wall, among save-the-beluga-whale posters, a sign informing me that I had entered a COKE AND PEPSI FREE ZONE.
Accompanied by his border collie, Shavelson—stocky, forty-something, dressed in a button-down, pen tucked into his breast pocket, his graying hair receding into a widow’s peak—gave me a tour of the premises, which included a well-equipped laboratory where that morning a summer intern with a newly minted bachelor’s degree from Evergreen College was titrating water samples to be tested for pollutants. Like Pallister, Shavelson was concerned about plastic pollution, but he considered it just one among many man-made environmental threats to Cook Inlet—ominous, certainly; grave, possibly; the gravest? Far from. The dizzying list of contaminants that could be found in this watershed belied the pristine illusions peddled in tourist brochures. There were the pharmaceuticals people were pissing into the waste stream, the depleted uranium leaching from ordnance fired during military exercises, the heavy metals from mining tailings, the pesticides carried here by breezes and currents, the oily water dumped back into Cook Inlet by a Chevron production facility at Trading Bay, the “gray water” discharged from superliners, not to mention the invasive species that stowed away on oceangoing ships.
“I’ve got very strong differences of opinion with Chris Pallister,” Shavelson told me after we’d adjourned to his office, where a bumper sticker on a file cabinet commanded me to BOYCOTT CONOCO & CHEVRON. Shavelson objected to GoAK because marine debris was their “sole focus,” and because people had confused the Gulf of Alaska Keeper with the Cook Inletkeeper, and because Pallister so indiscriminately accepts and promiscuously advertises donations from known polluters like Princess Cruises and BP, and because one of GoAK’s directors, John Whitney, was an administrator with the federal agency, NOAA, charged with disbursing marine debris grants in a supposedly impartial way (later that summer, because of such complaints, Whitney would resign from GoAK), and because Pallister was paying some of that NOAA grant money to his own three sons. This “appearance of a conflict of interest” was “the kind of thing that can hurt organizations like mine that don’t operate that way,” Shavelson said.
I mentioned to him what Pallister had told me in his defense: how he’d like to expand GoAK’s focus but didn’t have the deep legal pockets to do so; how he planned to apply for Waterkeeper certification; how volunteers were expensive to insure and less efficient than his three sons. Shavelson conceded that it was hard for environmental groups to litigate against polluters in pro-development Alaska. But he felt that GoAK was only making the problem worse, draining public resources that might be put to better use and in the meantime giving polluters the opportunity to remediate their polluted reputations. In his opinion, the Gore Point cleanup was essentially a boondoggle verging on eco-graft. Beach cleanups could teach the general public to be “good stewards” of the environment, so long as you worked with local communities and enlisted lots of volunteers, which is something that the Cook Inletkeeper tried to do, but cleanups alone did little to solve the problem once and for all. To do that, you had to stop it at its source.
The evidence on this point seems to be unambiguously on Shavelson’s side. Year after year, equipped with garbage bags and good intentions, hundreds of thousands of volunteers participate in the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), and year after year, the tonnage of debris is greater than before. Seba Sheavly, a marine biologist who ran the ICC until 2005, will happily admit that the Ocean Conservancy’s cleanup “has never been about curing the problem of marine debris.” It has always been, she told me when I called her at her offices in Virginia, “a public awareness campaign.” Sheavly is now a private consultant who lends her expertise on marine debris to such estimable clients as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the UN Environment Programme. She’s also worked for the American Chemistry Council, whose public relations department eagerly gave me her phone number. Sheavly considers the 2006 Marine Debris Act “the best chance we’ve had in years to make real progress.” Other environmentalists I spoke to regard the act as merely the latest in a long line of toothless legislative actions that have failed. “If you look at how much plastic is out there,” says Shavelson’s boss, Steve Fleischli, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, current federal policy seems, “well, rather comical.” In the opinion of both Sheavly and the ACC, marine debris is mainly a local