Gray whale dies bringing us a message -- with stomach full of plastic trash

Posted on Investigate West by Rita Hibbard May 3, 2010

When news that a dead gray whale had washed up on the shores of Puget Sound in West Seattle recently, its stomach full of human trash, I immediately thought of a series of stunning but horrific photographs I had recently experienced -- Seattle photographer Chris Jordan's work on the albatrosses of Midway Island who unintentionally kill their newborns feeding them our brightly colored garbage.

The gray whale was dead, but had been in good health. A bottom feeder, it had ingested about 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves, plastic pieces, a pair of sweat pants, a golf ball, and other cast-off bits of our lives. It was the fifth dead gray whale to be found in two weeks on Puget Sound, according to the Cascadia Research Collective.  Several of those whales were malnourished. The photo above, by Cascadia Research of Olympia, WA,  shows researchers near the whale.

Jordan's photographs show image after image of albatross chicks who have died after their parents have flown out over the ocean, bringing back deadly "meals" stuffed in their own beaks. The adult birds cannot distinguish between the plastic floating in the ocean and real food they need to feed their babies. As Jordan writes on his Web site:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Researchers at Cascade Research don't believe the trash killed the whale, but they do note that the sheer amount is alarming.

It did clearly indicate that the whale had been attempting to feed in industrial waters and therefore exposed to debris and contaminants present on the bottom in these areas. Gray whales are filter feeders that typically feed on the bottom and suck in sediment in shallow waters and filter the contents to strain out the small organisms that live there. They have been known to accumulate material including rocks and other debris from the bottom ingested in this process. While debris has been found in the stomachs of some previous gray whales found dead in Puget Sound, this appeared to be a larger quantity than had ever been found previously.

We know that giant plastic garbage patch is out there in the Pacific Ocean, twice the size of Texas. We can't see it from here. And even when you get close, it's apparently hard to fathom. Talking with Chris Jordan, who I met at the Journalism that Matters Conference in Seattle, he said when he began the work that led to the Midway Island project, he first thought to photograph the garbage patch itself. But when he looked at it, it was difficult to visualize, to bring home to peoples' lives. It was opaque and murky at the edges. It was deep and its size difficult to bring home. And his work  -- if you spend any time on his Web site -- is all about bringing home the message in ways that are meaningful to our lives.

So he ended up finding the message in the bodies of thousands of dead and decaying baby birds on Midway Island, birds who had died eating colorful bits of that garbage patch. And that's where the message of what choices we're making really comes homes.

Perhaps that dead gray whale -- with its 20 plastic bags, and its golf ball, and assorted plastic pieces -- might symbolize some of our choices for us. Might bring it home.

That whale, the fifth to die in Puget Sound in two weeks, is a chance to think about it. Let's not miss the opportunity.

