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Garbage Patch Kid

By John on January 24, 2010

You’ve probably read about the giant patch of floating trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Well, we have our own plastic trash poisoning the Gulf of Maine.  Let me show you where it comes from.

 Saturday was a warm, sunny afternoon, and a lovely day to be outdoors.  We live on the edge of a salt marsh, and a couple of times a year I go out and pick up garbage.  Saturday seemed like a good day to do that.  There had been strong Spring Tides earlier in the month – with that lots of litter is flushed down-river and deposited at the tide line.  It is not unusual to fill up a trash bag or two in less than an hour.

90% of this trash is plastic.  By volume it is mostly urethane foam and Styrofoam.  The remainder is plastic bottles – bottled water and sports drinks primarily.  Yesterday I picked up 42 bottles.  

The trouble with plastic is that it doesn’t biodegrade but it does UV-degrade.  In other words, it doesn’t break down in the environment, it simply breaks up.  What is most irksome is Styrofoam packing material (the kind your new computer came boxed in).  I find big chunks woven into the marsh grass.  When you go to pick them up, they disintegrate in your hand into little white pellets that blow away in the wind. 

Eventually, most of this plastic pollution is washed out to the sea.  Hundreds of millions of tons of plastics and chemicals make their way into the ocean every year. 

A bag of trash and a block of styrofoam packaging

The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that in every square mile of ocean there may be 46,000 pieces of floating plastic – mostly microscopic bits.  In places like the Pacific Garbage Patch plastic outweighs plankton at a ratio of six to one.  It is not that bad in the Gulf of Maine – yet.  But this stuff accumulates.  I don’t harbor any illusion that picking up a bag of trash for recycling amounts to much in the scheme of things.  It is simply an act of hope.

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Ocean Is Our Muse

By John on December 4, 2009

I grew up on the beach.

My mom had summer rental cottages at the shore, where we worked and lived.  Accommodations were spare but from the front door step the vista was limitless.  The sound of surf was always in the background.

My dad was a scuba diver at a time when the sport was new and dangerous.  He introduced me to diving when I was eight – outfitted me with a home made wetsuit and child-sized scuba tank .  For a few summers I spent all my spare time in the water.  I would find places to  sit quietly on the ocean floor, nestled into the seaweed, observing the fish and conserving my air as long as I could.

In college I realized what I wanted.  I had been studying business but it was a life destined to be lived inside – I left it behind.  Traveling the coast of Maine I found a piece of waterfront which I could afford, built a camp, and bought a boat.  I set out to learn the trades that would allow me to live and work on the water.

Commercial fishing has taken me places I never dreamed I’d go, both in experience and in thought.  The thread woven through my life has been a love of the ocean environment.  Now I want to talk to people who feel as I do.  John on board

We imagine ourselves as terrestrial beings.  But standing on the beach looking out to sea, you glimpse the edge of a larger world.  This is a water planet.  Ocean governs our lives.  As living things, we carry little bits of ocean chemistry walking on land.

There are people out there, a sub-set of population, who have an ocean vision.  I am using this new medium, web networking, to reach out. Blogging is a little embarrassing for a taciturn old Yankee.  I’m not doing this to hear myself talk – I’m trying to solicit a response.  I want to meet you and learn about your ocean experience.

Please use this website.  Let’s find out who we are.

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Where the Wild Things Are

By John on November 27, 2009

Dave Lamoureux with the 157-pound bluefin, a record tuna for an unassisted kayak fisherman. Copyright NY Times.

Dave Lamoureux with the 157-pound bluefin, a record tuna for an unassisted kayak fisherman. Copyright NY Times.

As the turtle said, “Dude, you’ve got serious thrill issues.”

 There aren’t many places in the world where bluefin tuna venture so close to shore that a person can paddle out to cast for them from a kayak.  But Race Point off the tip of Cape Cod is one of those places.  On the outgoing tide, all of Massachusetts Bay is trying to empty out around that one point of land, and that is where big fish congregate to feed.

