Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis

By Erica Cirino
Copyright © 2021, Published by Island Press
www.islandpress.org/books/thicker-water

CHAPTER 1
Welcome to the Gyre

Big changes happen fast here on the gyre’s edge. Looking out over the wild, whipping expanse of sea
before me, I gripped the wheel of the fifty- four-foot steel sloop and braced myself. In this half-dark,
half-dazzling sunrise hour, the seas had transformed from simply precarious to volatile and violent. The
gale had moderated over the past few days since our departure from Los Angeles, when it had been
blowing hard. But now it kept changing direction, forcing me to pay close attention to the red plastic
arrow spinning wildly atop the mast, and the telltales on the mainsail, as I worked to press in as close to
the wind as possible. When I fell into a good rhythm, the mainsail and jib were tight and protruding,
their bellies puffed full of wind; we were moving fast over the churning sea.

Between the craggy curve of the Californian coast and Hawai‘i’s long chain of volcanic islands exists a
clockwise-spinning vortex of seawater known as the eastern North Pacific Gyre. When you’re sailing into
it, you can’t see the water turning, but you can feel the elements of the sea coming together to create
the turbulence that fuels it. It may seem like no sea captain of a sound mind would choose to sail
through the gyre, with turbulent waters at its edge, and a near-windless no-man’s-land inside. Yet that
was exactly where we planned to sail, led by captain Torsten Geertz and the ship’s co-owner, a one-man
tornado of energy named Henrik Beha Pederson.

The more I learned about plastic pollution, the more I felt the need to see this infamous Garbage Patch
for myself. It is actually one of two distinct garbage patches accumulating on either side of the North
Pacific Gyre; another area of highly concentrated trash spins, smaller, farther west, off the coast of
Japan. Much trash is carried between the two patches, over a colossal area of ocean.1 I boarded the
sailboat and was soon facing into the gyre with the rest of the crew.

As the early morning wore on and we ventured farther into the gyre, the contrasting black-and-orange
dawn sky grew more orange and less black, and then morphed to yellow to pink to purple, flipping
through the pages of a Pantone color book until it settled on a uniform cerulean shade. At the same
time, the sun crept up from behind the horizon until it was suspended in the sky, and the choppiness of
the dawn sea sub- sided. I exhaled and relaxed my grip on the wheel.

Quiet. There was so much quiet out at sea. Any noises that were present were rhythmic, natural, easy to
acclimate to—noises quickly woven into the fabric of your existence: the smooth phsssssh-phssssh-
phssssh of the steel hull cutting through gentle waves; the repetitive pa-pa-pa-pa- pa-pa-pa of the sails
flapping every time the wind died down or changed direction; the rattling clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of
the mainsail shack- les on the tall aluminum mast when a squall snuck up on our ship; the occasional
grrrrrrrrunk of the wheel turning around its central axle, which apparently needed some grease. And
then, immediately around me, there were the sporadic human elements of life at sea: breath, move-
ment, and speech.
“Do you see that?” a voice cut through the calm. It was Malene Møhl, a Copenhagen-based plastic
researcher with a love of sailing. She squinted her hazel eyes, watching the waves. The seven other
crew members were either still asleep in their slim wooden bunks or milling about inside the ship’s
cramped living quarters while Malene and I carried out our overlapping early morning shifts on deck,
minding the sails and navigation.
“Look, look, off the bow!” Malene said. She motioned a quick hand toward the water. About ten meters
in front of our ship was the shred- ded corner of a sun-bleached orange plastic fish crate, suspended in
the curling blue arc of a wave. Minutes later, I saw a fist-sized chunk of white Styrofoam drift by the
ship’s starboard side, and then a small pink plastic dustpan off port. Next there went a punctured green
plas- tic shampoo bottle, and then past the bow a barnacle-encrusted Tupperware lid. Soon after, it was
pure blue sea again. Henrik, the crew’s organizer, scrambled up the short wooden stairs from the hull to
the cockpit and raced to the bow while clicking on a self-inflating life vest. His blond hair was mussed,
his eyes encircled by shadows indicating a lack of sleep.