The great garbage patch of the Pacific

Posted in Al Jazeera 09 Mar 2013 by Rose Aguilar
When you can scoop up in our oceans more plastic than biomass, it's time to recognise that we may have a problem.
According to the author of a recent study, each of the five known garbage patches in the oceans "contains so much plastic that if you were to drag a net through these areas you would pull up more plastic than biomass" [Reuters]
If you listen closely, you can hear the oceans, underwater life, and birds crying. Sometimes they're yelling for help. Plastic is quickly and painfully killing their environment and overall way of life. If you think I'm exaggerating, watch this heartbreaking trailer for Midway: Message From the Gyre, a forthcoming documentary about Midway Atoll, a collection of three small islands in the North Pacific, where the bodies of tens of thousands of dead baby albatrosses are filled with plastic junk. The islands are more than 2,000 miles (3,219km) from the nearest continent, making it one of the most remote places on earth. Led by the incredible photographer Chris Jordan, the team behind the film has returned to the island over several years and bore witness to albatrosses dying from starvation, toxicity, and choking caused by human trash. "We walk through the fire of horror and grief, facing the immensity of this tragedy - and our own complicity - head on. The viewer will experience stunning juxtapositions of beauty and horror, destruction and renewal, grief and joy, birth and death, coming out the other side with their heart broken open and their worldview shifted." In-depth coverage of the COP17 in Durban, South Africa In the trailer, Jordan asks, "Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time and allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us and our future? Come with me on a journey through the eye of beauty across an ocean of grief and beyond." If the trailer is any indication of what's to come, the film will be heartbreaking to watch, but if we don't come to terms with what we're doing to the planet, it will die off right before our very eyes. When you look at what's happening in Midway or spend anytime on a beach or in the ocean, it's clear that the painful process has already begun. Midway Atoll, an unincorporated territory of the United States, is about one-third of the way from Honolulu, Hawaii to Tokyo, Japan, and is located near the apex of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world's largest landfill. When I first heard about the Garbage Patch, which is located between Hawaii and the West Coast and estimated to be roughly twice the size of Rhode Island, I pictured a massive floating garbage dump that could possibly be cleaned up. But because the sun breaks plastic down into tiny pieces and never fully decomposes, the Patch is more like a massive soup bowl of small plastic bits that float just below the surface, making clean up efforts impossible. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of five known patches in the world. According to a sobering new study from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Climate System Science, even if everyone in the world stopped littering and putting trash into the ocean, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years. "There are five known garbage patches in the subtropical oceans between each of the continents. Each contains so much plastic that if you were to drag a net through these areas you would pull up more plastic than biomass," said lead author Erik Van Sebille. In some regions of the North Pacific, there is more weight in plastic than there is in life. That's how bad it is. The study also points out that if you were to drop a rubber duck in the ocean nearest you, it could end up in any ocean in the world. Watch this video to find out how the Australian researchers used GPS to project the path of plastics in the oceans. "Garbage from any country can end up in any one of these garbage patches. This tells us that no single country is responsible. Ocean garbage is an international problem that requires an international solution," said Dr Van Sebille. John Klavitter, Deputy Refuge Manager of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, is hopeful that the documentary on Midway will create global awareness needed to implement real solutions. Klavitter has lived on the island for the past 11 years and still feels like he's living in a dream. "The albatross look at you with trusting eyes," he says. "It's still unbelievable 11 years later." When he made his first trip to Midway in 1992, he saw a few plastic bottle caps. Today, they're the most common item found inside hundreds of thousands of dead albatross. On average, 350,000 albatross chicks hatch every year. Approximately 230,000 leave the island and 120,000 die. It's difficult to verify the cause of death, but he says most die of starvation or dehydration - when their bodies get filled with plastic. Klavitter not only finds plastic in their stomach, but also in the food they eat. "Ultimately, these plastics have toxins in them," he says. "And it means that we have toxic plastics in our bodies because we're all connected." So what can we do about this? The plastics industry bears most of the blame, but we are all complicit. We have to stop using so much plastic. Most importantly, we have to pressure the packaging industry to move towards bio-based products. According to Global Industry Analysts, the packaging industry is expected to reach $262bn by 2015. Dead birds, toxic chemicals and dirty beaches do not matter when profits are the ultimate goal. If we don't act now, Klavitter believes that it will take thousands of years before there is no plastic in the ocean. "We can't afford to wait," he says. "The albatross are teaching us what we're doing to our planet. They're telling us to make changes before it's too late." To learn more about the effects of plastics and the overall state of the oceans, check out the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival from March 8-10. The films will also be shown in Hong Kong in April. Rose Aguilar is the host of Your Call, a daily call-in radio show on KALW in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter: @roseaguilar The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. Source:  Al Jazeera

A Love Story on Midway Island

Posted in Outside Blog Thursday, June 14, 2012 By Adventure Lab

 Midway Atoll is a 2.4-square-mile atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with three islands covering 1,549 acres. It's small, remote, and an essential landing strip for giant seabirds. More than three million of them plop down on the islands every year, which means it's crowded, especially when the birds decide to lay their eggs. Virtually every square foot has a nest.

Three species of albatross, of which the most prominent is the Laysan albatross—with 450,000 nesting pairs, take up space on the island every winter. Laysans are big birds, with roughly six-foot wingspans. They stay, more or less, for nine months. They are monogamous, for the most part, and can live for up to 40 years. After the pairs land in October or November, they spend some time dancing and clicking and deciding on a nest before laying an egg. The male and female take turns incubating the egg for about two months, fly off on a series of epic journeys to find food for their young over the course of four or five months, and then leave the youngsters alone so they can fledge in June or July.

