MY VISIT TO WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH, NORTH CAROLINA, IN JULY 2012 coincides with a heat wave: daily highs exceed one hundred degrees. I know it is customary to enjoy any opportunity to visit the beach, but my being is wholly irritated by the heat and humidity, the sand in my scalp, the salty air on my lips and in my eyes, the sun on my freckles, and the ceaseless pounding of the surf. I cannot fathom why 44 percent of the world’s population lives near the sea.78 I’m a mountain girl; I take to the hills. I’d rather wear flannel and whittle a stick in the shade of a hemlock tree, listening to songbirds and banjos.
On Friday, July 6, I arrive at 5:55 a.m. at Johnnie Mercer’s Pier, where the sand is strewn with spent fireworks. My clothes are already sticking to me. I have arranged to join Susan Miller at 6:00 for turtle patrol of zone 3; we are to walk from Mercer’s Pier along the beach for about three quarters of a mile to public access point 32, and then back again, while looking for signs that any turtles came ashore during the night. Miller is a volunteer for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission; state agencies are mandated by the Federal Endangered Species Act to create and implement a plan for the recovery of all populations of threatened and endangered species that make use of their states. North Carolina has only two permanent turtle biologists and over three hundred miles of nesting beach, much of it along the barrier islands known as the Outer Banks;79 thus the necessity for the biologists to rely on about seven hundred volunteers like Miller to find, protect, and study the nests of the threatened loggerhead sea turtles.
A woman toting a camera with a telephoto lens approaches me quickly; thinking it must be Miller, I make eye contact. “Do you mind if I stand next to you?” she asks. “I’m trying to photograph the couple under the pier and don’t want them to notice me.”
“Sure,” I say nonchalantly, pretending her request is run-of-the-mill. Under the pier, the man kneels down on one knee, makes an ungodly long speech, eventually rises, and the couple embraces. The diamond on the engagement ring will last forever—just like, I am about to learn, the microplastics swirling next to them in the surf.
Miller arrives with an empty, reusable garbage sack slung over her shoulder, like Santa Claus down on his luck. I had expected her to carry a clipboard, and maybe a measuring tape, but I soon learn that there are no special tools for this work. Finding sea turtle tracks is pretty simple as long as you encounter the tracks—which look like those of a small dune buggy with bald tires—before the tides wash them away. Miller explains that if we were to encounter turtle tracks, which are not very common on Wrightsville Beach, we would contact the local head volunteer to figure out whether and where there might be a nest.
Miller hands me a smaller trash bag. “Let’s get started,” she chirps. After explaining how to look for the tracks of sea turtles, she then talks about the problem with nurdles. Turtles and nurdles: it all sounds like something from a Dr. Seuss book. This interest in nurdles—which, as it turns out, is the term for preproduction microplastic resin pellets—first comes as a surprise to me. But when one takes into account the simplicity of turtle-tracking tasks (sea turtle nests being few and far between, after all), and the volunteers’ motivation to make a difference, it seems inevitable that they would find another way to realize their full volunteering potential.
Sea turtles spend only a few key hours of their entire life away from the sea, going only as far as the high tide mark to lay their eggs, but during their brief time on land they face terrestrial threats, such as raccoons, which eat turtle eggs. This, coupled with pollution in the ocean, has knocked down sea turtle populations. The loggerhead sea turtles live in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, nesting on many coasts. To recover this global species involves making specific plans for each population.
Populations are delineated based on where females nest; there is no other way to pin down their national allegiance. Peninsular Florida and Masirah Island, Oman, are the two largest nesting areas, each with more than ten thousand females every year. Loggerheads nest in lower numbers in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina; this region is covered by the Northern Recovery Unit. After hatching, the hockey puck-sized turtles from the Carolinas and Georgia make their way to the Mediterranean Sea and only return when ready to breed. In the deep ocean, they live in beds of free-floating seaweed. After a decade or so, when they reach the size of a Frisbee, they move into shallower shore areas, called neritic habitat, where the water depths do not exceed seven hundred feet. Other loggerheads nest in Japan and spend their youth off the Mexican coast; still others nest in eastern Australia and grow up along the coast of Peru. Young turtles ride the prevailing ocean currents much like human youth ride megamall escalators between stores.
Miller grew up in Ohio and has no immediate plans to float home as a turtle would; she loves the beach as an ecosystem. More common attitudes toward the beach are to treat it as a romantic getaway, a playground, even a giant ashtray. Beaches in the early morning resemble a fraternity house’s lawn on the morning after. Only when I am able to adopt Miller’s view and see the beach as habitat, am I able to fully appreciate that abandoning a plastic bucket in the sand is not the bratty but otherwise benign act of a child refusing to put away her toys, nor merely littering, but an insidious form of pollution. Maybe the heat has made me cynical, but I decide here and now that beachgoers are slobs. A bizarre news story telling about a long-deceased person found in an apartment buried under piles of debris is no longer unfathomable; this is surely a potential fate of beachgoers.
