Gale Force Sailing

We’ve all taken a hit from the price of gas climbing higher and higher. Now, President Bush and some members of Congress want to take advantage of our pain at the pump to lift a moratorium on oil and gas development in parts of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). They are willing to sacrifice marine ecosystems and wildlife to appease Big Oil. But drilling in the OCS is not a long-term solution to our “addiction to oil” or even a quick fix for motorists. We need your help to convince Congress that the moratorium should stay put.

As sailors we are need to be acutely aware of the impact our dependency on oil is having on the environment we use.  We could all be doing a little more, and growing our awareness is a good first step.

The U.S. Outer Continental Shelf consists of the submerged lands, subsoil, and seabed up to 200 nautical miles or more offshore from U.S. coasts. Since 1981 the United States has had in place a moratorium on oil and gas development in parts of the OCS.

Drilling in the OCS will place rigs in currently protected places, and it will require onshore infrastructure such as pipelines, roads and ports. Our oceans provide essential habitat for fish and wildlife, support coastal economies and tourism, while also accounting for more than half of the nation’s GDP and more than 60 million jobs, all of which will be endangered if the moratorium is lifted.

Oil companies don’t need access to more areas. Oil companies are currently only producing oil from 18 percent of the areas they own. According to the Department of Energy, even if they were able to drill in the OCS, it would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.

When you picture a summer vacation at the beach, do you envision the sun dipping below oilrigs at sunset? Doubtful. And more importantly, clean renewable energy sources and more efficient vehicles are the best ways to reduce consumers’ costs, increase energy security, and reduce our contributions to global climate change. We need a real plan to address energy issues and gas prices, not dead-end drilling schemes.

Congress is expected to vote on the measure that would lift the moratorium in the next few weeks. So please take action to protect our coastlines today.

Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel and, like a skier negotiating moguls, coaxes his home-built boat, the Opus — aptly named for a comic-strip penguin — through the chaos of waves. Our progress becomes a series of concussions punctuated by troughs of anxious calm. In this it resembles the rest of Pallister’s life.

A 55-year-old lawyer with a monkish haircut, glasses that look difficult to break, an allergy of the eyes that makes him squint and a private law practice in Anchorage, Pallister spends most of his time directing a nonprofit group called the Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK (pronounced GO-ay-kay). According to its mission statement, GoAK’s lofty purpose is to “protect, preserve, enhance and restore the ecological integrity, wilderness quality and productivity of Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska.” In practice, the group has, since Pallister and a few like-minded buddies founded it in 2005, done little else besides clean trash from beaches. All along Alaska’s outer coast, Chris Pallister will tell you, there are shores strewn with marine debris, as man-made flotsam and jetsam is officially known. Most of that debris is plastic, and much of it crosses the Gulf of Alaska or even the Pacific Ocean to arrive there.

The tide of plastic isn’t rising only on Alaskan shores. In 2004 two oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic that spanned both hemispheres. “Remote oceanic islands,” the study showed, “may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialized coasts.” Even on the shores of Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, the survey found on average a plastic item every five meters.

Back in the 1980s, the specter of fouled beaches was a recurring collective nightmare. The Jersey Shore was awash in used syringes. New York’s garbage barge wandered the seas. On the approach to Kennedy Airport, the protagonist of “Paradise,” a late Donald Barthelme novel, looked out his airplane window and saw “a hundred miles of garbage in the water, from the air white floating scruff.” We tend to tire of new variations on the apocalypse, however, the same way we tire of celebrities and pop songs. Eventually all those syringes, no longer delivering a jolt of guilt or dread, receded from the national consciousness. Who could worry about seabirds garotted by six-pack rings when Alaska’s shores were awash in Exxon’s crude? Who could worry about turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets when the ice caps were melting and the terrorists were coming?

Then, too, for a while it seemed as if we might succeed in laying this particular ecological nightmare to rest. In the mid-1980s, New York’s sanitation department began deploying vessels called TrashCats to hoover up scruff from the waterways around the Fresh Kills landfill. Elsewhere beach-sweeping machines did the same for the sand. In 1987 the federal government ratified Marpol Annex V, an international treaty that made it illegal to throw nonbiodegradable trash — that is, plastic — overboard from ships in the waters of signatory countries. The good news for the ocean kept coming: in 1988, Congress passed the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, which forbade cities to decant their untreated sewage into the sea. In 1989 the Ocean Conservancy staged its first annual International Coastal Cleanup (I.C.C.), which has since grown into the largest such event in the world. But beautification can be deceiving. Although many American beaches — especially those that generate tourism revenues — are much cleaner these days than they used to be, the oceans, it seems, are another matter.

Not even oceanographers can tell us exactly how much floating scruff is out there; oceanographic research is simply too expensive and the ocean too varied and vast. In 2002, Nature magazine reported that during the 1990s, debris in the waters near Britain doubled; in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica the increase was a hundredfold. And depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today’s marine debris is made of plastic.

Plastic gets into the ocean when people throw it from ships or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but also when rivers carry it there, or when sewage systems and storm drains overflow. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, the U.S. still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, according to a 2004 E.P.A. report. Comb the Manhattan waterfront and you will find, along with the usual windrows of cups, bottles and plastic bags, what the E.P.A. calls “floatables,” those “visible buoyant or semibuoyant solids” that people flush into the waste stream like cotton swabs, condoms, tampon applicators and dental floss.

The Encyclopedia of Coastal Processes, about as somniferously clinical a scientific source on the subject as one can find, predicts that plastic pollution “will incrementally increase through the 21st century,” because “the problems created are chronic and potentially global, rather than acute and local or regional as many would contemplate.” The problems are chronic because, unlike the marine debris of centuries past, commercial plastics do not biodegrade in seawater. Instead, they persist, accumulating over time, much as certain emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. The problems are global because the sources of plastic pollution are far-flung but also because, like emissions riding the winds, pollutants at sea can travel.

Frank Deford - my favorite NPR sports reporter - did a really great story on golfers in the US needing to come to grips with the reality that their sport is water intensive - and unsustainable.  What does golf have to do with sailing?  

Well I think that golfers and sailors (often the same people) are both a little behind the curve when it comes to conservation thinking - and having Frank Deford echo this sentiment is a good sign of things to come.  You can hear the article here.