November 2007                                                                                                                                      Click here to watch the video!

Decades' worth of marine debris is fouling our coastline, but a handful of passionate people are determined to clean it all up, one piece at a time.

At first, the beach looked nearly clean. A strand of yellow rope looped over a piece of driftwood. An oblong buoy nestled among round rocks. The stuff looked like decorations in a seafood restaurant. It almost belonged.

But then other items popped into focus: a plastic water bottle, a pulverized lump of Styrofoam, a quart container that once held motor oil. On a remote, sunny beach in Prince William Sound these unnatural things clearly didn’t belong.

Reaching out for a single piece of trash was enough to dissolve anyone’s illusion that this place was pristine. Trash was everywhere. Shards from a discarded Cup-of-Noodles, pieces of fishing net, a plastic bottle cap. And there were odd things: the core of a TV set, a shampoo bottle with Russian writing, fragments of a plastic sink.

Within an hour, three volunteers quietly built a stack of orange garbage bags from the litter they found on one tiny beach on a small Alaska island, scores of miles from the nearest road.

The difference was dramatic, even though the trash had seemed invisible at first. It had been so ubiquitous it slipped from awareness, the way an ever-present noise fades into the background. When the noise stops, the sudden silence is striking. In this case, when the trash was gone I felt a sense of relief and realized that the beach looked the way it was really supposed to look.

The volunteers relaxed on warm rocks and sipped water. Springtime snow, still low on the island mountains, reflected bright patches on the dimpled surface of the spruce-green water. The answer to the question I had planned to ask, “Why do you volunteer to do this hard work?” now seemed obvious. Who wouldn’t want to be here? Who wouldn’t want feel that he had helped make the world’s most magnificent place even better?

Volunteers who take such trips to clean beaches tend to return—it’s addictive. Chris Pallister, Ted Raynor and Doug Leiser are hooked worse than anyone. They have organized the project for several years, yielding a collection of clean islands and happy volunteers. In the early years, up to 100 people would go out for a weekend each spring, chipping in for gas, moving from beach to beach by skiff or in a swarm of kayaks, and camping on the islands.

After four years, the three organizers did a little math. They divided all the shoreline of Prince William Sound— about 3,500 miles—by the distance they had cleaned—70 miles—and came to a discouraging conclusion. Their work, for all the good feelings it generated, could be called a symbol or a token, but not a solution.

“We figured at that rate, it’s like 200 years to make a trip all the way around the sound,” Pallister said. “We’d better put more effort on it.”

That was the point at which a hobby became a career.

Raynor was ready. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill he organized a volunteer cleanup by people who refused Exxon’s money but wanted to remove the oil. Raynor had never found a vocation that suited him—not fishing or skippering charter boats, nor working as a computer tech. In his 40s, he craved the satisfaction of cleaning beaches. It made him feel good to work hard with others to do something real, with his hands, for the environment.

Leiser was ready, too. An avid outdoorsman and the heir to a greenhouse business that had shut down, he and his fit, young sons wanted to get out on the water with a purpose.

Pallister and his sons were ready, too, and he knew how to get a nonprofit beach-cleanup business off the ground. Drawn to the sea by the memoirs of Joshua Slocum, the first man to singlehandedly sail around the world, Pallister had earned a law degree specializing in coastal issues but he didn’t enjoy practicing law. Instead, he began working to line up grants and other support for a larger-scale cleanup with paid workers.

In 2006, the three men—along with Leiser and Pallister’s sons—cleaned up the entire Knight Island group in Prince William Sound. They covered 350 miles of shoreline while working for six weeks in rain and wind on slippery rocks and logs in places rarely visited by humans, and collected 35 tons of plastic and Styrofoam, filling 35 construction Dumpsters.

The U.S Forest Service helped haul the debris back to Whittier for disposal, but Raynor carried much of it on his boat. With each trip, people would gather on the waterfront to see the little aluminum craft buried in stacks of plastic bags, and to congratulate and thank Raynor and his co-workers.

