From a stormwater management perspective, it might not be our
most pressing problem, but it’s a huge concern nonetheless, and it gets a lot of
attention with the horrific photos that draw the public’s eye to it: debris in
the oceans that comes from our activities on land.
We’re most aware of the marine
debris problem when it makes its way back to us, as, for example, in the late
1980s when medical waste like syringes began washing ashore in New York and New
Jersey. And while some campaigns focus on these kinds of impacts to coastal
communities, there have also been some hard-hitting documentaries and photo
essays about the effects of manmade debris—particularly plastics, which make up
the great majority of it—on wildlife populations. Seals, sea turtles, dolphins,
and especially birds ingest bits of plastic, such as resin pellets, or the very
small spheres, about half a centimeter in diameter or less, that are used in
manufacturing.
Several organizations, such as
Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society, frequently address the issue;
Cousteau spoke about it when he was the keynote speaker at StormCon in 2004. An
article from Natural History
documents the situation in detail, as does a soon-to-be-published report from
the National Research Council’s Ocean Studies Board, “Tackling Marine Debris in
the 21st Century.”
Many efforts have concentrated on
preventing commercial and fishing boats from discarding material at sea, but
there is also widespread recognition that land-based pollutants end up there,
too, washed in from streets and storm sewers. By some estimates, 14 billion
pounds of trash ends up in the ocean each year. Congress passed the Marine
Debris Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act in 2006 (and the NRC report is a
result of that act, evaluating effectiveness of measures to reduce the impacts
of such debris).
Given the amount of material
available and the dramatic nature of the problem, have you incorporated the
ocean debris problem into your stormwater education efforts? Does linking local
activities to a global problem have a greater impact on public behavior, or do
people tend to focus more on local conditions? And, since no single stormwater
program is responsible for, or has a mandate to address, the problem as a
whole—a tragedy of the commons situation—how much effort do you think stormwater
managers should put forward in addressing larger issues such as this?