At midnight I was pushing a 55 passenger van up the side of a hill. This adventure is just one of many I’ve experienced this week as an IJNR fellow. The Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources selects a handful of journalists each year to spend a week in the field exploring unique challenges facing the natural environment.

Our amiable group is looking at energy issues in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. En route to Colorado last night we got caught in a snow storm and after the chains on our tires broke, all 14 journalists tried in vain to push the van up the hill.

Though we managed to nudge the bus a few inches, it was ultimately our heroic bus driver, Dick Sandlin, who got us all the way to Ignacio, CO. A bus ride that started at 2:15pm ended at 2:30am and I’m certain it was the gummy bears and my boisterous colleagues that kept me going!

The best part about being on the-longest-bus-ride-ever with a group of journalists is that it was well documented! Our fiasco was mentioned in the Durango Herald and photojournalist Michael Kodas published a great post about our entire trip thus far.

The last photo on his post is exactly how I felt when I realized we’d be trapped on the bus for 10+ hours without Internet! But I have to say, this week has been phenomenal and it’s only Tuesday.

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Last week during a trip to Miami for the Society of Environmental Journalists‘ conference I joined a shark tagging trip led by the R.J. Dunlap Marine Conservation team from the University of Miami.

We put out 35 bait traps for the sharks and only caught one! Sharks are in decline across the globe due to shark finning, a practice where fishermen haul sharks on board, cut off their fins and throw them back in the water.

Most of the fins are used for shark fin soup. Because shark fins are made of cartilage, they don’t lend any flavor to the soup–only texture and are seen as a status symbol.

After their fins are removed, the sharks end up sinking to the bottom of the ocean and suffocating. Last week 2,000 dead sharks were found at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Colombia.

But at the University of Miami, researchers are studying sharks’ behaviors in an effort to protect them and hopefully create a shark sanctuary as the Maldives and Palau have done.

This experience tore at my heart and made me feel a level of compassion toward sharks that I didn’t think was possible. The U of M allows people to adopt sharks and the 6 ft. bullshark we caught was named Ben. Ben, this video is for you!

Photo by Jillian Keenan

In January I did a post about an amazing man-made landfill island off the coast of Singapore that’s also home to over 700 types of plants and animals and serves as a park for visitors. I spent a few hours on the island and thought it was such an interesting topic that the story might be able to find a home beyond my blog.

After my trip to Singapore, I visited NYC and while I was in the city I called Laura Chang, the Times science editor, who’d helped me publish the Garbage Patch story and I told her about Semakau. “Send me an email,” she said. I quickly sent a pitch and got an email from science editor James Gorman who said they wanted to publish it! I was elated.

Well five months and many drafts later it’s here for your viewing pleasure. This was a great story to write and it’s given me enough encouragement to send some more pitches their way. So stay tuned–if my next idea gets published you’ll be reading about an impressive water-harvesting technique in Africa.

I wrote for Forbes in 2010 and then stopped for a bit when I moved to Boston and started working for MIT. You can see some of my old posts about Twitter, Green Vacations and How to Recycle Your Old Electronics on the Forbes archive.

My first post of 2011 went live today and it’s about a new business in Cambridge that just launched their site. You can read the full story here: “Buying local helps schools thrive.”

I am always up for new story ideas so if you think of something that should be covered shoot me an email (lhoshaw@gmail.com).

A small, remotely controlled quadcopter that MIT prof Missy Cummings can fly with an iPhone

Ok, you may be asking, what does this have to do with the environment? Former Navy pilot Missy Cummings told me that remotely controlled planes are being used to track the spread of wildfires, to monitor tornado formations and to detect radioactivity from the tsunami in Japan.

I had no idea that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were being used so frequently! Some commercial planes can even fly themselves! Cummings told me,  “You’ve probably been on a plane, and you just didn’t know it, where the pilot never touched anything.”