Raynor was energized. His goal became nothing less than to clean up all the beaches on Alaska’s shoreline—more than 47,000 miles. He’s prepared to spend the rest of his life on it. He easily gets worked up on the subject, as he did one evening this summer while sitting next to a campfire by a tidal lagoon at twilight, talking to two new volunteers.

“If we’re crazy, there’s a lot of crazy people in the world,” he roared. “We’ve had 70 people out here this weekend, and we were turning people away. There’s a wide range of crazy people in this world.”

Indeed, while Raynor’s group was working in Prince William Sound, others were cleaning beaches near Homer, Yakutat, Unalakleet, Shaktooklik and Unalaska. And more volunteers were at work elsewhere in the country. In Alaska, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris program supports cleanup efforts coordinated by the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation, a nonprofit arm of a fishing trade association. MCAF Spokesman Bob King said the industry wants to clean up debris because so much of it on remote shores comes from fishing boats that lose gear.

Debris represents an obvious environmental threat in the Bering Sea. Work began on the Pribilof Islands more than a decade ago when local residents began to find dead fur seals and other marine mammals tangled in nets. But despite years of work, no end to the mess is in sight. Once a beach is clean, the tide brings in more nets, line and crab pots. King said a one-and-a-half-mile beach on St. Paul Island yielded 20 tons of debris in 2006. When he returned to those beaches a year later, he found about 1,000 pounds of new junk per mile.

“In St. Paul they keep going around the island, and by the time they get back to a beach they’ve done before, it’s pretty heavily trashed again,” King said.

It’s frustrating, but enthusiasts for the work point out that every piece of plastic removed from the environment is a step in the right direction, even if the amount that remains is overwhelming. Besides tangling and choking animals, plastic breaks down into tiny fragments that become part of the food chain. The material itself can be toxic, but it also can absorb contaminants in the water such as DDT or PCBs, concentrating the chemicals up to one million times beyond levels in the surrounding seas. Pelagic birds have been found dead with guts full of plastics, with no room left for food. But the nonlethal damage of contaminated plastic could be even more broad-reaching, because the poisons can move through the ecosystem affecting the health or reproduction of many organisms, including humans.

Pallister and his group know all this, but they aren’t focused on science or environmental policy. Leiser even refuses to be called an environmentalist. The men simply love the work. Cleaning beaches has caught them like a treble hook deep in a fish’s gullet. If the effort seems quixotic, they don’t really care.

After their progress in Prince William Sound, their focus shifted to remote, open-ocean beaches, where far greater concentrations of debris accumulate from world-spanning currents. Calling themselves Gulf of Alaska Keeper (although they are unaffiliated with other keeper groups or the national Waterkeeper Alliance), the group sought grants to make a leap into the unknown—cleaning rugged, storm-battered beaches many hours by boat from the nearest communities. Their first project would determine if their goal was even possible. If they couldn’t clean these beaches, they couldn’t dream of cleaning all of Alaska.

King’s organization paid for a helicopter to survey outer shores in April. Gore Point seemed like the perfect place to start. The point juts south from the Kenai Peninsula like a hook, scooping up whatever’s passing in the east-west Alaska Current. After the spill the beach collected deep, oily goo and thousands of dead animals. Last spring, plastic garbage lay in huge windrows far into the forest—tons of bouys, nets, bottles and miscellaneous junk.

Looking upward, the forest towered with straight, long trunks and high branches hung with moss, and above the trees enormous, dark cliffs loomed in the mist. All was quiet but for the calls of ravens and eagles and the rumble of the incoming sea swell. To someone looking up, it was an enchanting wilderness. Looking down, it was a landfill. The garish jumble of unnatural colors—bright blue, neon orange, crayon yellow—blotted out moss and ferns as far as 385 feet back from the black sand and beach grass.

Pallister had lined up more than 30 supporting agencies and businesses to supply equipment, supplies, money for the workers, fuel, food, boats, and so on. Most of the money for a month of work would come from two grants: $115,000 from NOAA, and a matching grant from a special legislative appropriation of $150,000. But the day before the crew left for Gore Point at the beginning of July, word came that Gov. Sarah Palin had vetoed the appropriation because it wasn’t among her priorities and had come through the noncompetitive earmark process. The workers launched anyway, not knowing how they would pay to remove the material from the beach after they gathered it up.