Photographer and filmmaker Chris Jordan stepped into this scene—carefully, of course—and stayed for a couple weeks. It affected him in a profound way. That's because, as you've probably heard and seen, a lot of the chicks die with large amounts of plastic in their stomachs. Their parents inadvertently scoop up the debris while feeding on squid and other fish at the top of the Pacific Ocean, and regurgitate the plastic into the youngsters' mouths. Eventually, Jordan decided to make a movie called Midway, and he wants to go back. He's hoping to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter to finish his project. We checked in with him to find out a little bit more about his motivation.

Laysan albatross and chick. Photo: Chris Jordan

Do you have a favorite photograph of an albatross chick?The two weeks we spent photographing the hatching chicks on Midway was one of the most beautiful experiences of my whole life. The mother albatrosses allowed us so close to their hatching babies that in one case, my lens was right in the nest and the mother’s wing was resting on my head.

 

Laysan albatross and chick. Photo: Chris Jordan

Albatrosses are as big as eagles, with powerful beaks that could rip your face off if they decided to. But they trusted us to come literally within a few inches of their hatching babies with our cameras, displaying an elegance and grace that was incredible to behold. I will never forget the intimacy of that experience.

Laysan albatross and chick. Photo: Chris Jordan

Was there a specific moment when you decided to make the film?
The moment I knew I had to push deeper into the story of Midway was when I was visiting a girls’ school in Brisbane, Australia, showing my photographs of the plastic-filled birds. At the end of my talk, one of the teachers broke down weeping in front of her whole school. I stood there frozen, with my heart breaking, as tears poured down her face and her voice shook with horror and grief, and she asked me “How do we get to hope from here?” Her question resonated for me like a temple bell on so many levels, and I didn’t have an answer. I think maybe that’s a question we are all holding right now, as the news about the health of our world gets worse every day, and our leaders become more and more lost and paralyzed. I knew I had to go back to Midway and stand in the fire of that question until I had something to offer that teacher. The result has been a three-year project that has changed my life at the very core. 

What have scientists told you about what the plastic does to the Albatross chicks?
That is complex because albatross chicks have a high natural mortality rate, and it is difficult to determine in a particular case whether a chick died from plastic or from other causes. For example, if two parent albatrosses leave their nest for five days in search of food, their chick may be subjected to dehydrating heat, or rain storms that cause hypothermia. If the baby dies during that time, who can say what was the exact cause of death, and whether the 22 plastic bottle caps in its stomach had a contributing effect? All that can be said with certainty is that the plastic is increasing the mortality of the albatross chicks by an unknown factor.

But personally, I am not so much interested in saving the albatross as I am in receiving the urgent alarm signal they are sending us about the state of our world. The birds on Midway are like messengers, the canary in the coal mine. When the canary dies, the miners don’t run over and try to save the canary— they receive the message that bird just gave its life delivering, and then act quickly to save themselves. That approach resonates with me because it doesn’t view the birds as helpless victims that we passively observe; it places a duty on us to receive their message, and be changed by it (or not). 

What do you hope the end result of the movie will be?
I believe the story of Midway Island offers a profound metaphor for our time, like an epic piece of literature that carries symbolism and archetype on multiple levels. A lot of smart people are saying that what humanity needs right now is a shift in our story, and my own theory is that we need a new love story—a real one that we can believe in, and that includes us all. First-world culture has lost its connection with a deeply felt reverence for the miracle of our life, and for our sacred place in the great mystery. Being on Pihemanu (the Hawaiian name for Midway) is like standing on a razor’s edge between darkness and light, paradise and hell, the past and the future; it is a focused microcosm of our world, where horror meets innocence, grief meets joy, birth meets death, all wrapped in an envelope of violent history and stunning natural beauty that overwhelms the senses and transforms the mind. I don’t hold any specific hopes for the end result of my project; my fiduciary duty runs to the story itself, and I consider it my job to honor that story with the highest quality piece of visual poetry that can be achieved with the resources I have available to me. And once I tell that story, my role is done, and that is where the viewer’s responsibility begins.

For more on the Midway Film Project by Chris Jordan, check out Kickstarter.

H/T: @Revkin
 —Joe Spring
@joespring
facebook.com/joespring.1

Amazing Documentary by Chris Jordan

Midway: A Message from the Gyre trailer by Chris Jordan

Check out Chris Jordan's website - here's the link to his "Running the Numbers" gallery, where he uses computer tricks to create huge large scale works depicting things like: number of pieces of junk mail mailed every 3 seconds in the US, or number of plastic bottles consumed each minute.

