(aka “Revenge of the SMURF”)
My family spent last Christmas at Gleneden Beach along the Oregon coast. The day after Christmas, my brother Ethan and I went for a run along the beach towards the sand spit to the north. As often happens during beach runs, we began collecting pieces of trash we encountered during the run. Although the Oregon coast has strong community participation in seasonal beach clean-ups and is kept relatively clean, it is still connected to the mid-Pacific garbage path via the North Pacific Gyre, and is perched along the margins of the world’s most wasteful consumer economy, the United States of America. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean basin, one long ocean current ride away, is the world’s most wasteful producer economy, China. Consequently, beach trash is unavoidable. It is really fascinating to see pieces of food packaging with Japanese and Chinese characters marking their point of origin, bringing into sharp relief the large-scale connectivity among the earth’s oceans and landmasses.
Whenever in the company of my younger brother, our conversations inevitably turn into philosophical debates. In this particular case, our habitual endeavor to collect beach trash provoked a discussion about the futility of this behavior within the context of our throw-away culture. We had some ingrained notion that we were “doing good” by collecting non-biodegradable plastics, batteries, and cigarette lighters from the beach and preventing them from killing or harming marine life. But now, all of the trash we collected will merely end up in a landfill, where it will continue to leach dioxins, BPA’s, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and other toxic chemicals into the surrounding soils and watersheds. These chemicals will eventually end up in the oceans in an altered form anyways. So what was the point? By picking up trash from “our” public beach, weren’t we just manifesting a “Not in my backyard” egotism? How is it acceptable to pollute everyone’s soils and terrestrial landscapes with massive landfills that are out of sight and out of mind, but somehow reprehensible to litter a public beach in plain view?
Nonetheless, there we were, merrily jogging along the scenic, “wild” Oregon coast, picking up trash, debating the meaning of life, feeling marginally good about ourselves (i.e., assuaging our consumer guilt) while despairing the trajectory of human civilization, and meditatively watching huge 20-foot waves curl and crash in chaotic break lines. Meanwhile, brown pelicans gracefully surfed the air rising from the wave crests, harbor seals poked their heads out of the surf to inspect the beach, and flocks of sandpipers chased the sea foam back and forth in pursuit of buried crustaceans.
Suddenly, I stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Half buried in the sand, far up the beach above the high tide line, an unmistakable object caught my eye: a green cylinder of plastic mesh fencing held closed with black zip ties, about 1 meter long by 30 cm diameter. I couldn’t believe it (did I already say that?). I did a double take. Looked again. It was still there. I walked over, and with a hard, steady tug, I freed the object from the sand and shook it out, staring at it, my breath held, turning it over in my hands, inspecting it carefully. It was a SMURF1: a Standard Monitoring Unit for the Recruitment of Fish, in contemporary marine biologist vernacular. A SMURF is a device consisting of bundles of black plastic garden fencing stuffed inside a burrito-like cylinder of green plastic mesh and deployed on a mooring line in the ocean to mimic kelp and attract juvenile fish (i.e., “recruits”) in order to monitor their populations.
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2002, I spearheaded a research project at Oregon State University as part of my honors thesis. I was charged with monitoring the recruitment of young fish to reefs and kelp forests off the central Oregon coast. So I deployed a dozen or so of these SMURFs to mimic kelp fronds and attract young fish in order to monitor their activity. Within a week of setting the SMURFs out on their mooring lines, a large storm struck, tearing apart the mooring lines and scattering the SMURFs into the Pacific. In a misguided effort to understand how nature was working, I had inadvertently polluted the oceans with plastic flotsam, destined to scour the seas like abandoned “ghost” fishing gear for thousands of years.
Ten years later, the harsh and tragic hypocrisy of this reality was now staring me in the face from the surface of the very beach I was trying to clean. I suddenly realized that the oceans not only connect us to each other across vast distances of space; they also connect us to ourselves across time, echoing hollow reminders from our past washing ashore with the crashing waves. Whatever we put into the ocean will come back to us in time.
Alas, it was revealed that the Emperor has no clothes. And the environmentalist has been exposed as the polluter. In a twist of irony, I realized that I was as much a part of the problem as anybody else. Try as I might to create a solution by recovering trash and reducing my consumption, I am still deeply embedded within the materialistic throw-away culture that is responsible for creating the ocean garbage patches and ever expanding landfills. I could not cover my involvement in this problem with any invisible or imaginary fabric of environmental egotism, no matter how many pieces of trash I collect and divert from the oceans and rivers to a landfill (and thus ultimately to the soils and watersheds anyways).
