in the world. In fact, some bottled water is nothing but municipal tap water. Yet savvy marketers slap nice labels on bottles, invoking dreams of mountain air and misty hidden springs and streams. And we fall for it, by the truckload.

In 2011, Americans bought 9.1 billion gallons of bottled water -- that’s 29.2 gallons of bottled water per person.

A pint of bottled water costs about $1. That equals $8 per gallon. (Twice the price of gasoline.) Tap water, which has been rigorously tested, filtered, cleaned, and sent straight to your home and office for ultimate convenience, costs about $0.01 per gallon.

Multinationals like Nestle (which has owned Poland Spring since 1980) laugh all the way to the bank.

Beyond the waste of money, there’s also the waste of some 30 billion single-use plastic bottles a year. Only about 20-25% are recycled (and those are mostly downcycled into lower-quality products). Many end up in the ocean, later to wash up on beaches around the world, like Curtis Cove in Biddeford:

Here’s my collection of washed-in plastic bottles along just one small part of one small beach.

Worse still, companies now ship bottles hundreds -- or thousands -- of miles to market. Senator Rubio’s thirst-quencher started in a spring in Maine. From there, it was piped to a regional collection facility, then piped or trucked to a bottling plant (perhaps out of state). There it was squished into a tiny, wasteful bottle. Then it was packed with other bottles, wrapped in more plastic, and freighted or flown some 500 miles (assuming the Senator was in Washington for his taping and not Florida). It sat on a store shelf, until being bought by an aide and placed just out of reach of the poor Senator.

All of that, for water!

A year or so ago at a local convenience store, I saw a crate of bottled water shipped in from Iceland. The company's packaging touted it as the “First Zero-Carbon Water Bottler” in the world. So they shipped water, a naturally-occurring resource (you know, like air) 2,300 miles away and sold it as “green.”

The global trend toward commoditizing water -- putting ownership and monetary value on it -- is disturbing. The need to create -- then dispose of -- billions of plastic bottles for no good reason is disturbing. The way that marketing and PR has made it chic to buy some bogus “experience”* of tasting a far-off land, is also disturbing.

At least it should be.

Chesapeake Bay watershed (source)

Buffalo Bayou, Houston, TX (source)

River Deule, France (source)

* (Note: A few instances of coarse language in this video, but very eye-opening. Look how many people end up liking NYC garden hose water over bottled!)