Spirit of Aloha | Features | July/August 2006

Diversions
By: Carey Morishige

Debris or not Debris?

PHOTO: CAREY MORISHIGE PHOTO: CAREY MORISHIGE

As the helicopter departed and the cloud of dust and sand settled, Kanapou Beach opened up before me, a quarter-mile strip of dirty sand surrounded by cliffs. Located on the east side of the uninhabited island of Kaho‘olawe, Kanapou is a beach in Hawai‘i that very few persons will ever visit. Now, frozen, shocked, depressed, I gazed from one end of it to the other. As far as I could see, the sand was littered with bottle caps, containers, crates, nets, buoys, broken pieces of plastic in every color. Some areas at both ends of the beach were so completely covered with trash that you could not dig far enough to see the sand or rock beneath.

For some time, I had read about and seen photos of the trash-littered shores and reefs of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, seemingly so far away. But it could not happen here, I thought. Or could it? Standing on that beach on Kaho‘olawe, I realized how wrong I was. That day we removed four tons of trash from this tiny beach.

It seems that most of my life has been spent surrounded by the blue waters, sandy beaches and steep shoreline cliffs of Hawai‘i. Sunday drives along world-renowned coastlines, swims at the beach any day of the year, walks along some of the finest beaches in the U.S.—all of this was part of my lifestyle. Often it’s easy to forget that visitors save for a lifetime to visit Hawai‘i for a couple of weeks, a once-in-a-lifetime journey to the tropical paradise I call home. Like most of us who live here, it was easy for me to wrap myself in the day-to-day grind of routine existence, plodding through an ever-increasing cost of living, hard work, endless meetings and the hope that the price of gasoline would drop a couple of pennies a gallon next week.

My job is to help protect Hawai‘i’s oceans. I’ve always had a passion for the ocean, its ecosystems and creatures. Someone once said that, if you make people passionate about something, they will protect it and they will fight for it. That’s me.

I work every day to help conserve Hawai‘i’s environment so that future generations can see what I’ve seen, experience the same glories that I have and forge memories of sandy beaches and crystal-blue waters, with the hope that they will grow up with the same dedication, however much they are buried in the day-to-day grind, to protect the Islands we call home.

This dedication is reinforced by the experiences and opportunities that I’ve had working in this field. The pleasure and pain of these experiences have been burned into my mind. I have been fortunate enough to work one-on-one with endangered Hawaiian monk seals. I’ve been graced with the breaches of endangered humpback whales and been treated to the aerial acrobatics of Hawaiian spinner dolphins. I have also seen the scars left in the flesh of entangled marine mammals, walked among the hundreds of buoys, crates and plastic pieces on the debris-laden shores of Kanapou on Kaho‘olawe and untangled, inch by inch, a 200-pound derelict fishing net from the sharp a‘a lava near South Point on the island of Hawai‘i, then seen it added to a 20,000-pound mountain of marine debris already removed from the shoreline.

That day on Kaho‘olawe opened my eyes to a problem that threatens our oceans and wildlife each day. It is easy to be overcome with a sense of hopelessness thinking about all the problems that face our environment today. But there is hope. In Hawai‘i and across the nation, there are powerful movements to deal with the problem of marine debris. Hawai‘i is leading the way with regular cleanup movements, the recycling of marine debris to create electricity, efforts in prevention, mitigation, outreach and education.

Hope can also be found in partnerships that have grown, almost literally, from marine debris. These partnerships bring together government agencies, not-for-profit organizations, fishermen, community groups, schools and the public to help tackle the problem of marine debris and thus protect Hawai‘i’s ocean and wildlife.

Hope can be found in our children, our keiki, our future generations, who, if taught well, will grow up with a dedication to conserve and protect the Islands they call home.

CAREY MORISHIGE is the Marine Debris Outreach coordinator with the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant College program.

Features Archives