Judy Moon
Seoul, South Korea
2016, Senior, Creative Writing

“This is Earth,” Ms. Alton said as she picked up the big blue marble from her desk. The deep, icy shade of blue reflecting from the polished, glassy marble caught my attention during the usual drabness that always came with the beginning of social studies class.

“Why is Earth so blue?” one of my classmates asked. “I thought Earth had patches of green.” In a second grade classroom of students busy playing Gameboy or Nintendo indoors all day long, Earth wasn’t the most riveting of things to think about.

“Well,” Ms. Alton replied, “although the green patches are called land, which is where humans and other mammals live, Earth is mostly made up of oceans.” We nodded our heads in understanding. “In fact,” she continued, “water makes up more than 70 percent of our entire planet!” To this bit of information, we collectively let out an audible gasp.

“What will happen if Earth drowns in its own water?” a young girl suddenly wailed out loud. “Will there be no more of those green patches? Why can’t we just dump some of that water into outer space?”

“That actually leads to my next point,” said Ms. Alton as she grabbed another marble from the bucket on her desk. “Look at this.” She held the marble up high for the class to observe. Unlike the beautiful deep blue color of the previous one, the new marble had a slightly nebulous shade of blue with smudges of black covering its surface.

“Ew,” said a boy sitting nearby. “It looks like the sandwich that I kept in my bag for the past 6 months.”

“Actually, this is not a funny issue,” said my teacher in a slightly more serious tone, along with her rarely presented grim face. “The marble that I just showed you represents Earth in the next few decades. See,” she added, “Earth is changing. Earth’s oceans are changing, and they’re changing fast.”

But as second graders, no one could fathom or fully appreciate the truth in Ms. Alton’s words—the truth of how the ocean’s transformation would impact our lives on the land. All that mattered to us at that time was going home, lying down on our beds, and playing Gameboy and Nintendo.

Almost eight full years have passed since that social studies class in Ms. Alton’s second grade classroom. I have moved countries, schools, made new friends, met new teachers, and moved on with life without thinking much about “the changing oceans of Earth.” The image of the two marbles began to fade away as I moved on into middle and high school. However, even after eight years, that one lecture from second grade lay dormant in my memory, awoken one day as a sophomore in high school.

It was a month before my AP Biology exam. Once again, I was stuck listening to another drab, monotonous lecture (some things never change) about ecology, the final unit we needed to cover before the AP exam. My teacher, Mr. Koester, was

showing us a PowerPoint about food chains, the different biomes and ecosystems, energy pyramids, and how pollution affects biodiversity.

“Look at this image, and think about what you might title it,” said our teacher, as he clicked to the last slide. The image constituted of a painting of Earth, with its lower hemisphere submerged in water, and its upper hemisphere exposed to the atmosphere, with land facing upwards.

None of us cared to give a response, and after a moment of awkward silence and coughs, he went on: “The title of this image is Cleaning Up 300 Million Tons Of Ocean Plastic. The painter is a teenage scuba diver, who was 16 years old when he drew this image. Many of you are roughly the same age, no? His name is Boyan Slat.”

“Wow, only sixteen years old and so passionate about cleaning up this planet,” I remarked silently to myself. I recalled my second grade lecture and reflected on how long it had been since my teacher first taught us about the importance of preserving the oceans. That was when I realized that in the years between my second year in elementary school to my second year in high school, the issue had only gotten worse.

The moment I arrived home, I went online, researching more about this young teenager through his website www.TheOceanCleanup.com. Along with giving famous TED TALKS to millions of viewers, Slat has created a solar powered trawler in the shape of a Manta ray that travels day and night 24/7 across the gyres picking up surface plastic, and storing it in bins for collection.

After hours of reading articles and watching online discussions of Boyan Slat’s “The Ocean Cleanup” project, I felt compelled to act in whatever small way I could towards addressing this problem. My Biology teacher was right; the products that we buy and throw away without much consideration use disposable single-use plastic, a harmful compound that affects and kills millions of fish, sea birds, turtles, sharks, dolphins and whales every year. While many people are aware of water pollution and the massive oil spills that are covered on the evening news every now and then, not many civilians seem to acknowledge the tremendous effects plastic littering and debris can have on marine life.

