This was suppose to be the 40th anniversary of Earth Day this month, however, there were three major tragedies this month related to environmental issues.
2) Oil rig fire and subsequent spill in Gulf of Mexico - Still ongoing, as a fire erupted on the oil rig, killing 11 workers, and is now spilling 5,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf, which is headed towards nearby coasts.
3) Coal-carrying ship damages Great Barrier Reef coral - coal-carrying ship ran aground on Douglas Shoals in the Great Barrier Reef. The ship was inside a marine protected area. It then rammed into the reef, and leaked about 4 tons of heavy fuel causing a roughly 3 km oil slick, and the damage it did to the reef will take 20 years to repair.
Forget about climate change for a minute. If you don't care about the planet, or are opposed to clean energy, the events of the last month should make you change your mind. If you can't see that these are dangerous occupations for those who work in them, cause pollution, and the risk to national security and increase in terrorism we take on while accessing these fuels, then you are a lost cause.
Maybe if we take away all the gasoline, and shut off the electricity to your house, will you start to think differently. Don't change your mind for the planet, change your mind because it's the right thing to do for humanity.
We finally got around to taking a honeymoon. We picked St. Croix in the Virgin Islands as our destination, because my wife was impressed with her visit to St. John's and St. Thomas a few years ago.
First of all, if you want to visit Hawaii, but can't afford the flight, then the Virgin Islands is the next best thing! The views were spectacular, as you can see from some photos below...
That being said, one of the disappointments about St. Croix was the amount of trash we saw on the beaches. I understand that the trash that washes up on a beach does not usually come from the local people. However, I think it is important for an island that relies on tourism to have a permanent program in place to keep the beaches clean. In addition, we did not see a very strong recycling program, so I am certain that the locals and tourists are contributing a significant amount to the problem.
Each beach access we stopped at contained a wide variety of garbage that had washed ashore. Plastics, milk jugs and cartons, fishing lines and lures, glass bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, etc. You name it, we saw it.
Since this was our vacation, I wanted to take my "environmental" hat off for the week (yeah right!), but the longer we were there, the more obvious the trash became, and the more we pressured each other into doing something about it.
There was a potential hurricane (Erika) that almost hit while we were there. It ended up being a tropical depression, so we only missed half-a-days worth of activities. Since we were limited on what we could do that day, we decided to go visit Isaac and Jack's Bay, a secluded series of beaches on the southeast side of the island.
We had visited Isaac's Bay earlier in the week (hiking from Point Udall, the easternmost part of the US). We wanted to see the other side, so we approached Jack's Bay from the other road, and found it to be an easier and better marked hiking trail.
As we approached the bay, we again noticed a lot of trash that had washed up onto the beach. First, we just picked up a few items that were obvious (platic doll leg, lighter, plastic bottle), but the more we picked up, the more we saw.
We decided to go full-board and pick up as much trash as we could from the eastern part of Jack's Bay. It took us about an hour, but it was well worth it.
There were some nearby pelicans towards the edge of the bay. If you've seen the video of the albatross and the plastic found in their stomaches on Midway Island, you'll understand our satisfaction when we were done (watch video link below). Basically, the birds eat the plastic, thinking it's food, and it takes up space in their stomach forever, which prevents them from growing strong enough to fly.
We decided to take a picture of what we collected. It was pretty scary what we found in that short amount of time, including hair curlers, motor oil containers, and toothbrushes.
We don't want to single out St. Croix, as there are many beaches around the world with this same problem. What hope this blog can lead to some change in how the beaches are treated by those who live closest to them. Here are some recommendations we would like to recommend...
1) There needs to be a regular beach cleanup on the island. Encourage the tourists to get involved, along with the school children. As you can see, it doesn't take much time to make a big impact
2) Once the beaches are cleaned, start to track and categorize the trash found on subsequent cleanup efforts, to determine where the trash is coming from, so the problem can be minimized.