When I was living in the mountains of Costa Rica, in the small coffee and dairy farming community of San Luis de Monteverde, I was at first appalled to discover that the people there dealt with their garbage by burning it. “Don’t they realize that burning plastics releases harmful toxins into the atmosphere?” I thought to myself in my hubris of perceived scientific enlightenment. But my academic elitism gradually gave way to a recognition that, in fact, theirs was a far more sustainable practice than the average American. For one, they produced an order of magnitude less trash than the average American. Second, they only burned the trash out of necessity due to a lack of municipal garbage collection services. And third, any garbage collection service, during the act of collecting and transporting the trash, would be spewing its own harmful toxins into the atmosphere, while merely moving the trash from location A, where it was “consumed”, to location B, where it could sit in a landfill for generations. Out of sight and out of mind unfortunately does not mean “rendered harmless.” Ultimately, the residents of San Luis were, inadvertently, making a decision of profound personal accountability by assuming some of the direct costs of their consumption (in the form of toxic gases released by burning plastics) rather than externalizing all of these costs and imposing them upon future generations or distant ecosystems and communities.
So, in honor of my dear friends and family in San Luis, I am writing to offer perhaps another solution to this problem. Let us end our “Not in my backyard” mentality. Let us cease throwing away our trash, forgetting or ignoring its fate the moment it leaves our private property in the back of an exhaust-spewing, taxpayer-subsidized, garbage collection truck.
For one year, anything that we cannot recycle2 or compost3, we will keep, in our house, in our own backyard, to fully recognize and acknowledge the costs of our consumption. This will be the Year of Atonement for Trash; the revenge of the SMURF. Since January 1, 2012, we have not thrown away a single item of trash, although we have regrettably recycled many. Thus far, four and a half months later, we have yet to fill a single compacted 6-Gallon garbage bin with the non-recyclable trash that we have accumulated.
1Marine biologists are very fond of their acronyms; at one point as a research diver, I was working for PISCO* on a CRANE project using BINCKEs and SMURFs.
2Recycling itself is not a perfect solution to the trash crisis and throw-away culture. Many experts correctly have relabeled recycling as “down-cycling” because it merely prolongs a product’s inevitable trip to the landfill by converting it to a lower grade product. Every recycled product will eventually end up either in the ocean or on the land as disposable trash. Another problem with recycling are the sheer quantities of energy and infrastructure required to power and run recycling facilities. Although the amount of fossil fuel energy required to recycle a product are generally substantially less than the amount used to manufacture the product de novo from newly mined materials, the fact that recycling demands considerable inputs of non-renewable resources should cause us all to question its long-term efficacy and sustainability. The sustainability mantra of the 1980’s – “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” – was written specifically in that order to emphasize the order of positive environmental impact for the three behaviors, from best to worst alternatives. Of the three, only reducing our resource consumption has a true lasting effect on global and intergenerational scales.
3The municipal composting of kitchen scraps and yard waste within the city is also a problematic issue, as the waste must be trucked miles away and managed in large piles using heavy, oil-powered machinery, with a commensurately large greenhouse gas footprint. It is then repackaged and sold back to the producer/consumer in plastic-wrapped bundles of compost. The only truly sustainable compost pile is the one sitting in your own backyard that you mix and turn by hand. At Orizaba Farm in Maine, we were able to recycle kitchen and yard waste from soil, to kitchen, to compost pile, and back to the soil all within a few hundred meters total distance. As renters in Seattle, this is not currently an option. Soon enough, we will once again have the privilege of tending the Holy Compost Pile.
*PISCO. Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans; a colorless or amber-yellow grape brandy produced in winemaking regions of Chile and Peru; a port city on the Pacific Ocean in southwest Peru.
CRANE. Cooperative Research and Assessment of Nearshore Ecosystems; a large, long-legged, long-necked, migratory bird of the family Gruidae.
BINCKE. Benthic Icthyofaunal Net for Coral and Kelp Environments; a small rubber nipple-shaped device, usually fitted with a plastic collar and handle, designed to pacify a young child by mimicking the feel of its mother’s teet; a colloquial term describing a baby’s pacifier.
SMURF. Standard Monitoring Unit for the Recruitment of Fishes; a diminutive, mythological, blue-skinned, forest-dwelling creature of popular animation culture.
Damn man, what a ridiculously ironic story! That is too funny!
