Newsletter #015

The Case Against Clean Beaches

Jul 06, 2022

Here’s something a little different. Less (actually none) photos and new product releases, and more just thoughts on the world. Share these thoughts with friends and respond to this to let me know what you think…

And new FSP related news soon. (new chalk bags, new shirts, new batch of multi color fanny packs)

A few months ago while trying to put together a remote beach clean up like we’ve done in the past (see here), I started reading this book called Moby Duck (bad title, interesting read). eBay link (never amazon)

Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn is about Hohn's journey to track a shipping container of bath toys that fell off a cargo ship and washed up on beaches across the world. The book spans a few years and lots of adventures, but one part really stuck with me.

Hohn visits a remote area of Alaska and spoke to two different groups of ocean advocates who are of different mindsets on the idea of cleaning beaches. One group, GoAK, takes corporate sponsorship ((Exon, BP)(boooo)) to clean remote beaches. The other group, Cook Inletkeeper, focuses on lobbying to reduce the amount of plastics going into the water system.

The book poses the question: do we need to just let the plastic trash blanket our beaches everywhere to get any actual change? Ban beach cleaning? Reroute all of our trash to legislators' private beaches? It reads:

“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.”

“First Broadcast on Earth Day in 1971, the ad appeared to be the heartfelt if heavy-handed work of environmentalists. It wasn’t. It was part of the Keep America Beautiful campaign. If like many Americans you thought that Keep America Beautiful was an environmental group, you’d be mistaken. It was created by beverage and packaging executives in 1953. By organizing volunteer cleanups and running public service announcements, the group has over the past half century managed to present pollution as an aesthetic problem for which litterbugs, not industries, are to blame. Meanwhile the group’s sponsors - the American Chemistry Council among them - continue to lobby against regulatory actions.”

Hohn also speaks about how, since the 70’s, scientists have been presenting work to legislators about how dangerous the plastic situation will become, and in turn they started sweeping public beaches with machines every morning so we could continue to ignore the problem.

I attached scans of the pages of this section of the book at the bottom if you want to read more.

If you made it this far subscribe and share to encourage more of this supplementary content.

And since we’re talking about the ocean, here's some links to surf videos.

Stab S.U.R.F Rematch - youtube

Torren Martyn Thank You Mother - youtube

And some music

Candy - Heaven Is Here - youtube (not sure how to link Spotify or Apple Music)

Spice - Bad Fade - youtube (also listen to the whole record)