Miller is good-humored in the heat and filth. Through sweat-and-sand-encrusted eyelashes she scans the sand at her feet, picks up three partially buried straws and a bottle cap and chimes, “I can skip the gym today, I did my squats.”
All species of sea turtles, including the loggerhead, are on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, along with charismatic species like Siberian tigers and Black rhinos. Sea turtles are rarely seen, but they garner public support. They represent characteristics that we value: their silence and gentle determination, wrapped in a beautiful armored shell, are forcefully inspiring. They are, as turtle geneticist Brian Shamblin puts it, cosmopolitan, the foremost world travelers.
Most well-traveled species are thoroughly mixed, genetically, so that all individuals are cousins and it becomes impossible to parse out populations among one big extended family. Turtles are an exception, because females have fidelity to their birth areas. Some flow of genes between populations still happens through choosing mates, when female turtles mix with fellas offshore who may or may not be local. Thus, Shamblin can only define the geographic boundaries of rookeries by the females present. He uses DNA from the mitochondria of cells rather than from the nucleus of cells; mitochondria are handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter—like pie recipes.
In 2010 the National Marine Fisheries Service crunched numbers from genetic, demographic, geographic, and oceanic factors and identified nine major sea turtle rookeries. Evidence suggested that the North Pacific and South Pacific populations were distinct and that both should be listed as endangered, while the other seven populations (the Northwest Atlantic, Southwest Atlantic, Northeast Atlantic, Mediterranean, Southwest Indian, Northwest Indian, and Southeast Indian) continue to be designated as threatened. In 2014 Shamblin completed a more in-depth study of the DNA from six of the nine regional rookeries. His findings support the distinction between the populations, as well as identifying eighteen other subpopulations that are unique enough to warrant their own management strategies. The subpopulations within the populations were again a surprise to find in such a cosmopolitan species. This goes to show the power of sisterhood.
After delineating populations, the second order of business under the Endangered Species Act is for the federal agencies to identify critical areas of habitat for the nine populations, such as safe areas for foraging, resting, and nesting. Because loggerhead sea turtles use terrestrial and marine habitats, critical habitat needs to be identified by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Both did so for sea turtles in 2013. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed critical habitat for Northwest Atlantic loggerhead populations that included 739 miles of coastline from North Carolina to Mississippi. That’s 84 percent of all nesting habitat for loggerheads in United States. The National Marine Fisheries Service proposed thirty-six marine areas for the same populations; these included neritic areas, breeding areas, foraging areas, wintering areas, migration pathways, and open deepwater habitats with floating beds of seaweed.
Walking on the debris-festooned beach at dawn makes me wonder what pleasantries must float among the nursery school turtles living in the oceanic beds of seaweed. On the sand we collect diapers, diaper wipes, abandoned plastic sand toys, cigarette butts galore, plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, plastic forks, balloons, soda cans, soda bottles, T-shirts, underwear, condoms, tampon applicators, plastic lotion bottles, fast food bags, tiny plastic condiment sacks, plastic water bottles, and many unidentifiable objects of plastic, metal, polystyrene, and wax paper. When the tide comes in, these sins are washed away with the sand castles.
About 90 percent of the trash that Miller and the other volunteers collect is made of plastic. All plastic products are created from the tiny beads called nurdles. Before I can understand how plastics are produced, I puzzle over why plastics are strewn across the beach. There are clean blue garbage bins at every access point, about forty feet apart. Every person who left the beach on foot walked past a garbage bin. Are beachgoers litterbugs? Worse is that when the team of volunteers first went public with the amount of garbage they collected, people scoffed in disbelief, saying the beaches look clean enough to them. Ah, so say people who have accepted living with sand in their every nook and cranny. Miller, a generous person, explains the incongruity in perceptions. When the beach is crowded, it is easy to assume that everything scattered about the sand belongs to someone in the sweltering throng. The trash is camouflaged as property. Only in the early morning, when the beach is deserted, can one see the extent of jettisoned materials that go unclaimed. Miller doesn’t let me put our spoils into the blue bins. The protocol is to take it all home, rinse it, sort it, and photograph it. “That’s the only way we could convince people that we weren’t liars,” she explained.
Miller and I collect the equivalent of five bags of groceries, which she will take home to rinse, sort, and photograph. We have not found any turtle tracks during my visit. If it weren’t for Miller’s efforts, we wouldn’t know that Wrightsville Beach doesn’t get many turtle nests; indeed, sea turtle conservation is only possible because of the observations by volunteers, like Miller, who are up at dawn to patrol their assigned three-quarter-of-a-mile stretch of beach looking for nests.
Volunteers who collect DNA, which comes from eggshells, are pivotal too. These volunteers have special permits and additional responsibilities. Like turtles, the volunteers have been delineated into groupings, in this case based on the stretch of beach they monitor. The nesting beaches in North Carolina are divided into twenty-two geographic units, sixteen of which are monitored by volunteer groups. Each volunteer group has an appointed coordinator who oversees the other volunteers in the group; the coordinator collates all the monitoring observations and provides the data to state biologists, and also receives a permit to do a wide range of special tasks. For instance, it is the coordinators who place signposts at nests: four wooden stakes connected by flagging and a sign from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission that explains why the area is staked and warns of the law and the penalties for disturbing the nest, eggs, or hatchlings. Coordinators are allowed to hang netting around nests in order to block outdoor artificial lighting from illuminating nests. And coordinators are permitted to collect eyeballs from dead, stranded turtles.80
The head volunteer for Wrightsville Beach is Nancy Fahey, and she employs a divide-and-conquer strategy with her volunteer assignments. Sea turtle monitoring is subdivided into three-quarter-mile sections, just one of which I walked with Miller. As the coordinator, Fahey assigns seven volunteers (one for each day of the week) to each section, rotating them so that every section is monitored by 8:00 a.m. every day. When a volunteer finds evidence of a nest, he or she contacts Fahey, who meets the volunteer at the site and determines whether it is real nest or a false crawl (sometimes females come ashore but then do not lay eggs). It is Fahey who has the necessary permits and training to remove and preserve one fresh egg from every nest in her jurisdiction. She will discard the yolk, place the leathery shell in vials full of preserving solution, label the vial with date, location, and nest identification number, and send it to the lab.
The lab is part of a multistate project among agencies for North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the University of Georgia to figure out the number of loggerhead sea turtles that nest in the region. The lab uses DNA fingerprinting to identify individual nesting females, how many nests they lay each year, and how long they go between nesting years. The data will make a strong census and create a better picture of population dynamics. Coordinators across the three states have collected eggs from 38,459 nests. The lab has been able to retrieve DNA from 85 percent of those, which has led to the identification of over seven thousand unique females. Females had, on average, 4.5 nests per season, and took about nine days between nests, which were usually within twenty-five kilometers of each other.81 Shamblin found a beach with three generations of loggerheads nesting simultaneously: a grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter.
Conservation doesn’t succeed if we only study the delineation of populations, estimate their size, and designate critical habitat. Even if the critical habitat is protected from development on land and from fishing at sea, there are still more hazards. Managing turtles really means managing humans. Case in point: litterbugs. Trash isn’t just unsightly; it is bad for the health of turtles and humans. The idea that human health is tied to the well-being of wildlife and the environment is called One Health.82 Before we pick through the issue of trash, let’s shine the spotlight on two other enemies of the sea turtle: nighttime light and sunbathers.
Despite their ability to navigate the global oceans, the fate of sea turtles can have a simple twist by a poorly timed evening barbeque illuminated by tiki torches in the backyard. When turtles are on land, they navigate by instinctively moving toward the brightest light close to the horizon. They aim both eyes to receive equal amounts of light, a behavior called phototropotaxis. In the pristine intertidal world that has existed since the Triassic period, over two hundred million years ago, the brightest light at night was the moon or starlight reflected on the ocean—that is, until Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Water reflects more celestial light than land, so sea turtles would always find their way back to the sea. Now with a flick of an outdoor light switch, newly hatched turtles can be misdirected and kept from finding their way to the ocean.
When the will is present to protect turtles from light pollution, the way is pretty obvious. Coastal communities with volunteer sea turtle projects have usually passed local ordinances to limit outdoor lighting at night. When it comes to the desire for natural darkness, this issue unites those with interests in wildlife conservation and astronomy. Advocating for dark skies is a battle against the human primordial fear of the dark. Our childhood cry for nightlights grows into demands for street lighting that functions to reduce feelings of fear—particularly fear for personal safety among women. Studies bear out the idea that crime is reduced by street lighting, but not as one would expect. Lighting is a placebo that everyone, even perpetrators, swallow. Lights don’t deter crime by increasing surveillance ability; when lighting is present, nighttime and daytime crime is reduced. Researchers speculate that lighting strengthens social pride, confidence, community cohesion, and social control of neighborhoods, and these social factors operate to reduce crime.
Wrightsville Beach is a fairly tight-knit community with about 2,500 year-round residents. The town passed an outdoor lighting ordinance in 2012 and the law is as much on behalf of the sea turtles as people preferring the ambiance of a small town instead of the brightness of resort cities like Las Vegas.
On Wrightsville Beach, as with everywhere else, controversies begin when money is at stake. Our second villain enters the scene amid a continual tension between businesses in the tourism industry and full-time island residents. The former wants the tax dollars of the latter to be used to protect island infrastructure. All infrastructure—bridges, roads, buildings—requires stable beaches. Of course, sunbathers need beaches too, which you might think are in plentiful supply. They aren’t. Beaches are deceptive; they appear calmly predictable with the rhythmic motions of waves, but in reality, they are like restless children, constantly in motion and causing trouble. People want beaches to behave, like the mature mainland: the tectonic plates of the mainland move anywhere from zero to one hundred nanometers (one billionth of a meter) per year, but the Outer Banks erode at an average rate of about two to three feet (one-half to one meter) per year. Sands wash away from some areas and pile up in others. The losses are greater than the gains. One study has found that these barrier islands have experienced 70 percent erosion and only 30 percent accretion.
Of course, natural disasters bring quicker change. When tectonic plates nudge one another, like teens elbowing for more room, they produce volcanoes and earthquakes. The rage of one hurricane can help the sea claim a beach and everything on it. Even putting natural disasters aside, constructing a building in the middle of a barrier island is akin to placing it on a moving conveyor belt. The building will eventually be at the edge of the island and, one day, off the edge. Retirement homes, vacation retreats, and other amenities for tourists are all at risk from the high erosion rates of beach ecosystems. Visiting the beach might be fun for everyone (except me), but living on the beach is a constant struggle against the forces of nature. Tourist is a season after all, not a permanent way of living.
Sea turtles can handle the dynamic and moody face of the coastline, and beaches have acted as the birthing centers for sea turtles since the dawn of their time. Sunbathers and their ilk, on the other hand, are full of ways to counter nature from taking its course. It goes without saying that attempts to legislate nature into compliance don’t work.83 Other countermeasures work in the short term but have unanticipated consequences. For example, who among us would have anticipated that adding stability to beaches would alter the sex ratio of sea turtle offspring?
The tourism industry puts municipalities under pressure to protect resorts from sliding off the conveyor belt. The old solutions of sea walls and breakwaters displaced problems from one municipality to another. These are outlawed now; you just can’t fool Mother Nature that easily. The alternative interventions are beach nourishment projects. Nourishment costs millions of dollars, and one hurricane or tropical storm can undo the work overnight. Wrightsville Beach is “nourished” every four years.
Beach nourishment involves dredging offshore sediment and pumping it onto eroding beaches. “Native sand is like sugar,” Fahey explains, describing the texture of pristine beaches. Nourished beaches have shell hash and sand with coarser grain. More important, dredged and pumped sand is a different temperature from the original beach sand.
Like other reptiles, sea turtles have temperature-dependent sex determination. The temperature of the sand, rather than a chromosome, determines the sex of each hatchling. Warmer temperatures produce females; cooler temperatures produce males. A diversity of incubation environments across the loggerhead range is important to attain a healthy balance in the proportion of males to females. Historically, North Carolina beaches produced large quantities of male hatchlings for the greater loggerhead sea turtle population. Beach nourishment adds warmer sands; consequently, eggs now produce a greater number of females.
In addition to periodic beach nourishment, nature has been sporadically diverted from its course in bigger ways. Back in the day, the area now called Wrightsville Beach was called New Hanover Banks in the south and Shell Island in the north; the two were bisected by Moor’s Inlet. At some point, Moor’s Inlet was bulldozed over, and the northern border became Mason Inlet (the southern border is Masonboro Inlet). There were not many visitors to the island until 1887, when a turnpike was completed that connected Wilmington to Wrightsville Sound. The turnpike was topped with oyster shells and dubbed Shell Road. The area’s heyday for tourists followed. Still, the sands changed faster than the names. More than a century later, Mason Inlet started aggressively migrating south, bringing Shell Island Resort to the very edge of the conveyor belt. In early 2002, engineers created a new inlet (unsurprisingly called New Mason Inlet) about three thousand feet to the north, and then filled in Mason Inlet completely to protect the resort. While some people are metaphorically moving mountains to protect sea turtles, others are literally moving beaches in ways that threaten them.
One of the biggest threats to sea turtles is not easily addressed by monitoring the turtles themselves; it is addressed by monitoring trash—in particular, the plastics made from nurdles. When I joined Miller in gathering the garbage that she documented in photographs, this was independent of her volunteering for the state’s sea turtle program. When I first spoke to the turtle volunteer coordinator, Fahey, on the phone to arrange a visit, she warned me, “We are a small-time operation”; she meant they didn’t find many turtles on their five-mile stretch of beach. I justified the visit because, as far as science goes, recording the absence of turtles is as important as recording their presence. It was a surprise to me to learn that Fahey’s “small-time operation” had spawned its own citizen science project that studies beach debris. Wrightsville Beach—Keep it Clean is the brainchild of a highly spirited volunteer, Ginger Taylor, who started the project to satisfy her own curiosity about the amount of litter on the beach. She continued the project to bring awareness to the issue and advocate for solutions. As the data collection grew, so did Taylor’s involvement in attending town meetings and working with community members and businesses for change.
The formation and impact of Keep it Clean are the most mysterious, unpredictable, and amazing types of outcomes for citizen science. It is great to design projects for environmental justice, to manage species and habitats, and to solve community problems. It is phenomenal when a completely contributory project—as the turtle monitoring designed by the state government—spawns a community-based action project. The problem with plastics would have remained hidden from community view if a fairly traditional project (monitoring turtles) had not put extra pairs of alert eyes on the beach, brought together activist types of people, and encouraged people to really be aware of their surroundings. A heightened awareness, combined with efficacy for science and monitoring, are the ingredients for change.
Taylor, a licensed clinical social worker by day, hatched the idea for Keep it Clean at night, while sitting with a small group waiting for sea turtles to hatch. Beach patrol to find nests begins in May and ends in mid-September. Another task for volunteers is sit duty, which begins in late June and ends by Thanksgiving. Sit duty involves arriving at 6:00 p.m. and waiting in the dark for eggs to hatch, sometimes until 11:00 p.m. Most things that get buried underground —such as dog bones, pirate booty, and corpses—rarely resurface, at least not of their own volition. Sea turtle eggs are more like flower bulbs: they bloom with young turtles, all at once, when the time is right.
About two months prior to this egg emergence, while people slumbered, a miniature armored tank of a turtle planted her eggs in a pit in the sand after she slowly pulled herself on to the beach. It took her about an hour to dig a pit above the high-tide mark and drop over a hundred white, leathery Ping-Pong-ball-size eggs into her hole in the sand. (A turtle produces no body heat herself, so the eggs are better off in the sunbaked sand.) After covering the eggs, she lumbered back to the sea, leaving the eggs forever. Ectothermic reptiles have a cold-blooded maternal strategy.
After about two months the turtles hatch and wait in the darkness of the pit until nightfall. When the sand cools after sunset, the baby turtles take that as a signal to bloom. For sea turtles, darkness is safer because predatory seabirds are asleep. Turtle hatching is called a boil, which in my interpretation is because the young bubble up to the surface of the sand like the brew in a witch’s cauldron. “A watched nest never boils,” said no sea turtle volunteer ever. Volunteers who sit for a boil look like they are sitting at a campfire, mesmerized by flames, but instead are staring at a patch of sand demarcated as a nest by the wooden stakes and cautionary tape. When baby turtles start crawling out from the pit in the sand, it looks like the swarming return of the undead: I would expect the monitors to feel a touch of horror as though hundreds of tiny, spiky prehistoric reptilian vampires were clawing their way out of a mass grave. Instead, they pack the faintest of whispers with the emotional intensity of Beatlemania screams. Single-mindedly, the little turtles crawl like infantrymen across the beach until the surf sweeps them away.
Three days after the hatch, the volunteers return to the nest to excavate it. They dig out all the eggshells and any remaining eggs, then count and record how many hatched and how many didn’t. Sometimes a hatchling will be trapped in the nest pit and the volunteers will set it free. At Wrightsville Beach, they invite as many people as possible to witness the excavations and share in the joyful miracle of sea turtle afterbirth.
The first time Taylor saw people at night, huddled up at the beach without a campfire, she thought they were having a séance. That was in 1998 and she stopped, learned about turtles, and asked a million questions, but she could not commit to volunteering because of her work schedule. Nine years later, while working a contract job in Hawaii, she became enchanted by green sea turtles that would come onto the beach just north of Haleiwa to bask in the sun. When she returned to Wilmington, she was ready to join the efforts at Wrightsville Beach, patrolling in the early mornings and sitting in the evenings. She saw her first boil in 2007 and described it as magical and spiritual—a natural high: “It puts things into perspective.” While the nights were amazing, the morning patrols were not. At first she and her husband imagined leisurely romantic strolls on the beach together. But she couldn’t walk by the trash without picking it up; Taylor isn’t the bystander type.
It was one evening while sitting with others and waiting for a nest to boil at Wrightsville Beach that Taylor raised the issue of the trash. She quickly learned that many other volunteers were already taking the initiative to pick it up. She wondered how much they had collected, and her curiosity propelled her and the other volunteers to start a new citizen science project. From the turtle program, they were already familiar with protocols to standardize and collate data collection and the subsequent sharing of the information: “We got this.” Taylor was confident they could do something similar with trash.