Last year while we were building up our place and didn’t grow any food, didn’t have a compost pile, didn’t recycle, and didn’t have fires to burn paper (summer) we produced a fair amount of garbage. Now the we have gotten our recycling act together (out here it is NOT county or town subsidized and has taken years and lots of volunteers to really pull it off…it is loaded by hand and hauled 4.5 hrs one-way to the nearest facility), and we have a compost pile setup, our trash volume has been cut by perhaps 75-90%. It’s an AMAZING difference. With Jill gone a lot now we probably make a 5-gallon bucket worth a month? (It is worth noting that brewing my own beer and kegging saves an AMAZING amount of waste, from the lack of bottles to the lack of trucking in cans full of 90% water from god-only-knows-where).
I still don’t agree with burning plastic and I argue this with someone a few times a year. Plastics will degrade over a number of years, not eternity, especially if left exposed to the sun (and especially at my elevation of 7500, I go WAY out of my way to buy metal because buckets and whatnot only last a few years in the high desert sun). When you burn them they make all sorts of nastiness, when they slowly degrade on their own time they simply return to their monomeric form which is generally quite inert. I mean, you can burn plastics, but that really should be done in a super-scrubbed incinerator like they’ve got outside of Salem, OR. Otherwise you might as well take fracking fluid and atomize it into the air…..oh wait, they are already doing that everywhere now!
So instead of a compost pile you’re going to have a garbage pile? I love it. You should post a photo of your garbage pile on here every month!!
Thanks for the feedback, Josh. Point taken on burning plastics. I certainly didn’t want to stand nearby when they were burning trash in San Luis due to the toxins emitted. More importantly, though, the Costa Rican community I was living in produced so little waste and had such a small per capita ecological footprint that, in the end, burning a small quantity of plastics probably amounted to an almost negligible change in their net environmental impact, especially relative to the average American. In retrospect, it probably would have been much safer to sequester the trash in situ at designated community refuse spots (like a modern day midden) instead of either burning it or trucking it hundreds of miles to a landfill.
heya bro, great to see so many good posts on the blog. mom informed me of a mention here, so i had to check in and soil my good name with a few bad points of my own:
1. i pointed out the SMURF to you. but in all fairness, you verified, and you initiated the garbage gathering in the first place. (although i do it on my own as well, i don’t go nearly as far out of my way as you do!)
2. for a wonderful, sardonic, serious(ly researched) take on the concept of “waste” and “garbage” you should refer to Ch.1 of “The Humanure Handbook.” amongst other things, he observes that even the landfills that are lined to prevent leaching (which are themselves few and far between) resemble giant, plastic disposable diapers. that aside, he makes a *very* good case (and paints a very realistic, grim picture) for why we need to discard the entire concept of waste.
3. if not the inventor, one of the people mainly responsible for popularizing the term “down-cycling” is William McDonough. in his treatise, he makes a distinction between “technonutrients” and “bionutrients,” although i support your point about the energy-intensity of recycling technonutrients. at the end of the day, bionutrient recycling is a solar-powered, self-regulating function of earth’s ecosystems. i think McDonough got around the problem by proposing that industrial systems should be able to repay the energy expended “with interest” but i’m pretty sure that somewhere in the fine print of the laws of thermodynamics the whole “with interest part” is bullshit. which is fine, except that i think his original intent was to paint a picture of good ol’ ‘Merican techno-optimism, not physically-realistic futility.
4. following the above term, we need to be a little more fine-grained about the “reduce” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle.” another maxim of McDonough’s is that ‘nature isn’t efficient — nature is effective.’ i like that distinction. our industrial economy is optimized for efficiency — the activities that gain the focus of our efficiency goals is entirely the issue. we are great at doing very destructive (or at least counter-productive, or even, paradoxically, inefficient). for instance, we have a very nicely-optimized “waste disposal” system. but the fundamental philosophy, attitudes and beliefs behind that system *make no sense whatsoever* (at least in the context of our short- and long-term health, well-being and happiness). i mean, we’re even very efficient at giving ourselves hemorrhoids and diverticulosis (50% of the population for the former, whoohoo! ref Slate). but i digress. in a localized, bionutrient-intensive system, it doesn’t matter so much how much i consume because (theoretically, and within reasonable limits) that consumption becomes localized productivity, in the form of caloric energy, biomass, soil productivity, food and materials, and more caloric energy, etc. so the limits we are looking at aren’t really *consumption* limits, but localized bionutrient production and recycling limits. this focus on consumption, i think, is rather arbitrary.
i love the “ironic time-capsule” theme of this post.
PS last weekend when Erin and I were running on the beach, and I was picking up trash and telling her about this very same story, I totally ran across a big blue plastic drink bottle printed with what looked like Korean characters on it. part of the whole “unites us across time and space” thing.
forget pen-pals. we are trash pals! this reminds me of a Demetri Martin bit…
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