Care About the Environment People, It’s Not that Hard

I did not take this photo: It is an image from the Documentary "BLUE"

On our trek down to Cape Town, South Africa, the World Odyssey stops in Mauritius, an island off the coast of Madagascar, to fuel up. This port is very similar to Hawaii in that we are required to be on a field program through Semester at Sea and we are only docked for one day. Mauritius is considered a part of Africa and is a common beach vacation spot for locals and Westerners. Pulling into the port, we could feel the humidity and the salty air, and after 6 days on the ship, we were excited to have a day at the beach. A lot of my friends did a program where they visit a beach resort and “learn about tourism” because they heard from previous voyagers that program has the most free-time at the beach. I was tempted to my ticket for another program and join them on it, but I decided to stick with my beach clean-up program instead.

Early on in the voyage, a woman named Karina Holden was our lecturer for the stretch from San Diego to Hawaii. She is a professional documentarian who produced the film, “BLUE” which is about conservation and how the ocean ties all people together across the globe. This documentary was one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen and images still replay in my brain even months later. Some scenes that stuck out to me were:

A female activist walking around a market in her home country where merchants were selling shark fins. Fishermen illegally hunt sharks with weapons that leave them defenseless to protect themselves and bring them back to the shore. They cut their fins off and throw them back into the ocean where they sink to the ocean floor because they can no longer swim. Karina shot a video where the shark holding on to its life slowly sinks to the ocean floor awaiting its slow and painful death. It is so inhumane to animals it broke my heart.

Another segment also discussed the topic of overfishing a bycatch. There was a scene shot under water where 5 or so seals were tangled in large fishing nets left in the ocean. Fish populations are dwindling due to commercial over fishing, and eventually people’s source of food is going to disappear.

An activist researches sea birds and how plastic has impacted their health. The cameras follow her into the forest at night where she leads them to one of their nests. She is holding the bird in her hands while her partner is sticking a tube down its throat to make the bird vomit. When the water is sprayed in its stomach, it forces out the remnants in the stomach not broken down through waste. When the bird vomits in the bucket, you can see plastic bottle caps and tiny pieces of plastic. Birds regurgitate their food to feed their young, so you can guarantee the plastic mothers are mistaking as food in the ocean is being fed to their new born young. One part of the scene showed a large piece of green plastic stuck in the throat of the bird they had to use their fingers to pull out as the bird screeched in pain. The plastic destroys the birds stomach lining and can cause them to lose feathers or even die.

Is your stomach churning yet? Good.

Semester at Sea has an obvious focus on ocean conservation and weaves it into their programs and courses. I have learned so much about what the ocean gives us and how important it is to preserve it. That is why I kept my program for the beach clean-up instead of wasting a day away a resort, because it is something that has become very important to me. I have lived in a landlocked state for most of my life, and have never experienced the immense power of the ocean until I moved onto a ship where the ocean is my backyard.

At the beach clean-up, I was in charge of picking up cigarette butts and bottle caps while others were in charge of plastic bottles and plastic bags. When you start to pay attention, it seems like everywhere you look another burnt cigarette would appear. I was picking up bottle caps, plastic spoons, random string and other small items. We were at a popular beach and because SAS always rolls up in groups of 40+ people, the locals started to stare at us and wonder what we were doing. We started a mini movement where little kids were running around picking up trash for us and older people were asking us why we were helping. I know one day of picking up trash doesn’t even make a dent in the issue, but I can only hope the people that saw us will pass the movement on and be more aware of the plastic on the beaches.

After about an hour, my back was cramping from bending over and I had dirt crusted under my nails. Our trash bags were heavy. Reminder, we picked up small trash and cigarette butts and our bags were weighed down. Here’s an image of all the trash we picked up in one hour on a beach that appeared clean to the eye:

Something I took away from this entire day is that trash can be so easy to skip over while you’re enjoying your day at the beach. People were putting their towels down over bottle caps and not even bothering to pick them up. People don’t think their one plastic bottle is going to make a difference, but when it washes into the ocean, the waves break it down into tiny pieces of microplastics until it’s not even visible anymore. This process takes hundreds of years to break down into microplastics and once a plastic is manufactured into existence, it is here to stay. It is a massive environmental issue that often overwhelms people to the point where they don’t care anymore. But if everyone does their part, we could start to see a change in our lifetime.

You may be person that thinks the whole getting rid of straws thing was a waste of time. That Starbucks getting rid of straws is just an inconvenience for you or that it won’t really make a difference. And I agree, banning straws only scratches the surface of this environmental plastic epidemic but let me give you a little perspective.

I work at Human Bean in Fort Collins which is a drive through only fast serve coffee shop. On average, I would say in a busy morning shift during the summer we serve around 150-200 cups of iced drinks in an hour. We are open for 15 hours out of the day. Let’s lowball it and say we serve 50 iced drinks an hour when averaging all the open hours. That is 750 straws a day, 5,250 a week, 22,500 a month, and 273,750 a year. Obviously, these are not scientific statistics - just a shot in the dark - but that is just one coffee stand, in one city, in one state. Multiply that by the thousands of Starbuck’s alone all over the world and you tell me one more time straws are not a problem. Straws are just the tip of the iceberg. Think about the plastic cups, silverware, plastic bottles, cell phones, car bumpers, literally everything we use on a daily basis. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?

My main point of this blog post is to yes scare you, but also to tell you to do your part. Buy a reusable water bottle instead of buying a plastic one at the gas station, buy reusable straws and mugs, be conscious of where you throw your trash away. Reduceyour use of plastic materials, buy a reusable water bottle and use it, and recycleas much as possible when you have to throw things away.

Our guides gave us some free time on the beach so Natalie and I laid on the beach and splashed around in the water with some friends. The water of the Indian Ocean was so warm – nothing like Huntington Beach in the fall! I had such a great day cleaning up the beach and then being able to enjoy it. I wish I could’ve spent more than one day at this port because Mauritius is so beautiful, but I hope their people were inspired to live a Greener lifestyle and this blog post inspired you a little bit to care about the environment – because let’s be honest it’s not that hard. We have one shot to get this right, there’s no Earth 2.0, so it is our duty to take care it to preserve what we have left of the oceans.

We were able to enjoy some free time on the beach after the clean-up, so here are some photos from the beautiful island of Mauritius: