time to read

One of the lovely books supplied in the cozy little room on the Oregon coast we inhabited this weekend was: Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris by Bonnie Henderson. I happily devoured three of the chapters last night.

It all started when Henderson, a self-described coast lover, signed up for a volunteer program called Coastwatch. At least four times per year, a Coastwatcher tracks the changes on just one mile of Oregon coast--hers is mile 157. Checking involves noting the seasonal changes she finds, reporting any potential problems, proposed developments, or any threat to continuity of public access to Oregon's 100% public beaches.

She ends up telling incredible stories of a few objects -- natural and human-made-- she finds on the beach at one point or another, gathering their histories (sometimes prompting her to travel across the world), searching for their origins. In the process, she reveals stunning complexity, a cast of vibrant characters and a few unsung heroes.

This book is a lovely set of stories that simply demonstrate what happens when people commit to carefully and closely observing a small piece of the world. You can hear some of the introduction read here (click on the travelogue option).

In one chapter, she discovers a dead murre, a common, penguin-like bird. In order to research the lives and deaths of these birds, she starts looking for help. She finds a couple scientists who have devoted themselves in one way or another to seabirds.

Common Murre by goingslo

Apparently the collection of data around dead birds washing up onto the ocean has not been routine at all. There are no government or scientific offices whose department this is. But the author found one marine scientist, Bob Loeffel, and she tells how it came to be that he had been independently collecting data on dead birds washed ashore on his weekly 5-mile runs for thirty years. He realized at an early point that this practice "had merit" and he described that he had it "by the tail", and he could not let it go.

Loeffel had identified a couple of very rare birds and was able to note some unusual events over those years, but one of the more dramatic outcomes was that his data ended up being the most important evidence in the case against the owners of the New Carissa, a large ship which ran aground off the coast of Oregon in 1999, and in the attempt at its removal, spilled gallons of oil and fuel, killing hundreds of marbled murrelets. Were it not for Bob Loeffel's records, there would have been no baseline for a "normal" amount of dead marbled murrelets found on his stretch of the central Oregon coast (Before New Carissa, up to 2. After New Carissa, 262), and no way to prove that the spill did any damage to the environment that needed paying for at all.

Old Carissa by Misserion

In another chapter, the author follows an unworn, barnacle-encrusted Reebok shoe she found on Labor Day 2000. This leads her to China, where the shoe was manufactured. Henderson helps us learn about the changes in mass production of shoes, the ingredients of shoes, the way they are made, the women who make them, the changes in the container shipping industry... it is all integral to the story.

The shoe likely fell off a boat during an ocean storm that occurred October 1998. But if the shoe was found in 2000, where was it in the intervening two years? Harrison introduces us to scientists Curtis Ebbsmeyer and Jim Ingraham, who have been studying and fine tuning the models for tracking the trajectories of debris floating in the Ocean. OSCURS, Ocean Surface Current Simulations, is the tool they use for this purpose. They figure most of these shoes got swept into the Eastern Garbage Patch, that vortex of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean you may have heard about. The one that is twice the size of Texas.

Great Garbage Patch by metrobest

Occasionally, the Patch coughs up single objects and they may float around the seas, being swept along by the various Ocean gyres until they run aground in Japan, China, Oregon, New England, Norway, or any other place on Earth with a coastline. Interestingly, most of the content of the Garbage Patch originates from shore, not from wrecked or spilled shipping containers.

One of the scientists who studies this says, "People ask me all the time, how do we clean this up? I honestly don't know. My view is that plastic is eventually going to end humanity."

Now, never fear: I would not have read the book if it was just a doom and gloomer. I have in fact avoided much content about the Eastern Garbage Patch because, well... because it's a floating trashpile in the ocean twice the size of Texas. Hello? Overwhelm! But Bonnie Henderson is such a wonderful storyteller, and brings to life these characters with such depth -- and brings the stories of real people who have jumped in and committed to something. Somehow she manages to balance it all.

What struck me most about this book was that it is about the simple and yet powerful merit in paying attention. The wisdom of looking with a scientific mind, not injecting opinion, just observing what is observable, and taking note.

Over and over. For a long time.

One of the debris-tracking scientists, Ebbsmeyer, is a particularly engaging and energetic example of a wholehearted and enthusiastic scientist: "I always try to tell kids, it doesn't matter what you keep track of, if you keep track of it long enough, it's awesome stuff!"

Looking closely at anything, the whole universe is visible.

Gazing Ball by bmmacht