The United States is bracketed by water: the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Atlantic to the right. To the south, you find the Gulf of Mexico, gentle waves lapping at the shore. All throughout the country, you find lakes, streams, creeks, ponds, rivers, and canals.
Water, nearly everywhere the eye wanders.
Back in Maine, I spent the day on the boat with a lobsterman. Our day starts early, dawn breaking over the water as we pull out of the bay and head east.
“Growing up here, the ocean’s in your blood,” Scotty says. “Can’t get rid of it.”
I lean back on the wooden stool, back pressed against the ridge of the boat. My stomach turns from the constant motion; I, on the other hand, am not from there. There is no open ocean back in Wisconsin.
I shake my head, refocusing on the task at hand: so how long have you been doing this?
“Been a lobsterman since 2000,” he says, smiling at the memory.
He came out to help an acquaintance and learned that he made more in that single day than he did in his last job, working in an airport. And the rest, they say — is history. It took 13 years for him to earn his full license and set out on his own.
The licensure process, he explains, is part training and part waiting list. There’s a limited number of traps that can be in the ocean every season, a requirement put in place to protect the ocean’s ecosystems and the whales that call coastal Maine home.
Scotty, like the rest of the lobstermen in the bay, take certain precautions to protect the environment. This includes using biodegradable rings to tag lobsters that he’ll keep — and making the ones that are tossed back because they’re still of breeding age. (This protects the species as a whole, helping population control and sustainable fishing practices.)
The day moves on with a steady rhythm. We drive a little further and stop, scooping color-coded buoys out of the water while the traps are reeled in. Traps are opened, lobsters were sorted: some tossed, some kept. The empty traps released back into the water, stocked with bait, droplets spraying up over the boat’s edge.
We move on.
Pulling up a trap, Scotty fishes out some plastic caught in the grate alongside a handful of wiggling lobsters. Shaking his head, he holds it up for emphasis before setting it in the boat for disposal once on land.
“It’s better than it was,” he says later. “But it’s still too much.”
I look out at the ocean, cornflower blue waves lapping for miles in every direction. We’ve been on the boat for hours, I’ve long since lost any sense of which way land is. The sun beats overhead. From my perch here, the ocean looks spotless.
It’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea of trash bobbing around underneath.
“Is there more trash in the ocean these days?” I ask. “Or less?”
I look at Scotty’s profile as he drives forward across the waves; the engine hums beneath us, the motor an ever-present backdrop to the day. His forehead wrinkles, considering.
“About the same, maybe less,” he says.
From Scotty’s experience, the level of trash may remain close to the same — but the contents have changed. These days, he says, it’s mostly plastic.
“10, 15 years ago, you name it,” he says. “We’d catch all kinds of stuff.”
He regales me with tales of the things they’d pull out with traps: tires, shoes, household items. There seems no limit to the madness. This day, the finds were smaller: a plastic cup, crinkled from the waves. An old glove. Remnants of several plastic bags.
Studies suggest that there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans. This litter can have detrimental effects on marine ecosystems, which can cause ripples throughout the rest of life on earth. Much of the plastic breaks down into microplastics, for instance, which is invisible to the human eye — and has the potential to affect our freshwater supply.
But like any issue, there are multiple views on how to handle trash in the ocean. Some say that massive ocean cleanup efforts are necessary, from known spots to the deep ocean floor. Others say it needs to rely on prevention, including limiting single-use plastics and improving recycling procedures.
The city of Baltimore, for example, has focused on the latter. Walking along the waterfront, you see giant wheels with comical googly eyes — but they’re more than a quirky tourist attraction. These are trash wheels, Mr. Trash Wheel to be precise, designed to pull plastics out of the water before they reach the Atlantic.
Since the pilot wheel was launched in 2008, they have collected more than 1,300 tons of debris. This has included more than 700,000 plastic bags, over 1,000,000 plastic bottles, nearly 4,500 sports balls, a guitar, and more.
Could prevention efforts like Mr. Trash Wheel and increasing city-wide bag taxes be the reason lobsterman are seeing less debris with their daily catch? What steps need to be taken to stop the flow of trash into the water — and clean up what’s already there?
There are plenty of ways forward, but Scotty says it means finding solutions before being told what to do.
“I’ve only had one real problem in 13 years,” Scotty says. “I’m just forced to deal with the consequences from other areas’ actions.”
I look past Scotty at the miles of ocean waves around us, salty water lapping at the boat and spraying into my hair. I can’t help but think about collective action: how a small decision adds up when we all make it.
After all, we only have one Earth. Isn’t it our responsibility to protect it?
