WHEN I was young, my brothers and I got into an argument over who made a big mess in the kitchen.  Sticky spills covered the counter tops, dirty dishes filled the sink and some kind of powder was all over the floor.  Incriminations flew, followed by shouts of “I didn’t do it so I’m not cleaning it up!”  After we settled down, we walked into the kitchen to find it remarkably clean.  While we argued over who made the mess, our mother quietly cleaned it up.  We felt pretty small.  

While we have been arguing about who generates the most trash and what steps we must take to decrease our plastics pollution, someone has been quietly cleaning up the mess.  Ocean Voyages Institute, a non-profit organization worthy of your attention, has returned from their latest cleaning effort with another 96 tons of plastic debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the swirling hurricane of filth located near Hawaii.

The founder and leader of the company, Mary Crowley, says “Keeping our ocean healthy is vital to ocean life and our own health.  Our clean-up missions give me great hope for the future of our ocean because change is possible.”  That is what I call putting your money where your mouth is.

Since they modestly grabbed a broom and dustpan and started cleaning up in 2009, the Institute has recovered nearly 700,000 pounds of plastics from the ocean, with nearly half of the total coming in one year, a whopping 340,000 pounds in 2020.

The Institute uses a 130-foot sailing freighter, the Kwai, to move through the congested Garbage Patch, hauling in discarded fishing nets, buoys, floats and other detritus of industrial-scale fishing, and some land-based plastics as well, everything from soda bottles to diapers.  The operation is small-scale but don’t deride them.  They have removed 350 tons of trash from the ocean that none of the rest of us have, including the United Nations or China, the world’s largest polluter.  We have yet to see a Chinese cleaning vessel out there.

Who are the good shepherds involved in this cleanup work?  Captain Locky MacLean says, “Many of my crew are from the Pacific Islands and we all do this good work for our children, so they will benefit from healthy oceans.”  The Institute is a neighborhood effort.  The Kwai is owned by the government of the Marshall Islands and its current crew hails from the Marshalls, Kiribati, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, UK and Germany, and coordinates its missions with the University of Hawaii. 

Captain MacLean adds that “Marine areas cover more than two thirds of our planet and are the main component of our life support system here on Earth, absorbing carbon and generating the very air we breathe.  They cannot continue to be taken for granted.”

There is a great lesson here.  What if cleaning up the oceans became cool?  As cool as, say, launching a privately funded, celebrity-filled rocket into space?  What if the world skipped just one generation of cell phones and put that money into a fleet of cleaning ships like the Kwai?  Super-rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates could compete to see who could clean up the Garbage Patch faster.  Imagine going down in history as the person who saved the Pacific.  Now that is a legacy.

BC Cook, PhD taught history for over 20 years. He lived on Saipan and travels the Pacific but currently lives on the mainland U.S.

(This is not a scientific poll.)

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