 Fly fishing from a kayak has become a sport in recent years.  Recently, the New York Times reported on a fellow who had been trying his hand at kayak-fishing for striped bass last year near Race Point, when he hooked up a small bluefin tuna.  The tuna took him for a ride.  He has since been perfecting his technique, and so far, the paper recounts, his biggest fish landed weighed 157 pounds! “Bluefins are powerful enough, he said, that if given too little line, they can cause a kayak to flip end over end.”  Now there’s a thrill for you.

 There is no exaggeration in his assertion either.   Bluefins are awesome fish – anytime you hook one is a thrill.  Frankly, a 157-pound fish may be a trophy to a kayak-fisherman but it isn’t even a keeper for someone with a commercial tuna license.  The biggest fish I ever caught weighed in at over 900 pounds – gutted and dressed!  It took three of us four hours to land it.  Boy was that fun. 

Sort of like hunting mastodons with pointy sticks.

Not that I want to dismiss the accomplishment of the kayak-fisherman – he’s got more moxie than I do.  There is something elemental about fighting big fish from a small open boat (ask Santiago).  These sorts of elemental challenges are becoming fewer as human engineering rules the planet and the natural world is more removed from daily life.

 The planet needs wilderness.  People need wilderness too – especially civilized people. 

 The ocean is wilderness at our doorstep.  Once you get away from the shore and below the waves, it’s wild.   The ocean is where I go to connect, again, with something unmistakably real.

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Urban Sprawl in the Ocean

By admin on July 10, 2008

John on Press Herald Post

 

Have you ever attended a planning board meeting?

There has been considerable discussion of “urban sprawl” in southern Maine. Town planning departments and planning boards are where citizens confront these questions of sprawl and manage the effects of development.

But imagine, for a moment, a planning board where all the members happened to be builders and real estate developers. Imagine a housing development up for review by this body – what sort of standards would they apply.

Sidewalks? – Too expensive. No one walks any more. Waiver granted.
Extend a water main? – Home owners can drill wells. Waiver granted.
Wetlands? – Breed mosquitoes. Drain them – waiver granted.

You get the idea. Fortunately we don’t do municipal planning this way (though some would like to). Land use is strongly tied to community values and the people who make those decisions have to represent the whole community.

“Marine habitat destruction” is the ocean equivalent of “urban sprawl”.

A few summers ago I attended a two-day workshop at the UME Darling Marine Center campus in Walpole. Meeting there were US and Canadian planners and scientists looking at human-caused stressors to marine habitats in the Gulf of Maine. They determined that, in every kind of marine habitat, from open-ocean to estuary, the greatest impacts by far come from commercial fishing.

Then they asked the question, “If fishing is altering marine ecology, who manages the impacts of fishing?”

Answer: in US waters the responsibility falls to the New England Fishery Management Council. Hmmm – not what people expected.

Therefore, today I am attending the New England Fishery Management Council’s Habitat Committee meeting. It’s not an easy assignment to sit through. The day’s discussion is focused on a federal proposal – guidelines for protecting corals from damage by fishing operations. The chairman, an intelligent, well meaning man, is running the meeting – he is a charter boat captain. The vice-chairman owns a groundfish trawler. Three members are employees of marine resource agencies in NH, RI and CT.

The final member is an industry trade representative with a large trawler background – he has been speaking at length against the federal proposal – specifically, recommendations to close areas where corals are found to many forms of commercial fishing. Listening to him you would understand that bottom trawlers, clearly, are no threat to coral and should not be included on a list of destructive gear-types. “Really. Trawler captains avoid coral areas. They don’t want to get into the stuff. Damage to coral comes from lobster traps and gillnets, not trawlers. No need to close them out of these areas.”

fish Okay. Yup. We know how he’s going to vote.

Few people realize that there are beds of hard coral in areas of the Gulf of Maine. Cold-water corals that grow in deep basins and canyons along the continental shelf edge. Species which live for 500 years. One pass of a trawl-door or a carelessly retrieved net can wipe out a long biological history in an instant. Scientists estimate that 80% of coral biomass in New England has been lost to interaction with commercial fishing over two centuries, in little bits and pieces over time.

So how long shall we leave a piece of sea-bed undisturbed in order to regenerate coral communities? No one in the fishing industry is going to ask that question. Instead, the debate may be whether to protect some of what is left. And coral is just one of many issues of this sort.

Comprehensive planning for marine environmental quality? No one has invented that yet.

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