Setting Out, Toward A Smaller Boatprint

When you travel and live, as we now do, on oceans and along coast lines, you see things that were not part of the expectations, the dreams that set you on this path. I remember leaving Miami once and passing garbage and cast offs as we sailed away - plastic bottles, balloons, bits of wood, even a chest of drawers floating along. Far out on the ocean we have passed chunks of styrofoam, plastic crates, all kinds of plastic packaging, more balloons, more bottles, as well as the lost fishing and mooring buoys that weather or circumstance have torn away from where they were intended to be. We have seen plastic bags floating under the surface close to beaches, even lying on the bottom as we snorkel near the boat. Add to that the garbage which will deteriorate more quickly, the wood and the bits of food and fabric and rope that appear from time to time (and some of that plastic), the glass that washes up on some beaches, and it seems that wherever we human beings go we leave our trails of garbage behind. And since there are a lot of us, that makes a lot of garbage. And then there is all the garbage that lies mostly invisible in and under the water - from chemical waste to human waste to the remains of things we have constructed of materials whose permanence has outlasted their usefulness. And all the remains of all the fuels we burn, exhausting into the air and water...

Pausing in Dartmouth has give us time to reflect on a lot of this. And living with the multitude of kinds of packaging that come with each thing we buy, and the ongoing discussions about reducing/reusing/recycling that are now part of life in North America has helped focus our thoughts. As well as the news about the Bisphenol-A debate and the possible implications for our health of using our Nalgene water bottles. At the same time we have been reflecting on the price of using fossil fuels - both financially and to the environment - and exploring the use of electric motors and ways to improve our collection of electrical energy from wind and sun. At this point in our lives we are ready to do more to reduce our boatprint on the environment.

As I sorted the plastics, those that could be recycled and those that could not, I started to think about how to reduce the amount of plastic passing through our lives. A look through the things we buy revealed how much is packaged and contained in one kind of plastic or another. And of course we do live in what is, essentially, a plastic boat, constructed using a combination of petrochemicals. And use tools constructed of plastics. To live completely rid of plastics would be impractical. But there have to be practical ways to reduce the packaging we acquire, a way to replace at least some of what we use now with products less packaged, or not packaged in plastic at all. And we thought about the fact that even when plastic is recycled (not possible everywhere we visit) that recycling still uses some of our world’s precious supply of energy. And the less we use the less we contribute to that supply of almost indestructible garbage, wherever it ends up. Figuring out what we will do, and doing it, will be a good place to start.

So over the next little while we will be evaluating what we do now and what we hope to do while thinking about how to reduce the impact of our life on the environment around us, exploring what is possible and what is practical. We’ll keep a chronicle of our adventures, our ideas and actions and how things progress, on this blog. And talk a little bit about groups and people we meet along the way whose work is related to what we are trying to do. We hope you’ll join us in our explorations from time to time, and will be happy to hear any helpful suggestions and ideas you have. Next blog we’ll start tackling getting some of the plastic out of our lives...