Filmmaker sounds alarm over plastic

published 2012-02-06 in kalahari.com

Hong Kong - On Midway atoll in the North Pacific, dozens of young albatross lie dead in the sand, their stomachs filled with cigarette lighters, toy soldiers and other plastic scraps their parents mistook for food.

That sad and surreal sight is one of the many symptoms of a plague afflicting the world's oceans, food chains and human communities: The onslaught of discarded plastic, said Hong Kong-based film director Craig Leeson.

"Every piece of plastic ever made since the 1950s exists in some shape or form on the planet," Leeson said. "We throw plastic into a bin, it's taken away from us and we never see it again - but it still comes back at us."

Over the past year, the Australian director has been following the menace of plastic from Sardinia to Canada to the Indian Ocean for a film that aims to combine the art of nature documentary with a campaigning quest.

Provisionally called Away, the movie - backed by David Attenborough and the UK-based Plastic Oceans Foundation - brings together new research on the spread of plastic with missions by "explorers" such as Britain's Ben Fogle to show the diverse effects of plastic trash.

Research

Its message is that while you may throw out your plastic goods, they are never really thrown "away".

Crews under Leeson's direction have so far swum with blue whales, taken a deep-sea submarine to the depths of the Mediterranean and found swirling clumps of plastic trash in the Indian Ocean.

They have used a harpoon-like instrument to take biopsies from whales and dissected a dead Corsican turtle in a laboratory - "dead turtles are the smelliest things you can imagine", he said. Sea lions are yet to come.

The foundation cites research showing that at least 250 species are known to have ingested or become entangled in plastic in the seas.

They put forward plastic ingestion as one of the main causes of "skinny whale syndrome", in which whales are discovered mysteriously starved.

The 250 million tons of plastic we discard each year make their way for thousands of miles around the oceans, and Leeson's team - many of whom have backgrounds in the BBC's Natural History Unit - are determined to document this in spectacular fashion.

But beyond this, their goal is to show that the environmental damage is systemic, going far beyond a series of water-borne trash heaps.

Health problems

In fact, Leeson said, the mass of plastic the size of Texas often said to exist in the North Pacific is a myth. Instead, particles of plastic lurk there invisibly, in seemingly clear water.

"If you trawl for it with these special nets that they've developed, you come back with this glutinous mass - it's microplastics that are in the water along with the plankton," he said.

"The problem is that it's being mistaken for food and being eaten by plankton eaters, who are then eaten by bigger fish, and so it goes on, and it ends up on our dinner tables."

Studies have linked this with health problems in humans including cancer, diabetes and immune disruption.

And it is not just the plastic itself that enters the food chain, but other man-made substances from sources such as industrial waste that attach themselves to plastics in the water.

The team will be shooting until mid-2012 and will also visit communities living beside rivers that are heavily polluted with plastic to see its more direct effects on human life.

This is not the first high-profile campaign on the subject: Greenpeace, currently researching plastic in the Arctic Ocean, has warned that urgent action is needed to address the sources of plastic waste, and campaign group WWF calls the problem "staggering".

Message

But Leeson hopes the images in his film will jolt viewers out of their complacency about rubbish that apparently disappears into the waste collection system.

"When you see a toy soldier or a lighter that's manufactured in China that ends up in the stomach of an albatross at Midway Point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that just shows you how much effect you're having on the environment," he said.

Leeson will not divulge all the findings from new research carried out for the film, but it is clear the message will be an alarming one.

Does he think his team can compete in the busy market for alarming messages, currently dominated by the threat of climate change?

"Clearly climate change is one of the most pressing issues, if not the most pressing issue that we face, because it affects everything we do," Leeson said.

But plastic and carbon emissions are directly linked: Plastic is estimated to account for around eight percent of the world's fossil fuel use, half of it in energy consumed during its manufacturing.

The film will question the "disposable lifestyle" behind discarded plastic, but not advocate banning the substance altogether.

It will also look at solutions to the waste mountain, including plastic recycling and biogenesis, in which plastic is reduced back to its core elements while producing energy.

An initial aim is to persuade consumers and manufacturers to reconsider their use of disposable plastics such as mineral water bottles.

Leeson said responsibility for waste cuts across different environmental issues, including climate.

"Plastic is part of that, but also if we are raising awareness about issues such as plastic then we’re raising awareness about what does actually affect the planet we live on, and I think that’s a good thing," he said.

- AFP