the woods, in that strange way that voices echo through woods, glancing off tree trunks, perhaps, muted by all the rustling forest noises, I’d made a discovery of my own. GoAK’s labors, I’d discovered, were even more Herculean than I’d imagined. Cleaning up debris turns out to be slow, mind-numbing, back-straining work, especially if, but not only if, you happen to be recovering from a microdiscectomy. Trying my best to obey my doctor’s orders, I’d sit down atop a pile of debris and shovel everything in reach into a garbage bag emblazoned with the sunflower logo of BP. When nothing remained in reach, I’d move over a little and start shoveling again. The other members of GoAK’s crew worked all around me, several yards apart, some sitting, some stooping and rising, gleaners harvesting surreal produce—plastic gourds, fungi of foam. Even more than gleaners, what they resembled were rag-and-bone pickers, as nineteenth-century trash scavengers were known. All over the developing world, rag-and-bone pickers are still at work, some of them in colossal landfills from which they somehow scrape a living, and in which they seek out not rags and bones but plastic and aluminum recyclables.
Not all Asian flotsam and jetsam washes out from landfills, however. Now illegal in most of the developed world, the dumping of trash at sea is still widespread in the developing world—Africa, Latin America, Asia. Go to the collector beaches of Europe and you’ll find great payloads of flotsam and jetsam originating from the coasts of the Caribbean. Here then is another way in which plastic pollution resembles airborne pollutants: the developed world burned fossil fuels indiscriminately while their economies were maturing and only belatedly decided to mitigate the environmental impacts. So go the coal plants, so goes pelagic plastic. You might then be inclined to condemn those developing countries. But for which markets do Chinese coal plants burn? To whom do we send our virtuous recyclables? We Americans consume and throw away far more per capita than does the developing world. In the early years of the new millennium, shipping containers that delivered Asian goods to American shores often returned carrying postconsumer waste—recycled paper, plastics, metals ferrous and nonferrous. For a while there, postconsumer waste was California’s leading export. The Chinese market for raw material had by 2005 driven the value of polyethylene water bottles up to around twenty-five cents a pound—piddling compared with what a castaway toy could supposedly fetch on eBay, but not chump change when you’re living, as the Filipino rag-and-bone pickers of Payatas do, on less than two dollars a day.
Out here on Gore Point, what to GoAK’s gleaners looked like an unsightly blight would have looked to a rag-and-bone picker, as to a driftologist, like the mother lode. Then, too, on Gore Point, the gleaning, though back straining, was far more pleasant than it would have been in a Filipino landfill. Here, the weather was lovely and the cool forest smelled mostly of sea breezes and spruce needles and damp earth and tree falls undergoing their slow-motion combustion, returning to dust. Then too, the paid rag-and-bone pickers here were earning a hundred times what the average Filipino earns.
Every now and then someone would find something remarkable—a bottle with Arabic writing on it, a toddler-size sports sandal, a Russian vacuum tube—and hold it up for the rest of us to see, before pocketing it or, more often, dropping it into a bag with the other trash. When you stepped back to examine your progress, the difference would hardly be noticeable. But the hours and bags added up, and by late in the day, it was clear that the last of the Gore Point midden heap would be bagged by nightfall.
I was beginning to despair of finding a Floatee myself, and the more I dug and shoveled and gleaned, the more intense my determination grew. I kept seeing them: There! Under that drift-net float, something green! A frog? I’d inevitably unearth a disappointment: an empty bottle of dish detergent, say, or yet another float, embossed, often as not, with Asian characters. To make my defeat taste all the more bitter, when I recounted the legend of the bath toys lost at sea to the North Slope volunteers, one of them breezily announced that she’d found a plastic duck a few hours back and dropped it thoughtlessly into her bag. I considered trying to locate and tear open the bag in question. By then we’d piled up dozens of them. It was hopeless. That