Captain Moore Says: Refuse!

The latest blog post by eco-blogger Fake Plastic Fish includes an inspiring brief video interview with Captain Moore, one of the people responsible for bringing the North Pacific Gyre "plastic island" to the public's attention.  Moore was the subject of a high-profile magazine article, "Plastic Oceans," which tells the story of how Moore first encountered the floating plastic while sailing his catamaran from Hawaii to California.

Dubbed the "Eastern Garbage Patch," essentially all of the plastic afloat in the Pacific eventually ends up in a huge calm patch of the ocean.  At the North Pacific Gyre, currents collect the floating debris, to swirl endlessly just below the surface in a patch twice the size of Texas.

Captain Moore set up the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to help publicize the problem, and now he is taking the next step: speaking out against Stuff.  Not just plastic Stuff, but all Stuff. 

"They can refuse.  Refuse to be a part of this non-stop consumer culture.  They have to realize that it's their own freedom that's being compromised by consumption"

To quote Tyler Durden, "The things you own end up owning you."  Captain Moore goes on to point out that if you want freedom and a better life, that's not going to come from buying Stuff and watching television.  It comes from doing things, from learning things, from getting out there and making something with your time, from improving yourself rather than shopping.

This struck a nerve for me because I recently re-read "Your Money Or Your Life," which makes the point that the only commodity we have is time.  If you earn $20 an hour, and you buy a $20 DVD, you have just exchanged an hour of your life for that DVD.  Was it worth it?  What if you had exchanged that life hour for the cost of a dinner out with friends, or a tank of gas?  Would those be better or worse trades, for an hour of your life?  What I like about this book is that it doesn't tell you what to do; instead it gives you the questions to ask yourself.

Captain Moore is doing the same thing.  Do you really need that thing?  Could you be happy and fulfilled without it?  Could you do without, or fix a broken thing instead?  What will happen to that thing when you are done with it?  Will it end up in a landfill, to be blown into the ocean, and carried to the Gyre?  It's the treadmill of modern life: work to make money to buy stuff; repeat until death.

We created the garbage patch with our greed, our desperate desire for new things, and with our demand for packaging.  I recently talked about upcycling, and now we come to the third R of the familiar trio: Reduce Reuse Recycle.  We tend to focus on Recycle because it's the easiest, and it gives us permission to keep buying Stuff.  But of the three, Recycle is definitely the worst choice.

Reduce!