greenboatblog.com

Why Being Green Matters
    

Up until about 150 years ago most of the world was clean and beautiful. Sure there are horror stories of people dying in the cities from primitive toxins like coal dust, lead poisoning,  and so on, but by and large the lakes and rivers were clean and the Ocean was full of life.  Stories abound of settlers in New England dropping buckets over the side of their ships and pulling them up full of cod. Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest thrived for generations by living in tune with the salmon runs.  The biggest creatures in the history of the world, whales, lived long simple lives in the ocean deep.
             Look at the world today.
 

Cod are rarely if ever found in Boston Harbor anymore, and if you are lucky enough to catch the one salmon allowed per fisherman each day in Puget Sound you need to worry about how much mercury it contains. Iceland still kills plenty of whales while the Japanese hide behind ridiculous claims that they need to murder these magnificent creatures in the name of science. All the while whale meat is for sale in downtown Tokyo.
           

How we treat the natural world says a lot about ourselves. If you believe, as I do, that our most distant ancestors came from the sea, then we should be ashamed of how badly we are treating Mother Ocean. Remarkably, most people who cause pollution, either on purpose, or not, give very little thought to how badly they are actually treating themselves and the generations yet to come. I don’t know anybody sane who would bathe in gasoline, eat plastic, or force their children to ingest poison, yet in a very real way, every time an old outboard spills fuel over the side,  a $3.00 bundle of grocery- store toys gets left at the beach, or a tidy mom tries to shine up the galley with some cleaner full of toxins, this is exactly what happens.
           Aside from our own health, what does it say about modern society when every resident Killer Whale in Puget Sound is so full of industrial toxins that the entire group is dying a slow death, unable to reproduce enough healthy offspring to keep the family growing. Or how about the dead beluga whales who are so full of toxins that disposal crews must wear haz-mat suits when removing their carcasses from the beach? Industrial defenders would like you to think occurrences like these are one in a million, but the sad truth is that similar problems can be found all the way up and down the aquatic food chain, from plankton to polar bears.
         

Take a peek at what is happening beneath the waves in Chesapeake Bay, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the South Pacific, or in almost any large body of water, and the scene is bleak. In almost every commercial fishery around the world, the current population of marine organisms is over 90% less than it once was.     90%!      Most of this decimation has been caused by overfishing of course – a topic we won’t be delving into very much here – but a good deal of the problem lies in the unhealthy water marine animals are now forced to occupy. 
         

 This blog is not going to try to solve all the world’s problems. Plenty of great books exist that can enlighten you on these big questions. What we will try to do, however, is point out why you should be green in your little hole in the water. 

No matter how you look at it, this planet we live on is a closed system. The only thing that gets in is a life- sustaining dose of sunlight. Other than some of this light bouncing back into space, a little heat, and some upper atmosphere gases, everything else that is made, used, and disposed of on Earth stays on Earth. Mankind is the only member of Nature, and yes we are animals after all, that has created an unsustainable way of life. Everywhere else in the natural world organisms live and die in harmony with the planet. Non-human organisms grow, nourish themselves,  create recyclable waste, reproduce, and in death, release their vital elements back into the sytem.

The circle of life works – it has allowed life to flourish on this planet for millions of years. And yet, human beings have somehow forgotten the rules. We produce an overwhelming volume of toxins and wastes that harm the system. More on this later, but how advanced can we really claim to be when we alone are poisoning everyone and everything around us?

Being green can take many forms, but at the heart of it all, being green means trying to live our lives as members of the circle of life. While we may try to convince ourselves that Man has evolved beyond the necessity of adhering to these basic rules, in the end, the logic and processes of a closed system are bound to catch up to us if we don’t. 

Why Greenboatblog and Greenboatstuff Exists.