I was shocked. The full article, “The Sky’s the Limit,” was published in the business section of the Boston Globe today. Oh yeah, for all the seriousness of UAV deployment and the security concerns it raises, I have to include Cummings’ playful idea for how to use the vehicle, which has a camera attached:

“We could tell it to look in the window of Starbucks and see how long the line is.” Wow, waiting in a Starbucks line has never seemed so passé.

* Cummings goes on the Colbert Report next Thursday, look for the episode in August.

[UPDATE August, 19, 2011]: Colbert Report video in now online.

The subject of my first story: Small dairy farmers in India transport milk to a solar powered refrigeration system. Photo courtesy of Promethean Power Systems

I’ve made it back to Boston from the South Pacific and I’m excited to announce that I’m a correspondent for The Boston Globe! (If you’re waiting for an ending to the S. Pacific journey, there will be a few more belated posts on the Scientific American site to wrap things up so stay tuned!)

It was all very fortuitous. One day in April, I wrote to Beth Daley, the manager of the Boston Globe Green Blog, and asked if I could submit a post. She said of course, but that I should come into the office and try to get more regular paying gigs. I was surprised and thrilled at her willingness to take me on board.

As soon as I got back from the Cook Islands, Beth had set up an appointment with her editor Gideon Gil. Beth completely took me under her wing and suggested I pitch one of my story ideas that she thought sounded really promising. She also gave me lots of ideas of her own that she didn’t have time to write herself. Beth will be a Knight Fellow at Stanford this fall so we bonded over that too.

When I stepped into Gideon’s office, he was staring intently at his computer screen–they had just started using a new software system that was a bit of a headache. Gideon turned to me and smiled, wanting to know what I hoped to do for the Globe. Luckily he recognized my name, or at least, he’d remembered reading Clark Hoyt’s article about my Garbage Patch story in The New York Times. This gave me a sort of instant credibility.

When I pitched my story idea he thought it was definitely worth publishing. “How quickly can you turn around a story?” he asked. “Pretty fast,” I replied and he gave me the assignment on the spot.

When we came out of his office and met up with Beth, Gideon laughed and said, “I gave her an assignment already.”

“That’s got to be the fastest anyone has ever been assigned a story before,” Beth told me as we walked down the aisles of cubicles at the Globe. Strangely enough, my idea fell through. But I quickly pitched four others and the image you see above is from one of those four which ended up as my first Globe article.

For the full Boston Globe story click here: “Milk storage unit uses sun to keep cool.”

An update is long overdue!  A short bout of heat stroke put me out for a week and then I was working around the clock to produce a short video about a Cook Island resident who contracted fish poisoning.

Mataiti is far and away one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. He got fish poisoning in 2007 and has spent the last five years trying to recover. He was hospitalized for several months during which time he was comatose and then paralyzed when he awoke. He’s been re-learning to walk and talk—both of which are very difficult since there is no rehabilitation specialist or speech therapist on the island.

But while we did the interview he was joking around and laughing. For someone with a debilitating illness, I found this remarkable; he seems completely undaunted by his experience.

I met Mataiti after investigating ciguatera, a foodborne illness caused by eating certain reef fish whose flesh is contaminated with toxins originally produced by dinoflagellates, which live in tropical and subtropical waters.

These dinoflagellates adhere to coral, algae and seaweed, where they are eaten by herbivorous fish who in turn are eaten by larger carnivorous fish. In this way the toxins move up the foodchain and bioaccumulate.*

The toxin also bioaccumulates in humans, so that you might eat a contaminated fish and be fine. It might only be after eating several poisoned fish that you feel the effects since the toxins only become harmful after a certain dosage.

This short, three-minute video tells Mataiti’s story and how he’s learning to rebuild his once active life.

Note: I filmed this video with professional photographer and filmmaker Justin Bastien. This was completely a joint effort, so I owe a huge thanks to Justin. Special thanks to Pacific Divers for their underwater footage. Also this post was originally published on the Scientific American blog under the headline: “One illness threatens a Cook Islander’s way of life.”