Her plan evolved over time. In the early days of quantifying trash, they called themselves the Trashy-Talking Turtlers. While Fahey was compiling nesting data from volunteers to report to the state, Taylor was compiling data on the number of trash bags filled and reporting it in a weekly newsletter that she sent to participants and town officials. Staff at the local paper, the Lumina News, read everything sent to town officials, and so they picked up on the story from time to time. As public discussions ensued about how to address trash on the beach, people started to question how their tax dollars were spent, which in turn led to some skepticism about the trash, and suggestions of junk science that amounted to calls of “show me the garbage.” Wrightsville is a beautiful, beloved beach and many beach revelers are blind to the trash. Several volunteers noted that the garbage is hard to notice when the beach is crowded and that it takes a special intention, and trained beach-combing eyes, to spot garbage in the sand. Taylor brought bins upon bins of saved, rinsed-off garbage she gathered during her patrols and presented it at a board meeting. She didn’t enjoy discrediting claims that Wrightsville Beach was pristinely clean—that’s why people love it—but she could not ignore her evidence. She had to open their eyes to the sad truth, believing that people will protect what they love and knowing that the people of Wrightsville Beach truly love the ocean.
“When the trash issue grabbed public interest, we decided to separate from the turtle monitoring,” Taylor explains when we meet in an air-conditioned coffee shop in Wilmington. “Plenty of people without particular interest in turtles had big concerns about the health of the oceans and we wanted the name of our group to reflect the broader interest. Plus, turtles had nothing to do with the garbage problem, and we didn’t want to risk getting them dragged into the potential controversies.” Same beach, same morning patrols. Some of the same turtle people, plus more. In 2010, the group gathered name suggestions and took a vote and agreed on Wrightsville Beach—Keep it Clean. Taylor continues to assemble the data on the amount collected from each zone and how frequently each zone is cleaned. The town board has used the data to help address litter problems, including changing some ordinances.
The public skepticism taught the volunteers to not throw the evidence out with the trash, even when the evidence was the trash, until first documenting it in photographs. One could view the public response as a form of peer review. As scientists learned long ago, purely motivated skepticism expressed through peer review is an effective way to improve research projects.
No one, least of all Taylor, anticipated what happened next. She had gained a new perspective from watching turtles hatch and, similarly, she gained a new perspective by looking at the photographs of the sorted refuse. She saw a prevalence of plastics, and this observation led to more questions. That’s how science operates: answers lead to more questions and the cycle perpetuates itself, just as a child maintains a circular conversation with an adult by responding, “But why?”
Taylor turned to Google and searched for “turtle” and “plastic.” She learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a soup of microplastics spanning twice the size of the state of Texas; the two major areas of concentration are the Western Garbage Patch, off the coast of Japan, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, situated between California and Hawaii. She learned that because plastic items are made of crude oil, they never decompose, but they do slowly break into smaller (sometimes tiny) pieces due to exposure to sunlight. She learned of ocean garbage patches in other parts of the world and the impact of plastics on marine life. Like accidentally viewing a grisly image that you wish you could unsee, Taylor saw an ugly global problem and could not ignore it. The data on trash from Keep it Clean didn’t lead her to discover something previously unknown to humanity, but for her and the other volunteers, finding out that their beach was part of a known global problem made this a very personal discovery. And personal discoveries can be a force for change.
The mass-production of plastics began in the 1940 and 1950s, and today over 260 million tons of petroleum-based goods are produced every year, among them pipes for household plumbing, patio chairs, intravenous drip bags and syringes, computer keyboards and mice, and polyester shirts. About half of what’s produced will be disposed in landfills or recycling centers within a year. The rest is unaccounted for. Much of it may remain in use, but some crazy, unknown percentage has been added to the piles of litter that cover our beaches and float in our oceans. The top three generators of plastic waste are the world’s population centers: China, the European Union, and the United States.
Plastics are moldable organic polymers, derived from crude oil. Crude oil is refined into products like gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene, and heating oil, and, a little farther down the production line, into crayons, bubble gum, tires, and spandex pants. Crude oil is made up of hundreds of different types of hydrocarbons, which are hydrogen and carbon atoms bonded into various sorts of arrangements. The industrial refinement process segregates hydrocarbons based on their boiling points.
