WaterNotes

Ocean Conservancy released their report on marine debris from the 2009 International Coastal Cleanup, titled Trash Travels: From Our Hands to the Sea, Around the Globe, and Through Time.  The entire report is required reading for anyone interested in a snapshot of what is going on with our beaches and coastal environments. The top ten [...]

I’m pretty much speechless about this one. We hear about these impacts on our wildlife and we can theorize that baleen whales will scoop plastic plankton alongside the real stuff, but to see evidence of it really brings home the size of the situation we’re in.

Fascinating, depressingly artistic and provocative.. if you can get past the idea that a plastic bag can yearn for anything, can be happy, or contemplative.  Its a beautiful consideration of our objects, and their fate.  Anyone else starting to notice my total obsession with documentaries lately? Also intriguing, but totally unrelated to plastic bags: a [...]

MotherJones posted this video with short interviews from the Project Kaisei crowd. The samples of plastic they brought back are on deck and in view in several shots. Just further proof of the reality few of us get to view firsthand but nevertheless exists.

The North Pacific gyre is home to the aptly named Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Although conservation and marine science has known about the existence of this strange amalgamation of human plastic waste for several years, not much is know about its true size, the structure of the debris it contains, or the impact on marine [...]

A fellow marine educator, Ron Hirschi, was recently honored with a trip to the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. He was kind enough to detail his excursion on his own blog but his time spent on Midway Atoll particularly sparked a single great idea: Project Serious Sand. As he recently wrote on the National Marine Educators [...]

Over the weekend I hit the Lagoon once more for a serious cleanup. Instead of showing up in flipflops and a tanktop with a single bag to use I came with an absolute arsenal against trash. Pocket knives, a roll of bags, watershoes to go hunting in the shallows for marine debris, oatmeal bars, and [...]