Once on the bow, Henrik snapped to life standing beneath the luffing, lazy genoa, calling out a blow-by-
blow report of the items floating by. “A rope! A fish crate! A tube! A bottle! A balloon!” One by one, the
rest of the crew, awakened and alerted by the sound of Henrik’s booming voice, climbed up onto the
deck, and they too began watching the waves.

After a slow but steady stream of plastic items would intercept the ship for a few minutes, we’d see
nothing, and then a few minutes of plastic again, and then nothing, and then the pattern would repeat.
When the items ventured close enough to the ship, Henrik would lean over the metal railing and scoop
them up with a large fishing net. After about an hour, he had stacked a shin-high pile of colorful,
barnacle-encrusted trash on the deck. And that would turn out to be only a small part of the day’s
plastic haul. We were at least one thousand nautical miles in any given direction from landmasses
inhabited by humans and their plastic societies.

Plastic was the whole reason Henrik had brought the ship—an old steel sloop called Christianshavn—
and crew out into this desolate part of the sea. He’s a biologist by training, one who has studied the
effects of humanity’s use of plastic on wildlife and the environment. But he’s a sailor at heart. During
many pleasure trips spent sailing in exotic places like Greece and Thailand with Christianshavn’s Danish
co-owners, Henrik witnessed enormous amounts of plastic items commonly used on land floating
around in the ocean and washing up on even some of the most remote shores. It was then he realized it
was time to repurpose Christianshavn from a timeshare vacation ship into a research vessel. In late
2012, he established a nongovernmental organization called Plastic Change, focused on shifting the
world’s relationship to its most beloved material, something he viewed as one of the world’s foremost
environ- mental and social problems, and a problem that he as a scientist-sailor and former Greenpeace
manager might be well equipped to address.

“Plastic defines our culture,” Henrik declared in 2014, at an early board meeting for his nascent
nonprofit. “We must not let it define our future.” That year, he commandeered Christianshavn to carry
out research in the oceans, collecting data on marine plastic pollution by scooping it out of seas and
trying to answer questions about each piece— like where in the world it came from, what it had been
used for, and how much other plastic was out there, in the oceans. Henrik hoped sharing his
organization’s at-sea findings would compel others to care, and ultimately, take action—though at the
time, it was less clear what appropriate action should look like.2
By the time I boarded Christianshavn in Los Angeles in November 2016, Henrik had directed the ship’s
scientific voyage from his home waters outside Denmark through the Mediterranean, across the Atlan-
tic into the Caribbean, then through the Panama Canal to Colombia, around the Galápagos Islands, to
Mexico, up to Los Angeles, and—to kick off its grand finale in the Pacific—into the most notoriously
plastic polluted stretch of ocean in the world: the eastern North Pacific Gyre.3
And so, there we were, in a part of the ocean so polluted it’s been nicknamed the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch. Yet it became rapidly apparent while gazing out over these waters that “the patch” was not really
a static, floating pile of plastic, as the so-often sensationalistic global media machine has commonly
portrayed it. The reality is much graver: These waters are more akin to a soup to which humanity has
added an unknown number of plastic items and pieces.4 The plastic is commonly suspended right
below the surface, pushed just out of sight, constantly and unpredictably stirred by the roiling sea.

Notes:
National Geographic Resource Library. 2019. “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
https:// www.nationalgeographic.org /encyclopedia /great -pacific -garbage -patch /.
2. Pedersen, H. B. 2016. In-person interview.
3. Plastic Change. 2019. “Ekspedition Plastic Change (2016–2018).” https://plasticchange.dk
/videnscenter /ekspedition -plastik /.
4. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2019. “How Big Is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
Science vs. Myth.” Office of Response and Restoration. https:// response.restoration.noaa.gov
/about /media /how -big -great -pacific-garbage -patch -science -vs -myth .html; Syberg, K. 2016. In -
person interview.