Different hydrocarbons vaporize at different temperatures. Refinement starts with a slurry of hydrocarbons. As each vaporizes, the resulting gas is funneled into a chamber to cool and condense. Then the segregated hydrocarbons are combined to make compounds like ethylene, styrene, and propylene, among hundreds of others. Because there are so many types of these compounds, they are generically called monomers. To design different plastics, one mixes and matches various monomers into polymers. Nature does the same; the difference is that natural polymers, like cellulose and vegetable oil, will biodegrade because they are derived from living things. Polymers derived from petroleum will only photodegrade. Polymers are further designed through the addition of chemicals to make them soft and pliable, dyes to make them colorful, and flame-retardant chemicals to suppress combustion. Over half of all plastics are designed with chemicals that cause cancer, and some with chemicals that mimic hormones (we’ll return to this topic in chapter 10). The final juiced-up polymers are shaped into the tiny resin pellets called nurdles, the building blocks of plastic goods.
The making of toothbrushes, iPhone cases, milk jugs, and teething rings begins with nurdles. Heated and molded, nurdles are quite like colorful Fuse Beads, a popular craft that kids arrange and their parents iron into place. Given how they are made, is it dangerous to use plastics?
In 1998, Hideshige (Shige) Takada, an organic chemist with expertise in measuring trace levels of chemicals in the environment, was approached by one of his colleagues and asked to examine some nurdles.84 The expectation was that nurdles would have only trace levels of hazardous chemicals, since only trace amounts of known carcinogens are added to polymers. Furthermore, pure plastic is expected to have low toxicity because it doesn’t interact with its environment. It is what chemists call inert. Inert chemicals are uncompromising, showing no give-and-take with their surroundings. The expectation was wishful thinking.
Takada found that concentrations of organic pollutants are incredibly high in nurdles. The pellets are, by some standards, biohazards, chock full of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).85 He figured out that nurdles in seawater are not inert, but bond with a lot of chemicals diluted in the sea, such as PCBs (toxic by-product of industrial production), DDT (an insecticide), and PBDEs (flame retardants). Even the plastics designed without added toxins quickly become toxic. For instance, polyethylene, used to make plastic bags, is probably not toxic in your home,86 but it becomes toxic by absorbing pollutants, which happens when the bags float around the ocean. That might be a good thing if the nurdles and other plastics were then sieved out of the ocean, but they’re not; instead, they enter the food chain.
Once they invade the lower levels of the food chain, they bioaccumulate their way to the top. In one study, seabirds that had eaten plastics had polychlorinated biphenyls in their tissues at 300 percent greater concentrations than those that had managed to avoid plastics. POPs are found on plastic waste in concentrations one hundred times higher than those in sediments and one million times higher than those occurring in seawater. Many POPs are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because they disrupt cell division, affect immune functions, and cause diseases. Almost 80 percent of EPA priority pollutants are associated with plastic debris (by virtue of being designed with hazardous ingredients or by gaining the hazards from the environment). Taylor sums up the situation simply: “It makes you cry.” Just as people do not view the beach as habitat, humanity does not view the ocean as a living ecosystem. It functions as a cesspool, and every high tide is the swooshing flush that fills a couple of Texas-size toilets.
Takada had found that nurdles concentrate POPs so highly that just five of them have the equivalent POPs of twenty-six gallons of seawater. This calculation led him to realize that nurdles provide a simple way to monitor global contamination of POPs. Now it made sense for him to start a citizen science project. He could never ask people to send twenty-six gallons of seawater to him, but he could ask for microplastic pellets. In 2005, he launched International Pellet Watch, which asks people to look for nurdles on the beach and mail them to him for chemical analyses. Volunteer contributions have led to the identification of the more and less polluted areas of the world. For instance, nurdles found on beaches near big cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo have skyrocketing concentrations of PCBs.
Nurdles spilled at production sites are one source of microplastic pollution. Another is that big pieces of plastic don’t stay together forever. Plastics break into smaller and smaller pieces over time. Eventually they reach a size where fish, invertebrates like zooplankton, and microorganisms ingest the plastic.87 Wood, leather, glass, and clay can easily return to be part of the earth. Plastics haunt us forever.
Taylor has two sobering words for me: “endocrine disruptors.”88 The chemicals that leach from plastics interfere with hormonal systems, which are major channels for communication among various parts of the body. Taylor tells me one example of endocrine disruption that she learned from Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean, a book that describes his experiences with garbage patches in the ocean: “When mice ate particular plastics, they lost their maternal instincts.” All species of sea turtles, and at least 21 percent of all seabird species, are harmed by plastics. People are harmed too. Plastics are either made with chemical toxins, or in environments where they absorb toxic pollutants.