When I first heard the term “green” associated with anything I had visions of my wonderful hippy Aunt Wendy, dancing through her garden in a homemade dress and thanking the pagan gods for her fresh vegetables. 
For most of my adult life I have been a pretty clean cut, rational taxpayer who never thought a lot about the environment unless an oil spill was front-page news. Sure I enjoy a good summer day at the lake, but until recently I took Mother Nature for granted.
            Like most boat owners, I want my boat to look nice. I want my engine to run smoothly. I want my family to enjoy our time on the water with good food, comfy clothes, plenty of fun things to do, and a clean cabin that doesn’t smell. When I started fooling around on boats I figured the easiest way to have all these things was to think of my boat as a house.
            At home we had jugs of cleaners, bottles of bleach, boxes of laundry soap, rolls of plastic bags, and every other convenience available to supposedly make life better.
Most of these products found their way to our boat without any real thought on my part. If a cleaner said “biodegradable” on the label I might buy it as long as it wasn’t too expensive. I never thought to question what “biodegradable” really meant, I just assumed it meant a product was harmless if it got in the water.
In the spring I joined most folks in our marina by scrubbing and polishing and using all those nifty cleaners to try and outshine my neighbors.
Every fall I changed my diesel engine’s oil and usually got most of the gunk cleaned up. When it came time to fill the fuel tanks I tried to be careful but more than once some fuel spilled overboard. As the colorful slick spread around my boat I was much more worried about what my fellow boaters thought than I was about the pollution I had just let go. After all, the lake we are on is huge-those few drops of fuel wouldn’t cause much harm would they? After a day on the water we hauled our trash to the marina dumpster like everybody else, all three bags of it.
            Then one day I read a book.
            Quite by accident I grabbed a copy of Carl Safina’s “Song for the Blue Ocean.” The cover looked cool and since I like to read, I thought I should learn a little about the Ocean. As the plight of the majestic blue fin tuna, the incredible Pacific salmon, and numerous coral reef inhabitants unfolded I began to question my beliefs about the environment. Carl’s book led me to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and beyond.
            As I began to question my beliefs about the true state of the environment two real life experiences opened my eyes even more,.
            Being a devoted sailor I long dreamed of cruising in the British Virgin Islands.  Several thousand miles and several thousand dollars later my family and I found ourselves chartering a sailboat in the BVI over the Thanksgiving holiday. Here we were having the time of our lives, overcoming my daughter’s fear of sharks and my fear of looking like I might not know what I was doing. The weather was perfect, the sailing terrific, all in all, paradise. Then one day, as we were lounging in the bay that supposedly inspired Robert Louis Stephenson to write “Treasure Island”, a plastic shopping bag floated by our stern.
            I almost cried. In that moment I completely connected with the old Indian chief in the 1970’s commercial who cried after canoeing through garbage and having litter thrown at his feet.
            A few months later the family was on Maui.  On an afternoon getaway my wife and I took the windy road to Hana to see “Old” Hawaii. Driving just south of Hana the beaches are beautiful – from a distance. This is one of the first spots in all of Hawaii where the waves from the mainland come ashore.
Unfortunately the breakers carry with them all sorts of junk. Like the commercial just mentioned, a walk on these beaches also took me back to memories from my childhood – memories of climbing through garbage at the dump. Plastic water bottles, soap containers, what I mistook for sea-foam but was actually millions of tiny pieces of Styrofoam, nylon nets, poly ropes, junk, junk, junk, littered the beach.
It soon dawned on me that if these beaches were so littered, even though there were plenty of people who routinely try to clean them up, how awful it must be on those countless shorelines without a “Friends of the Beach” committee.
            These experiences, a mountain of books, countless articles, website after website, and plenty of nights at my desk until 3 AM led me to start greenboatstuff.com and launch this blog. I am just an ordinary guy. I claim no particular brilliance and I have no fancy letters after my name. While I may lack “official” credentials, I do believe I possess enough common sense to make a case for why we should take better care of our rivers, lakes, and Ocean. It is my sincere hope that through this blog I can shine a light on the true state of the waterworld we boaters too often take for granted.