* This definition of ciguatera is taken directly from the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Te Manga, at 2,140 feet above sea level, is the highest peak on the island. Photo courtesy of Sara Close.

Today we saw land for the first time in days! Everyone was on deck together, untying the lines, taking photos and waving to the crew aboard a container ship that was docked in the marina. Stepping on land was wonderful, although I still feel like I’m swaying back and forth.

Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, is the most remote place I’ve ever visited. With 18,000 residents and only one main road that circles the island I feel like I’m on an episode of Survivor (series 13 was actually filmed on the nearby atoll of Aitutaki).  Most residents work in the tourism industry, farm or raise livestock, partake in commercial fishing or sell black pearls. The pearls are cultivated on oyster farms and sell for up to $10,000 if they’re unblemished and exhibit a rare color.

Maria Aroranqi has lived on the island for the past thirty-nine years and sells fresh produce in town a few days a week.

The island is incredibly green and banana and papaya trees dot the roadside. On any given day you can see locals buzzing around on motor scooters or women with flowers in their hair casually walking into town. Life moves slowly and everyone keeps talking about island time, which means you can expect all your meetings to start half an hour late.

But our interest in Rarotonga goes beyond the quotidian. We’re here to examine several environmental woes plaguing the island: polluted and undrinkable tap water, hazardous waste management sites, ciguatera (or fish poisoning) among residents and plastic pollution along the beaches.

Over the next few days we’ll be talking to Cook Islanders about their experiences with these issues and how it’s affected their lives. Our goal is to learn how these issues uniquely affect an island community. We’ll look at how waste management is handled differently from larger nations that have copious amounts of space to landfill their trash; what happens to a fish-dependant community when there’s an outbreak of ciguatera; how unsafe tap water causes illness and increases bottled water consumption and who suffers when electronic waste is burned on the island and left to decompose in the sun.

Muri Lagoon, a popular tourist destination, has suffered from bleached coral due to increased algal blooms that pop up when they receive extra nutrients from fertilizer and pig farm runoff. Photo courtesy of Camden Howitt

Though these investigations are land-based and we’re no longer at sea, every issue is water-related and shows just how much this community depends on clean water for their livelihood. With no neighboring nations to provide immediate support, Rarotongans are on their own to find sustainable ways to harvest clean water and manage the adulterated water in their streams, lagoons and underground watershed.

Ashley Park (left) and Amber Watson (right), both juniors at Spanish Fort High School in Alabama emailed asking about where trash travels in the ocean

Ashley Park and Amber Watson, both juniors at Spanish Fort High School in Alabama, sent me an email after reading the post “We discover what’s floating in the South Pacific.” They wanted to know how trash travels in the ocean and if recycling is really the answer. Since I’m not a plastic pollution expert, I turned to Marcus Eriksen, the co-founder of 5 Gyres, a non-profit studying garbage in the ocean, to provide some answers. Eriksen has traveled 2,600 miles across the Pacific Ocean on a raft made of 15,000 plastic bottles and regularly speaks at schools and companies across the U.S. about the effects of marine debris. Here’s what he had to say:

Ashley Park & Amber Watson: What was the plastic pollution rate ten years ago? Has the rate decreased since then?

Marcus Eriksen:We’re not seeing significant increases in plastic density in the North Atlantic.  Check out the work of Sea Education in the Journal of Science, where they compared 22 years of sampling the [North Atlantic] gyre.  We know there’s more plastic going in [and] we think it’s washing up on islands, the natural nets in the gyres: as the gyres accumulate and circulate floating debris, much of it washes ashore on islands in their path. If we turn off the tap of plastic pollution to the ocean, the gyres will rid themselves of plastic.

