Talk Trash and Walk Trash... With Me

In April of this year I had the good fortune of running my prayer for the Ocean by the edge of the cliffs in Big Sur...it was the Big Sur International Marathon which happened a few days before the biggest oil spill in our history in the Gulf of Mexico. The immediate response after the spill...even mine...was to point a finger at BP and curse the greed and recklessness of an oil company that could cause so much harm to so many of us and countless species.

Soon after, I remembered...whenever there is one finger pointing out, there are four more pointing back at me...or we. So when I saw a brief ad in the employment section of the Coastal Weekely for 50 Marine Debris Outreach presenters to come to work for a small stipend for Surfrider, I was all over it. It was during the early months of summer when I had no income from my job for Monterey Peninsula College, so the timing was perfect.

Fifteen hours of training on plastics in the ocean later...my boyfriend and I have become avid trash walkers and trash talkers. He also was able to get hired as a Marine Debris Outreach dude.

Yes, BP has caused millions of gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico, but we have collectively been the cause of other petroleum in the ocean. Amazingly, there is a mysterious plastic soup out there in the ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is estimated to be the twice the size of Texas. Go figure, our individual water bottles that we consume to the tune of 45 million per year just in this country, our individual plastic shopping bags, our single use plastic take out containers all add up to an oil spill in the form of plastics.

Have you ever tried eating plastic? Does plastic soup sound like a yummy dish to bring to a potluck? Nope, to this day no organism is able to get nutritional value from eating plastic. Quite the opposite, it is killing all kinds of species from sea turtles to Albotross birds.

But I certainly would not have guessed that adult Albotross birds go out to that garbage patch in the middle of the ocean between China and the U.S. and eat my colored plastic bottle caps because they look like shrimp or krill then fly back and regurgitate them into the mouths of their babes. That is why of the 500,000 albatross chicks born per year in the NW Hawaiian Islands, approximately 200,00 (40%) are dying of plastics ingestion. We can't blame these birds, who are going out to where real ocean animals were living before and used to be food for them.

I believe if we really were aware of the damage that we are causing the ocean and the beings who live in and rely on the ocean that we would be willing to change our individual and collective habits. We would be able and willing to demand a different way of thinking about our earth and our ocean so that we would not use single use plastics that are used for fifteen minutes but last forever.

So education, color pictures of suffering animals and birds...is one antidote to the suffering caused by ignorance. Being able to talk trash to others, having fun picking up trash on walks. Doing it regularly and telling others about it...this too could be right livelihood!