Our New Oceans

We have mentioned, before, the vast floating wasteland of plastic debris-- fairly recently described as "twice the size of Texas"-- that has accumulated in the North Pacific subtropical gyre. I still encourage anyone to read the long Best Life Magazine article at that link, but not if you're already at the edge of despair today.

Turns out, not surprisingly, that our ocean garbage dump has continued to grow since that article was published. It's now twice the size of the United States, as also blogged at Daily Kos by FishOutofWater. From the Independent article linked above:

About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

The garbage soup, which floats in a becalmed area of ocean normally avoided by boats, was discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an oceanographer and heir to a large oil fortune who “subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist.”

The research vessel “Alguita” is currently exploring the Garbage Patch, and keeping a frequently-updated blog of their observations. From Feb. 10’s post:

Clear skies and gentle seas made debris watch a much more appealing activity, and drew the crew with nets, cameras, and binoculars to the bow. For a solid two hours, we fished as fast as we could, pulling up floats, toothbrushes, plastic and glass bottles, a golf ball, a billiard ball, an unused glue stick for a hot glue gun, and several rope boluses filled with crabs and tiny striped fish - But most appalling was the plastic confetti. An endless stream of delicate, white snowflakes, like plastic powder coating the ocean’s surface. This, remarked Charlie, is indicative of the gyre, “where the trash comes home to roost and degrade…..”. A school of cavorting dolphins lightened the mood - the first Charles has spotted in his 10 years of visiting the gyre.

Our Manta sample mirrored what we observed – a bowl full of plastic, with almost zero evidence of life. We wouldn't be surprised if the plastic to plankton ratio here was 100 to 1. The contrast between this “clean” sample and the mass of zooplankton from the other day was remarkable, illustrating the dramatic range in biological productivity throughout the ocean.

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In more bad ocean news, yesterday’s Los Angeles Times reports on growing “dead zones” off Oregon and Washington, likely a result of climate changes that in turn affect winds and currents.

Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all -- a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.

"We couldn't believe our eyes," Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died."

From the first sentence you just know

I finally had the opportunity to start Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And-- here's the thing-- it's fantastic. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now. If you're not moved to tears within, oh, four pages, by sheer amazement at how good this book is, I'm not sure if you're someone I can know.

On eating and drinking in Tucson:

Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned. Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away. Every ounce of the city's drinking, washing, and goldfish-bowl-filling water is pumped from a nonrenewable source-- a fossil aquifer that is dropping so fast, sometimes the ground crumbles. In a more recent development, some city water now arrives via a three-hundred-mile-long open canal across the desert from the Colorado River, which-- owing to our thirsts-- is a river that no longer reaches the ocean, but peters out in a sand flat near the Mexican border.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona.

In the Papers, 8/1/07

One proposed settlement in a major water rights negotiation would be the largest grant to irrigators since the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, representing 15% of the federally-controlled water in California. The recipient of these rights would be the Westlands Water District, a group of large agribusiness operations in the San Joaquin Valley. This is a complicated situation; also at issue is an old unsettled lawsuit by the district against the U.S. government for pollution of the cropland, and potential associated cleanup costs. Coming to an agreement may be a win/win for the feds and the agribusiness group, but who's losing?

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Fortunately, the ecological effects of the proposed border fence with Mexico are starting to be discussed in the mainstream news media. Such fencing would inhibit the movements of large migratory species, as well as those of smaller, but crucial, dispersers such as insects and pollen. It would also restrict species' access to water in many places. The Sonoran Pronghorn, mentioned in my first post, is of especial concern. Land of Enchantment has been blogging on this subject at Daily Kos for some time: here, and here, for instance. Her diaries are worthwhile reading.

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Small-town police reports: feel the love.

A man fishing at Hyalite Reservoir snagged a wallet that had been on the bottom of the water for 30 years. The wallet will be returned to its original owner.

The Dambuilders

You often hear it said that there are only two species which deliberately alter their environment by the damming and/or diversion of streams: one, of course, is the beaver.

The other is us. One estimate suggests that there are 800,000 manmade dams worldwide. Of these, perhaps 14% are in the U.S.; nearly half are in China. Most are small; but the mere 40,000 large ones manage to have profound impacts on nearly every river system on earth.

I spend a certain amount of time-- not a large proportion, but some-- thinking about dam removals. I work in fisheries biology, partly with salmonids, and it is hard not to maintain a consciousness of dams as a constraining force on fish populations. On the other hand, this is the West, where water is scarce and precious. The stockpiling of water is not an unreasonable impulse on its face, though its effects are often far more damaging than originally anticipated.

So, I've certainly considered dam-building as an enterprise which attempts to meet human water resource needs-- whether it is successful or not, worth the cost or a form of expensive, wanton destruction.

What I had not considered, until yesterday, was the possibility that the joy of water diversion was ingrained in us instinctually as a species, becoming a source of interest and pleasure beyond its utilitarian purposes.

Many sources claim that the sound of running water, itself, is the instinctive cue for beavers to build dams; for instance, such a recorded sound will cause a beaver to initiate damming behavior.

I began to think about this as I watched the children at my six-year-old daughter's birthday party, which was held at a city park with a tiny creek running through it. The creek is shallow, with irregular grassy banks, and narrow enough to jump in many places. While it has a muddy bottom, it also contains a number of large cobbles. The kids gravitated quickly towards this creek-- it was a hot day-- and throughout the party the streambed proved a more compelling location than any of the play equipment or the shaded picnic pavilion under which we occasionally convened to eat cake or open presents.

My own daughter, in fact, was the first to ask to "be excused" from cake-eating and return to standing ankle-deep in the water. Others quickly followed. And what were they doing in there? Building a dam, of course. A fortuitous spot had been chosen, where there already existed a (very) slight drop-off. Large cobbles had at first been lined up, to form a primitive and very porous stone wall. But the children were not satisfied with this. They worked on and off all afternoon, and stayed late to finish, filling in the gaps between the big rocks with small ones, packing the spaces with mud, adding sticks at angles for strength and stability. The water behind the dam got deeper; we had to be careful of the youngest attendees. People were bathing in the "pool." The stream widened, and there was visible downstream dewatering. The grownups began to gravitate towards the stream too.

The question is, why? These children did not need to impound water for residential use, agriculture, or power generation. They made a dam because making a dam was pleasurable. It was fun to make, and fun to watch. It was neat, the way the stream got deeper, the way the course of the water changed.

Wow, said the children and the adults. That's so cool. I felt guilty for damming the stream, but it was cool. And everybody was so happy.

The larger question, of course: what is it about our species that finds environmental manipulation intrinsically cool, whether or not any rationally-developed aim exists?

Before we left (but after most of the kids had gone home), one dad partially disassembled the dam, so the water could flow freely again. As I carried bags and coolers across the park to my car a mere five minutes later, I saw a new group of children in the stream, in close to the same spot, laughing and splashing about in their excitement.

They were carrying rocks.