Dump and Dive

By Anna Cummins on January 08, 2010

I dumped all of the air from by BC and sank like a rock 70ft to the sandy seafloor, before me a living wall of corals and tropical fish. Anna’s sporting her new matching light blue fins, mask and snorkel. Every crack and crevice hides something living. The colors are spectacular and meaningful to the critter that wears them, either hiding, warning or for pure persuasion to fight or frolic. I look up at the trickle of light permitting me to see things mostly in hues of blue. “But what did this reef look like years ago?” Seasoned divers say it’s now covered with algae and nothing like it was 30 years ago. Yet my baseline is now, and it’s beautiful. So what’s missing? And does it matter?

We’re on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands awaiting our window of departure for the first transatlantic expedition to study plastic pollution in the Sargasso Sea. There are unending little chores to prepare the Sea Dragon, a 72ft sailboat, one of 12 in the Challenge Series. We’ve made time for diving and a visit to the landfill. Approaching the hill we begin to see the manmade slopes littered with cars and tires at the base. This is where Anna and I meet Boogie. He’s been working here more than a decade.

Boogie explains that goods are imported and nothing has left, until now. “There have been cars dumped here since I was born, over 100,000 of them. They we’re all here,” he says pointing to a field nearby where he says they were stacked 50ft. high. “People don’t pay attention to where these things, all things, go. We finally found a way to recover the steel and sell it. It took an economic incentive to clean the mess, and it will take one to stop more.” But for every car there are four tires.

We drive over one hill and see a black valley. “There are one million tires there,” he says. Then he points to the bailer. There are bricks the size of Volkswagen beetles each holding 100 tires squished together. “We’ve moved 200,000 of these from St. Thomas,” Boogie says proudly. “Where they go I don’t really know for sure, but they’re not here.”

Continuing our uphill spiral we come to the top of the hill, where the juxtaposition of bulldozers squishing trash contrasts the blue skies, ocean and green hills. The growing mountain we stand on is a sandwich of new trash, sand and rock, and more new trash. Does it matter that the new version of normal, the baseline of what nature is, includes a wasteland? The human evolved aesthetic didn’t include this landscape. The human expectation for living novelty and diversity is diminished.

What we saw on the dive and in the dump are a signal that some systems are not working, and that there is a need for innovation and legislation to make it right. The solutions are there. Check out 5gyres.org to see a few. What story will we tell in 30 years? Will we reminisce or rejoice?