Jewish World Review August 8, 2006 / 14 Menachem-Av, 5766

The coming tsunami of trash

By Niall Ferguson

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There is a wonderfully sinister poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea," which depicts an Atlantis-like metropolis lost beneath the "melancholy waters" of a "lurid sea." The sea lures us from our cities to its shores at this time of year. This summer, however, I cannot help thinking of Poe's lines as a kind of prophecy:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

Why am I haunted by this image of a sunken city? I think because it symbolizes the coming revenge of the sea on mankind for nearly a century of mistreatment. It was 99 years ago that Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the first plastic based on a synthetic polymer — Bakelite — and ushered in the age of plastic. From that moment, a new kind of pollutant entered the sea; one that took a century or more to degrade.

The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Program, about 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.

The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week, this newspaper carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer. Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of bottles thrown in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea. Albatrosses are not the only victims. Untold numbers of fish and marine mammals are killed each year by discarded fishing nets, compounding the chronic problem of overfishing. But what to do?

In economic terms, the pollution of the oceans is the ultimate "tragedy of the commons." As popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, the tragedy is that an area of open pasture will tend to be depleted and eventually destroyed if the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, while the costs of exploitation are shared. When people dump rubbish in the sea, they are acting like a medieval farmer who overgrazed the common land. The rubbish is disposed of at no cost to the polluter, just as the farmer's cattle get fed for free. But everyone loses if the sea becomes a cesspool, just as everyone lost if the commons became a desert.

There are two classic solutions to this kind of problem. The first is regulation by a higher authority. In the case of the oceans, this solution is already in place, in the form of the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The problem, as with so many U.N. documents, is the lack of effective enforcement. So what about the alternative solution, namely privatization?

In early modern England, common land was progressively "enclosed" — claimed and fenced by individual landowners. In theory, of course, some parts of the sea have already been enclosed, in that countries with coastlines lay claim to coastal waters and fisheries. Yet, even if all such claims were universally respected, vast tracts of the world's oceans would remain "no man's water." In any case, it is far from clear that national governments are effective custodians even of their own coastal waters, because it is precisely there that most pollution of the sea occurs.

This, then, could be the ultimate tragedy of the commons. "The men of the hydrocarbon age," a future historian may write, "busied themselves with extracting oil from under the land and the seabed. Much of the oil they burned to heat their homes, fuel their vehicles and power their factories. But some of it they used to make plastic, a substance they valued for its durability.

"Perversely, men employed this almost indestructible petroleum product for quite ephemeral purposes. They obsessively wrapped it around everything they ate and drank. The result was that each human meal generated a substantial quantity of waste in the form of soiled plastic containers. Some they burned. Some they buried in huge holes. But a considerable quantity of this plastic ended up in the sea.

"Because plastic tends to float, the rubbish came to cover ever wider areas of the ocean's surface. Currents and tides deposited a proportion on beaches all over the world, but much of it remained out of sight in 'Garbage Patches.' As the principal victims of plastic pollution were birds, fish and sea mammals, men paid little attention. Only a few recalled Edgar Allan Poe's lines:

The waves have now a redder glow —

The hours are breathing faint and low —

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence."

So enjoy the seaside. But beware the coming tsunami of trash.