Men's Journal

Marcus Eriksen says plastic pollution is destroying our oceans, and he sailed 25,000 miles to prove it.

by Kitt Doucette

Marcus Eriksen has floated 2,000 miles down the Mississippi River and sailed from California to Hawaii on rafts made entirely of plastic bottles. So when the 44-year-old activist arrived at Easter Island on a 72-foot monohull sailboat, it was easily the most seaworthy vessel he’s employed in his adventures. And for good reason: The Sea Dragon had to carry him and his crew some 25,000 miles over the past two years as he documented the devastation wrought by plastic pollution on waters and coastlines around the world. Eriksen hopes he can finally record and prove the scope of the damage in the most scientific way yet.

Eriksen’s expedition, 5 Gyres, is named for the enormous ocean eddies whose circular currents keep whatever’s floating in them — sometimes millions of tons of waste, mostly small bits of degraded plastic — swirling for years. In places like Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, 40 percent of albatross chicks die from being fed plastic waste that their parents think is food. Sea turtles choke on plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, and endangered monk seals get tangled in masses of discarded fishing nets. By the time Eriksen lands on Easter Island, he has traveled through all five of the planet’s major oceanic gyres, from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

As Eriksen leads a group of supporters and scientists to the island garbage dump, he chuckles quietly, describing how during the previous leg of sailing, one of his crew members — a Scotsman who played bagpipes on deck at sunset — jumped off the boat and swam to shore when they arrived. “He ran the eight miles into town just for a cold beer,” Eriksen says.

Easter Island, 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, is one of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth. Lush green hills give way to waves breaking over a lava-rock reef. A line of large stone statues called Moai stand like ancient sentinels at the water’s edge. This was once one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet. But as I stand with Eriksen on a hill overlooking the trash, the smell of burning plastic — a cross between gasoline and low-grade tear gas — is unmistakable. Thick black smoke claws at my eyes and sticks to the back of my throat. I have to convert a ­T-shirt into a gas mask to keep from gagging.

The dump is the final resting place for whatever plastic washes up on the island’s beaches, most of which originated on a different continent. Eriksen surveys the scene with the intensity of a combat general. In his silhouette, you can see signs of the marine he once was — close-cropped hair, jaw firmly set. This is one of dozens of such landfills he’s visited on his trip, and he looks on silently for what feels like minutes.

Then a young bearded guy, along to film the journey for a documentary, pokes a video camera in his face, and Eriksen switches into his well-practiced media mode. “Trash dumps are the open sores and festering wounds of a harsh realization that we produce an unfathomable amount of plastic trash,” he says to the camera. “There is no magical place we can throw it all called away.”

He looks like he’s on the verge of tears. The cameraman stays focused on his face, and then pans to the half-melted puddle of plastic bottles bubbling and hissing beneath us.

The camera clicks off; Eriksen and his crew, which includes his wife, Anna, retreat to fresh air. “Let’s go for a walk!” he says with a smile and a deep breath. “After a few weeks on that boat, all I want to do is walk.” Moving along the ridge, he squats to pick the small yellowish-­purple guava fruit that seems to be everywhere and shoves it into his mouth, as might be expected of someone who’s been at sea for years. “Wow,” he says with his mouth full, “you have to try this. It’s delicious!”

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“I’m a product of my culture,” Eriksen told me as we strolled through what passes for downtown on Easter Island a few days earlier. “Blue-collar Louisiana, surrounded by sinking tract housing. I could peer over the St. Charles Parish line into virgin swampland.”

As a child, Eriksen fed his adventurous spirit along the banks of the Mississippi River Delta, fishing poles and crab nets in hand. Weekends were spent building forts, capturing turtles, and hunting snakes. He killed his first alligator at the age of 14.

He also became enamored of the uniforms of the military recruiters in his neighborhood — and by the prospect of war as adventure. “I counted the years, months, and days before I turned 17 and could drag my mother into the recruiter’s office.” After serving as a marine reservist while at the University of New Orleans, he reported for duty in the first Gulf War, in 1990, at the age of 22. The realities of combat — dying comrades, the charred remains along the infamous Highway of Death — swiftly erased his childhood fantasies. During one particularly miserable night in a sandbag bunker in Kuwait, Eriksen made a promise to himself that, when he returned home, he would float the length of the Mississippi River in a hand-built raft, living like a modern-day Huckleberry Finn. “I wanted to reclaim my life,” he explains.

To help numb the trauma of war, Eriksen turned to books and spent the next 10 years in libraries and classrooms, eventually earning a Ph.D. in science education from the University of Southern California. But it wasn’t until 2000 that his cause really came into focus. While working as a high school science teacher, Eriksen chaperoned a group of students on a trip to Midway Island, not far from Hawaii, where he first saw hundreds of dead albatross, their bellies still full of plastic debris, including lighters, flip-flops, and action figures. “I remember thinking that those birds were dying because of our trash — my trash,” he says, “stuff I used every day and discarded without a care in the world.”

This spurred him into action. He decided to finally fulfill the promise he had made to himself, while creatively incorporating his new convictions: He built a raft out of old bicycles and soda bottles, aptly named the Bottle Rocket, and set off down the Mississippi River, from northern Minnesota to New Orleans. He spent five months camping along the banks, battling insects, rapids, whirlpools, massive river barges, and a never-ending stream of garbage. “I couldn’t believe how much plastic trash was floating in the Mississippi and piled up on the banks,” he recalls. “It was disgusting. From the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, I could always see trash.” He brought awareness to the issue by giving talks at schools and museums along the way.

When Eriksen got back, he wrote a letter to Charles Moore, the oceanographer and racing-boat captain who discovered and brought to public attention the North Pacific Ocean gyre — the size of Spain and Portugal, located a thousand miles west of Los Angeles, and ­estimated to contain 1 million tons of plastic waste. Impressed with Eriksen’s passion and ingenuity, Moore took Eriksen on as director of research and education at his nonprofit, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It was under the foundation’s sponsorship that Eriksen hatched his next adventure: again sailing on a boat made of discarded plastic, but this time across the Pacific Ocean.

He and Algalita colleague Joel Paschal departed Long Beach, California, in June 2008 on a raft Eriksen dubbed Junk. Thousands of plastic bottles wrapped in discarded fishing nets kept it afloat while the fuselage of a Cessna 310 airplane served as the cabin. They almost sank their first week at sea; Anna had to deliver glue to keep it from going under. Finally, after 88 days, they completed the 2,100-mile trip, docking in Honolulu that August. The stunt worked, thrusting Eriksen and his cause into the spotlight. He made an appearance on The Martha Stewart Show and spoke at high schools and fundraising events. As sponsors lined up to support him, Eriksen took quick advantage by planning his most ambitious expedition yet by far: 5 Gyres.

To continue reading Marcus Eriksen is a Plastic Radical, click here.

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