Since plastics are toxic, why are they treated as solid waste? In a 2013 article in Nature, marine scientists and chemists (including Takada) urge countries to regulate plastic waste as hazardous materials. They argue that doing so would quickly help agencies restore affected areas and be impetus for research on new and safer polymers. Four plastics make up 30 percent of all that is produced: PVC (in pipes that carry our water), polystyrene (in food packaging), polyurethane (in furniture), and polycarbonate (in electronics). These are difficult to recycle and sit as toxic time bombs. If just these four types of plastics were categorized as hazardous, in the United States the EPA could follow the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 to initiate a massive cleanup effort.
Ever since that fateful day of Googling, Taylor and many of the other volunteers reduced their use of single-use plastics, choosing alternatives whenever possible. Eliminating some, like straws, was easy. Vanquishing others, like sporks, was a pleasure. Yet plastics are so pervasive that it is a challenge to avoid them, like zipper-lock food storage bags and adhesive bandages. In the coffee shop, I sit with a smoothie in a single-use plastic cup with a single-use straw; Taylor has given her reusable canteen to the barista to fill directly. I think part of the difference in our behavior speaks to the power of experiential learning, which often accompanies participation in citizen science. A key part of learning is the process of making meaning, and we make it best if we can base it on firsthand experience.89 I learned about marine pollution in the academic literature and news articles; Taylor learned from direct contact and her own inquiry.
Another way to explain the heightened responsibility among volunteers like Taylor, Miller, and Fahey is that they are data driven in their decision making. They are not that different from people with diabetes who learn to track their insulin levels in order to successfully manage the disease. Today people are using new technology to gather data on vital signs, cortisol levels, how many steps they’ve taken, what they’ve eaten, the medicines they take, and their personal mood, weight, posture, and sleep patterns. This is part of a personalized health movement called the Quantified Self. Gone are the days of a simple pedometer; these are the days of Fitbits and Bioharnesses. The data usually make their way to marketing companies, but setting that aside, when people have data in their hands, they can use it to guide decisions about diet, exercise, medicines, friendships, and more. In essence, Taylor, Miller, and Fahey are managing their lifestyles and environment and using data on trash to inform their personal management decisions. Plus, quantifying garbage informs the decisions of police (they can increase patrols of highly trashed areas), town boards, and members of the public.
The sea turtle volunteers appear to be immune to a social and psychological phenomenon called the bystander effect, where a person is less likely to assume moral responsibility if others are present to (potentially) assume it instead. Yet even while assuming responsibility by picking up other peoples’ trash, the volunteers talk about the need for industry to do its part by assuming responsibility for producing social good.
Miller equates industry’s avoidance of responsibility with the ubiquitous habit of passing the buck that we teach our children. She had moved to Wilmington from Ohio to become a public school teacher. In Ohio, competition for teaching jobs was fierce; while aggressively pursuing one job with multiple follow-up calls, she was told to back off: “Honey, you are one of nine hundred applicants.” Meanwhile, North Carolina had a teacher shortage. She was instantly hired over the phone with “School starts in two weeks; can you be here?” Three years later she quit. With the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act, she notes, “A teacher really can’t give a failing grade. The teacher has been made responsible for passing kids, rather than the kid being responsible for earning a passing mark. I couldn’t stay part of that system.”
Taylor urges others to accept more responsibility, one company at a time. Several months earlier before our meeting she had gone into a local market for her socially responsible shopping. The local honey supplier was using plastic bottles. Taylor called the supplier and left a heartfelt and educational earful via voicemail. Although she never received a call back, the supplier had gotten the message: several months later Taylor noticed that the local honey was now in glass bottles.
Keep it Clean joined with the Plastic Ocean Project and Cape Fear Surfrider on a campaign called Ocean Friendly Establishments that encourages, certifies, and supports local restaurants that only provide straws upon request. Straws are consistently among the ten top litter items in annual International Coastal Cleanup reports. One of the biggest resorts, the Blockade Runner, was the first to sign up for the program with its East Oceanfront Dining restaurant.
I first thought of Miller, Fahey, and Taylor as midwives for sea turtles, managing the hatches. They participated in a citizen science project run by a state government agency, and their essential roles gave them leverage to be decision makers in the management of an endangered species. This empowered them to set an agenda for their own citizen science project, which transformed their lives. I now see them as stewards of turtles, a role that extends their responsibility from the local beaches to faraway oceans.
Science is our most reliable system for obtaining new knowledge quickly. For any given research question, if we do science properly, we should come to the same answers. Thus the most influential part of science is selecting the most important and relevant research question. No one can know in advance what the answer will be (science is, by definition, discovering something not yet known). But who selects the question is important to many types of citizen scientists. Who decides which knowledge to pursue? The volunteers on Wrightsville Beach initially came together over a common interest in turtles, and from their shared experiences they developed their own citizen science project. In chapter 9 we’ll explore how citizen scientists take further control to improve lives and environments.