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Ocean Watch
By Susan Scott
Monday, January 1, 2001
TOM Hank's new movie, "Cast Away," has it all. It's well done, entertaining and has a good message. What counts in life, the story says, is not stuff but people. Slow down and appreciate them. Castaway junk litters
world beachesThe movie also brought up another modern day issue that most mainlanders probably missed and most islanders surely noticed: The beach in the story was clean. That island had not one scrap of human trash on it when the castaway and his Fed Ex parcels arrived and in four years, only one piece of junk drifted ashore.
Now there's a real fairy tale.
Today, even the most far-flung beaches are loaded with litter. In real life, a castaway would have more than a volleyball for company. He would have the entire Wilson clan, an extended Spalding family and a set of off-brand cousins. He would also have a whole pile of slippers and sneakers to go with them. Size a problem? Just wait a few days.
And catching rainwater in coconut shells? Please. In four years, that guy would have enough bottles and containers to stock a bar. And why waste energy trying to spear fish with a stick? It's far easier to net them with the discarded fishing nets that would almost certainly be on that beach.
The audience laughed over the fire-starting scene but I laughed the hardest. I am the person, remember, who glued to my wall hundreds of disposable cigarette lighters I found in Hawaii's remote northwest islands.
BECAUSE albatrosses often pick up lighters at sea and feed them to their chicks, I found most of my lighters in bird nests. But they wash onto beaches too and some still contain butane.
Plastic fishing floats are another category of rubbish that litters virtually every tropical beach in the world. These come in various shapes and sizes, and lashed together with the thousands of feet of rope that would also have washed ashore, would make an unsinkable boat.
Heck, with the stuff lying on beaches today, you could build a whole house, complete with, as the movie showed, a real outhouse.
I wish I were exaggerating. But I sailed from Connecticut to Hawaii once and found lots of uninhabited islands along the way but none free of trash. Even on rocky coasts with big surf, garbage, including a surprising number of wrecked boats, rested high and dry.
During my working stints in the remote islands of Hawaii's Northwest Chain, I became intimately acquainted with marine refuse. We picked it up from beaches, tugged it off reefs with boats and rescued animals caught in it. We even decorated the house with the stuff. One artistic worker made a population of fishing float people who stared at us with eerie, empty eyes.
There is hope. In August, the Hawaiian Island National Humpback Whale Sanctuary sponsored an international conference on marine debris to explore solutions.
Environmental groups continually lobby for more effective marine littering laws, yacht clubs and other private groups organize beach clean-ups and fishermen push for better disposal facilities in their harbors.
You can help fight this ocean trash problem by supporting the above efforts. It's not glamorous but it's one of the most pressing issues in marine conservation today.
The junk problem might also be lessened if we remember the message of this movie and rethink how much stuff we need to be happy. As the story suggested, it's not much.
The imaginary "Cast Away" island doesn't have to be only a place of the past; it could also be a picture of the future.
Marine science writer Susan Scott's Ocean Watch column
appears Mondays in the Star-Bulletin. Contact her at susanscott@hawaii.rr.com.
