Stephanie Carrow: In the waters of Trash Creek

Published in CT Post, Friday, July 19, 2013 by Stephanie Carrow

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Summer is a time of abundance, and most of it -- the blossoms, sunshine and songbirds -- we welcome appreciatively. But it's also the time for a proliferation of another sort -- that of plastic garbage in our waters. This plastic endangers marine wildlife and human health, both locally and as it makes its way out to sea. 

 

I've been paddling the lower Connecticut coastline for 16 years, and every day in the season that I go out on my kayak, I come back in a mini garbage scow.

After every trip, the back well of my sit-on-top holds a variety of balloons (latex and Mylar), shopping bags, food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, bottle caps, lighters, beer cans, yards of monofilament line with floaters and hooks, and empty No. 2 bottles for cleansers, motor oil and other toxic fluids. I've also picked up basketballs, soccer balls, beach balls, a good pair of men's sneakers, two-gallon buckets, a bright pink Croc shoe, and countless neon green tennis balls, apparently used in forfeited games of fetch with dogs. And I'm retrieving only a small part of what's out there.

While I've observed -- and picked up -- plastic refuse throughout my kayaking excursions, I'm sad to note that Ash Creek, between Fairfield and Bridgeport, has by far the highest concentration of garbage I've seen in waters along the coast -- so much so, that on my first or second paddling trip there, I dubbed it "Trash Creek."

It's a shame, too, because Ash Creek is also a place of sublime summer beauty: I don't think I've seen more of a range of shorebird species in one discrete patch of this coastline as I've seen while paddling Ash Creek. But the herons, egrets, osprey, cormorants, belted kingfishers and others there must wade and fish amidst garbage.

Knowing the damage that plastic refuse can do to marine life, I can't in good conscience pass it by -- I feel compelled to pick it up. I think of sea turtles choking on plastic bags and balloons they mistake for jellyfish, and of albatross chicks dying with bellies full of bottle caps and other plastic debris mistaken by their parents for lookalike zooplankton. I imagine all this local refuse drifting seaward and choking marine animals; or adding to the toxic Atlantic Garbage Patch, cousin to the now infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But this plastic does its damage even here in local waters. I myself came upon a lifeless cormorant who, tangled in snagged plastic fishing line, had drowned just inches below the water's surface. I met a man who'd saved an osprey from a similar fate -- both birds dive for their fish. And I met a couple who similarly saved a horseshoe crab -- not a cuddly animal, but vital to the ecosystem and even to human health (its blood is used in pharmaceuticals).

A reading of the book Plastic Ocean, by Capt. Charles Moore (with Cassandra Phillips), provides an even more vivid picture of the magnitude of the problem, some of which begins in coastal waters. Capt. Moore is credited with having discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- which he describes as actually a soup of microplastic fragments and whole objects that swirl in two vast gyres in the remote North Pacific Ocean.

The fragments occur when plastics, which never biodegrade, become brittle and break into pieces that mix with and mimic plankton, the oceans' food base. These fragments are accumulating in the oceans in such tonnage that they have been found to outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one -- or greater in some places.

Since his discovery in 1997, Moore and others have engaged in rigorous scientific samplings of the plastic soup and its multiple consequences, among them: well over 140,000 marine animals -- birds, sea turtles, whales, dolphins, otters and seals -- die each year from plastics ingestion, entanglement or strangulation. Much of the plastics involved are bottle caps, shopping bags, balloons and fishing lines -- among the very items we can find in abundance along our shoreline and floating in our local waters.

The largest animal ever to roam the earth, the blue whale, lives solely on tiny plankton -- meaning that it is now ingesting large quantities of plastic with every giant gulp.

Another consequence is to our own health, since the toxic microplastics are also eaten by the fish that we consume. Plastics leech toxins into our waters, and they also attract other pollutants such as PCBs and pesticides -- which means that anything consuming plastics becomes contaminated. It's been determined that our favorite food fish -- including tuna and salmon -- consume plastic, or eat the fish that eat the plastic.

It doesn't require a kayak trip to see our contribution to the problem. On any given day in this season, many of our beaches are strewn with plastic, ready to be washed out into the Sound and the sea beyond in the next high tide.

A stroll by the shoreline could fill multiple garbage bags with plastic bottles, bags, cups and utensils, food wrappers, straws, cigarette butts (also plastic), lighters, a plethora of bottle caps, and the occasional tampon applicator or condom. There are also perfectly usable plastic beach toys -- pails, shovels, sand molds -- and shoes left for the tide to take them.

It's as though they were easily disposable, and they are: the cheapness of plastic has made them so. We live in a throwaway culture; but in the process, we might be throwing away the very health of our waters that makes coastline living so appealing.

The solutions to the problem are multilateral -- and a few beach cleanups per season aren't enough to tackle this scourge. Along with Moore's book (a lively, compelling and absorbing summer read), the website 5gyres.org provides clear steps we all can take to stem the plastic tide. Moore's website, algalita.org, also provides further information on the problem and solutions. We can begin by steering clear of single-use, disposable plastics; and by recognizing that everything we leave behind has a consequence.

It's a conundrum that our most disposable products are made from the least destructible, longest-lasting material.

For my part, I will continue to pick up garbage as I walk the shoreline or paddle the waters, with this vision in mind: My most astonishing sighting in Ash Creek was of an American white pelican, on the day after Hurricane Irene.

 Unheard of in this part of the world, it had been blown perhaps a thousand miles north of its home, as had dozens of other non-indigenous species, according to local birding groups. That dazzling survivor embodied for me the essence of Ash Creek, and our Sound beyond, as a haven of beauty and wonder -- not a careless dumping ground. Our efforts together as a coastal community can, for all our sakes, set things right again.

Stephanie Carrow, of Fairfield, is a writer, psychotherapist and avid kayaker, and has been published in Fairfield Magazine and other local publications.