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Decades' worth of marine debris is fouling our coastline, but a handful of passionate people are determined to clean it all up, one piece at a time
At first, the beach looked nearly clean. A strand of yellow rope looped over a piece of driftwood. An oblong buoy nestled among round rocks. The stuff looked like decorations in a seafood restaurant. It almost belonged.
But then other items popped into focus: a plastic water bottle, a pulverized lump of Styrofoam, a quart container that once held motor oil. On a remote, sunny beach in Prince William Sound these unnatural things clearly didn't belong.
Reaching out for a single piece of trash was enough to dissolve anyone's illusion that this place was pristine. Trash was everywhere. Shards from a discarded Cup-of-Noodles, pieces of fishing net, a plastic bottle cap. And there were odd things: the core of a TV set, a shampoo bottle with Russian writing, fragments of a plastic sink.
Within an hour, three volunteers quietly built a stack of orange garbage bags from the litter they found on one tiny beach on a small Alaska island, scores of miles from the nearest road.
The difference was dramatic, even though the trash had seemed invisible at first. It had been so ubiquitous it slipped from awareness, the way an ever-present noise fades into the background. When the noise stops, the sudden silence is striking. In this case, when the trash was gone I felt a sense of relief and realized that the beach looked the way it was really supposed to look.
The volunteers relaxed on warm rocks and sipped water. Springtime snow, still low on the island mountains, reflected bright patches on the dimpled surface of the spruce-green water. The answer to the question I had planned to ask, "Why do you volunteer to do this hard work?" now seemed obvious. Who wouldn't want to be here? Who wouldn't want feel that he had helped make the world's most magnificent place even better?
Catching the Cleanup Bug
Volunteers who take such trips to clean beaches tend to return-it's addictive. Chris Pallister, Ted Raynor and Doug Leiser are hooked worse than anyone. They have organized the project for several years, yielding a collection of...