Carolyn Kormann and Boyan Slat: The Widening Gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

--W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" 

My oldest son, from age ten wanted to be a photographer for the National Geographic, a fantasy for which I was partly responsible because I subscribed and he read everything which came into the house. 
Years later he read The New Yorker, cover to cover, when I was reading only the cartoons, but he got me into the habit, and that has richly rewarded me.

This week (Feb 4) it was a dazzling piece by Carolyn Kormann, a staff writer, about the problem of those Texas size plastic garbage heaps floating around the Pacific and one man who decided to do something about it, a Dutch guy named Boyan Slat.

Carolyn Kormann

Actually, it's not just one heap but at least four, and they are more like gyres (swirling things) and those are only the ones you can see. Much of the garbage may be sinking to the ocean floor, washing up on beaches.

I'd often wondered why someone didn't just get a big tanker, or a fleet of tankers out there and vacuum the stuff up.

There is the image of those starving polar bears on ice floes, victims of the global warming which Trump dismisses as a Chinese plot,  and now there are the images of those terminally cute sea turtles swallowing plastic straws and wrapping.

I've tried to get the staff in my office to switch to metal spoons rather than throw away plastic, but they have refused, the ladies claiming it would fall to them to clean the silverware and they may be right. Having read Kormann's piece, I now understand whatever de minimus efforts I might make, carrying groceries home in reusable cloth bags, eschewing plastic spoons and straws, it would be only a drop in the bucket, literally. 

Boyan Slat

Kormann manages to profile Slat, who is trying to do something, and is something of a hustler, necessarily, giving Ted talks, gathering up large quantities of money from foundations and on line donors--but he's hustling for a great cause, cleaning up the oceans, while she also renders an unsparing portrait of the man and all through she weaves in the science and technology and personalities which are being mobilized. She tells you what other workers in this field say about him, the criticisms of the concept--some think once the plastic is ocean borne, it's too late--other think the engineering is simply too complex. Then again, the guy is Dutch and the Dutch have a history of engineering the ocean. 

Decades ago--seems like a lifetime--Jacques Cousteau complained the oceans had become befouled by trash and garbage and although I noticed that, it seemed nobody else did--they were too busy delighting in the underwater things he recorded swimming by.

Slat's idea is to simply pull an enormous net behind a boat or boats and sweep up the garbage, but there are problems--the plastic just floats away from the net, elusively pushed away by the wave generated by the approaching finger. And the stuff may have sunk far deeper than the net and the stuff may be not just plastic crates and big things but tiny bubbles and shards. 

It's a project which Slat admits is daunting but he insists, as he must, it is not unsolvable. Like those oil rigs in the North Sea, where there's a will, there's a way.

Kormann ends her portrait with a gossamer portrait of surfing with Slat in the San Francisco Bay. The image is cinematic, two beautiful people, one Slat, who is a comically inept, who, one imagines, is only out there so he can be alone with the winsome Kormann, but both on surfboards and he tries and tries but he is, like Gatsby, trying to overcome the irresistible force of his own personality and of nature, "fighting the endless white water to get back out," a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly.