Commencement to Saving the Seas

After learning so much on this cruise, I thought a commencement ceremony would be in order, so I put a short graduation speech by a familiar face at the top of this Hawaii cruise summary.

Consider the links below like yearbook pages filled with fond memories of our abbreviated "semester at sea."

Back to School

Music 074: Intro to Ukulele

Ecology 1844: The Great Auk

Humanities 110: History and Appreciation of Art

Oceanography 1964: Ka'anapali Beach

History Five-0: Hilo

Ecology 2018: Hanauma Bay and Honolulu

Music Appreciation 50: Hula Culture

Economics 499: Kauai

Anthropology? From L.A. to Ensenada, Plus Some Other Stuff In Between

Having linked all of the blogs written about this trip in one place for easy future reference, I normally would fade out here, but I want to include a final word.



Over the fifty years since Dustin Hoffman's character received that word of advice, so much plastic has been created and subsequently discarded that a huge environmental problem has evolved.  Tons of plastic products purchased from WalMart and now Amazon get dumped in landfills weekly where it won't biologically degrade in our lifetimes.  As bad as the situation may be on land, it's worse for oceans.

As I can tell you from walking along the shore in Redondo Beach, trash cans eventually become overstuffed, and often trash containing food scraps gets picked up by seagulls and strewn in the sand.  Caught by the wind, the garbage ends up at sea.

More catastrophically, large storms eventually batter coastal cities, dragging massive amounts of flotsam into the sea.  It floats on or near the surface, following currents until much of it ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii.

This area is now estimated to be twice the size of Texas, but it is not dense like an island.  Often, the plastic is just below the surface.

Cruising to Hawaii, we saw occasional bunches of floats and netting filled with other trash floating by, but those generally wind up in a convergence zone between shipping lanes, where it has accumulated for decades.

If you are an environmentalist and want to save the world, consider one word: plastics.

But I'll go a step beyond the vague advice to The Graduate.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a problem that could be alleviated with truly measurable results.



The Ocean Cleanup project claims they will be able to clean up half of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within just five years of its deployment, which begins in 2018.  Their goal is plastic free oceans by 2050.

As to whether TOC can pull it off, I don't know, but I salute their effort, which can only succeed with sufficient funding.  While the whole world would benefit by success, there is not a specific customer to pay the tab.

You can join me in helping to fund their project here with a tax-deductible donation through the Netherland-American Foundation, a USA 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

The budget for the first ten years of this project is 317 million Euro, which would obviously be a lot of fundraising.

While it is a large sum, it would be less than 6% of the USA Environmental Protection Agency budget of $5.65 Billion for 2018, if that fraction of funds were directed in this less bureaucratic direction.  And that's just one country, albeit the most charitable.

If politicians truly care about improving the environment, why not back this effort?

Put another way, it is a little more than half the amount of what Al Gore sold his TV station to Al Jazeera for or twice the estimated value of Oprah Winfrey's mansion in Montecito, California, one of her seven homes.

Maybe you're an engineer who thinks big and can figure out an even better solution.  That would be great, but all of us can choose to be less wasteful beginning today and make other small changes in our own lives to make the world a better place.