To begin, let’s start with the easy facts. We’re surrounded by plastic. Think about things you can find in a typical household: grocery bags, Ziplock bags, phone cases, glasses, straws, remote controls, juice boxes, the list can go on forever. Research shows that since we currently recycle less than 5% of the plastics we produce, much of it washes out into the seas, as 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of Earth’s oceans. More than 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year, and the numbers are steadily climbing up the scales.

That 8 million tons of plastic debris, which stems from billions of humans around the planet tossing their plastic away without much of a thought, ends up in our oceans. And as if land dwellers weren’t bad enough, thousands of ships, boats and luxury cruisers toss millions of pieces of plastic day in and day out across the globe. Globally, 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic already exist in the ocean, and a new study published in Science Magazine suggests that this volume will double by 2025 (in only nine years!).

Part of this plastic accumulates in five areas where currents converge: the gyres. These five massive, slow rotating whirlpools accumulate plastic, in which the petroleum plastic will remain in the ocean for decades, if not longer. Plastic, that double-edged sword of material engineering, does not break down. Although in the ocean, sunlight and waves cause floating plastics to oxidize slowly into increasingly smaller particles, it never degrades or completely disappears, which is why plastic plays such a virulent role in the marine ecosystem. After entering the food chain, these persistent organic pollutants bio-accumulate in the food chain, resulting in an even higher concentration of pollutants in fish, including species of seafood consumed by humans.

* * *

Last summer break, I visited my hometown, Busan, with two of my closest friends and their families. And as always, I was anticipating another amazing time lounging on the famous Haeundae beach. Not only that, I was also looking forward to the amazing seafood that would be presented to us every dinner, freshly sliced and served alongside a traditional bowl of rice full of various greens and vegetables.

But after our seven-hour drive from Seoul, we passed by the beach strip, noticing that nobody was on the sand. Instead, we saw huge signs and lengths of rope cordoning off the beach. My father leaned over the steering wheel and squinted his eyes. “Huh,” he muttered. “It seems that the beach is closed today due to a concert they had the other night.” That was when I noticed small clusters of volunteers picking up leftover bottles, cigarette butts, and ramen cups from the shore.

It’s fine, I thought. We’ll go to the beach tomorrow, and everything will be just like it was. Postponing my desire to romp on the beach for just one more day, I set my sights instead on the delicious seafood dinner we were to eat later that night.

After we settled into our hotel rooms and took a brief nap, we went down the famous seafood alleyway and got a table at our favorite restaurant specializing in octopus, mackerel, and fresh cuts of tuna. As a side dish, my father ordered a big pot of steamed clams and a pan of shrimp fried rice.

Dinner was enjoyed without incident—almost. As we were in the midst of scarfing down our food, my friend let out a tiny groan, holding her jaw and wincing. Then, she spit out a tiny object that many, including me, initially thought was a rock. But this “rock” was slightly brown, with hints of transparent green thrown in. Once I prodded it with my finger, I knew immediately what it was. Due to the substantial number of plastic particles floating around in the oceans combined with its minuscule size and shape, it makes it extremely difficult for small fish to distinguish between edible food and indigestible plastics (Parker, 2015). And as these small fish are consumed higher and higher up the food chain, the plastics don’t go anywhere. And in some drastic cases, they end up in us.

Sure, it may seem like a pain in the neck to always make sure to throw away trash in the correct bin. It is also very difficult to change the habit of disposing our everyday belongings like paper receipts, water bottles and disposable Starbucks cups, on the streets and benches of parks.

However, think about it the other way. That water bottle that you left on the bench in the street in front of your school could be flown away into the sewage, whether by a person knocking it over, or by wind. That water bottle could then end up flowing down the sewage pipes heading towards the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean, depending on where you’re from. When that water bottle enters a body of water, it will break down into tiny pieces of plastic waste, and could one day end up in a fish’s belly—and perhaps even yours.

Spending five seconds to walk over to a recycling bin, or simply holding onto your bottle until you come across one, shouldn’t be a very hard decision to make, especially if you consider how much of a difference your thoughtfulness has on marine life. And if you don’t’ really care about fish or birds or marine creatures, then do the selfish thing and think of yourself. Because in the end we all live on a blue marble—and here’s a newsflash: it won’t be blue much longer unless we collectively act. Instead, it might just roll away, beyond the point of saving, and be lost forever.

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