Pallister stayed in Anchorage trying to round up money, organize logistics and fend off bureaucrats. Then, a stop-work order came from the state Historic Preservation Office over concerns about an archaeological site. That was resolved after a visit by a state archaeologist, but only when the cleaning crew agreed not to use all-terrain vehicles to carry debris across the point. Cleanup work continued, but the workers didn’t know how they would get the trash from the wave-battered outer beach to a protected cove on the far side, where boats could safely operate.

Other problems accumulated. Out of 100 volunteers who had signed up, only 30 agreed to serve 10-day stints at the point. All but five of those canceled and, of that handful, several were unprepared for the reality of camping in an utterly remote location, in constant rain and fog, doing hard labor day after day. Pallister’s and Leiser’s sons kept up a brutal pace, however, and the huge carpet of plastic slowly turned into mountains of plastic bags—several thousand of them.

Then came critics. Brad Faulkner, a Homer fish buyer, arrived at the point by boat to go beach combing with his 12- year-old, Dylan, only to find their trash Mecca gone. “That was the best beach combing beach in Alaska,” he said. “It now looks like the city dump with mountains of plastic bags. They have no means to get that junk out of there.”

Lisa Demer, a reporter from the Anchorage Daily News, began calling with questions about the project’s finances and legal organization. Pallister was nervous. Because of paperwork issues and budget delays in Congress, he’d received only verbal approval of the NOAA grant. He had nothing in writing, and Demer’s calls to Washington were upsetting everyone. Pallister had already poured his own money into the project to keep it going, and no one had been paid in quite a while.

“I might lose everything on this deal. I might have to sell everything I own to pay for all this,” he said. “These guys think I’m making all this money, and I’m out here going broke.”

From the field, Leiser and Raynor convinced Pallister it would be impossible to hand-carry the material across the point to a boat. Pallister hired a helicopter company to fly it from the stormy beach to a safe anchorage nearby, where a 100-foot landing craft from Homer could be loaded. The chopper would cost $1,882 an hour. A ship that size would cost about $4,000 a day and would take 10 hours just to get there. And the bags would have to be slung in huge Super Sacks—another $2,000 expense—that could be attached to the helicopter’s hoist—something the men had never done before. It all looked overwhelming.

The Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation came forward with a grant of $42,000 for the chopper and boat, and people and equipment converged on Homer. But the late season weather closed in, with gale warnings at Gore Point. Without an indoor work area, Pallister paced docks and parking lots in the rain, his cell phone constantly to his ear, directing workers, flight operators and boat owners, getting weather reports and, when lucky, reaching the crew at the point on a spotty satellite phone connection.

A horrid weather pattern appeared ready to stop everything, but when the storm didn’t materialize, Pallister set out on a landing craft for Gore Point. The next morning, a six-passenger helicopter swooped out of mostly clear skies and its pilot used a dangling, 125-foot line to pluck bundles of 250-pound Super Sacks from the beach and plop them down onto the vessel’s deck on the other side of the point.

Pallister, his three sons, Leiser and Raynor worked feverishly for the next 10 hours to load the helicopter and landing craft, darting under the heavy swinging sling, dodging the falling Super Sacks, and dragging and repacking heavy garbage.

Leiser and Raynor had been at the point for 54 straight days. They were elated as they watched the helicopter clear the beach and forest, leaving them clean for the first time since the invention of plastic. Raynor picked up tiny scraps left here and there and putting them in his pockets even as tons of trash were whisked away overhead.

But Pallister was too tired to feel good. “I’m not sure this was worth it,” he said to his son Eric. “Worth all the money, the hassle, the wear and tear.”

Eric said, “It’s worth it. The first time you do anything is always the hardest.”

At the end of the day, the landing craft was full, stacked with a pile of garbage 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 6 to 12 feet high. Raynor panned his video camera across the mass of white sacks, buoys and nets.

He narrated as he recorded: “Here it is, all this region’s garbage in one megapile. We’ve done a good thing.”

Charles Wohlforth is a writer in Anchorage. His website is www.wohlforth.net.