Birthday and Earth Day

It's been a week for Plastic Ocean. I presented at Tara Theatre in Litchfield, South Carolina on my birthday talking to 220 people of all ages about my experiences in both the North Atlantic and North Pacific gyres and the negative impact of plastic to the marine environment. Thank you Goffinet and Ian McLaren for pulling this event together. My favorite part of giving talks is the Q and A and this group didn't disappoint. One woman stood up and said she had been carrying her own reusable bag around for 25 years because "It starts with me." The audience gave her a round of applause. It was one of those defining moments when someone does something for the betterment of the masses but never gets a voice - those that lead by example. Her sharing this to a large audience deserved a loud and long applause. I laughed a little inside at the synchronicity of that statement because that same week, I learned of a blog http://itstartswithme-danielle.blogspot.com/2010/04/teach-them-better.html and how apropos that this one line had been honored. My husband used to rant how our magazine titles went from "Life" to "People" to "Us" to "Self" and he felt it was what had been the breakdown in our culture, the lost sense of community. "It starts with me" is a turning point in looking at our selves and how our actions effect not only each other but the world in which we rely on and live in.

Earth Day at Hugh McRae Park in Wilmington, NC brought a huge crowd of 5,000 people. Jennifer O'Keefe and myself had a "Plastic Ocean Project" table amassing the many problems plastics create in the marine environement using pictures of marine life maimed, trapped or died from misguided plastics in the ocean. We had items that we pulled from each gyre -one being the actual bottle we found and freed a fish trapped inside. Other items were samples collected that illustrates plastics fragment making it difficult to go out into these gyres and scoop the plastics out. Our images and display drew a crowd. It was a great opportunity to share and educate -thanks Shannon Culpepper! And my sister Linda Hall who I bamboozled to come to the beach only to put her to work with outreach to this enormous issue. (Pictures by Lloyd Mackall)