Bonnie Monteleone, a University of North Carolina graduate student studying marine pollution, holds 22 plastic fragments she collected from the Pacific Ocean during a 2009 research voyage.

AP & AW: What is the condition of plastics in the ocean now?

ME: It degrades into small particles, which are more easily consumed by foragers and filter feeders.  Over time, most plastic pollution will wash ashore, which is where cleanup is most practical.

AP & AW: What are the biggest threats caused by plastic pollution?

ME: Plastics absorb and release toxins, like PCBs, DDT and other hydrocarbons, into the organisms that consume them. Entanglement is also a huge issue, affecting marine mammals, seabirds, fish and turtles worldwide.

AP & AW: Is plastic being recycled more frequently and being reused more efficiently?

ME:Overall, no. For some plastics, like PET, yes. To recycle plastic efficiently it must be collected, sorted and sometimes washed before it can be remanufactured.  Most products made of plastic today come from virgin petroleum, not recycled plastic.  If you contact your local waste recovery center, you’ll get the facts about your trash.   In most communities across the United States, plastic water bottles, soda bottles, milk jugs and detergent bottles are selected from the waste stream for recycling because they are high value plastics. The rest is either burned, buried or exported.  It all comes down to economics.  For many towns and cities, it’s easier to send a ton of plastic to China than to the local landfill.

Plastic debris that has washed up along the shore of the Azores. Photo courtesy of 5 Gyres.

AP & AW: Do you feel that recycling plastic would help with plastic pollution in the oceans?

ME: Sure, but the problem is recovering the waste in the world.  The best solution is not to use so much plastic for disposable products in the first place.

AP & AW: Is plastic pollution accumulating in the five major oceanic gyres?

ME: Yes. Check out www.5gyres.org for our recent observations in the five gyres.

AP & AW: Knowing that some plastics float and others sink, and that ocean waters move, how is plastic pollution distributed around the world vertically, horizontally and seasonally?

ME: Great question.  PE and HDPE float, so they are in all five gyres.  PET, PVC, Polycarbonate and Polystyrene all sink, and are found in the nearshore environment, like in the sediments of river mouths.  The smallest particles can become neutrally buoyant simply by their size. Neutrally buoyant means that the particle neither sinks nor floats, it just hovers in the water column. We find plastic throughout the water column.  There is a need for new scientists to figure out the mechanisms for vertical transport, the distribution around the world and the temporal change.  Maybe this could be you?

AP & AW: Knowing that plastic pollution photodegrades, chemically degrades, and mechanically breaks into smaller fragments, where do the smallest particles eventually go?

ME: The fate of plastic is an unanswered question.  Islands are the natural nets for floating debris.  Small particles may sink as they absorb POPs [persistent organic pollutants, like PCBs and DDT], or they are ingested and excreted as heavy fecal pellets, before sinking.  The fate of microplastics is unknown.

AP & AW: Knowing that plastic pollution can be a sponge for many hydrophobic pollutants, do these pollutants desorb and bioaccumulate inside fish that ingest the pollution?

ME: Yes, our colleague Chelsea Rochman is studying this using fish we collected in the South Atlantic Gyre.  She has shown in the lab that fish can bioaccumulate POPs from ingested plastic.  We don’t know if it happens in the field [or how it affects humans that eat animals that have ingested POPs].

Thank you Ashley and Amber for your questions!

For more information about plastic in the ocean, you can also check out these organizations:

• The Algalita Marine Research Foundation
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

During my watch I was responsible for keeping the ship on course. My watch group includes three other people and during our daytime shift we take turns steering the ship, putting up sails and cooking meals. At night we steer and look out for oncoming vessels.

Ever wonder what it’s like to live in a cramped space with 14 strangers for a week? Well, I can tell you. There are the highs like watching the sun rise over the ocean and realizing the twinkling stars in the background are actually Mercury, Venus and Mars! And there are the lows like when you get dehydrated, become seasick and then pass out on the deck for a few hours before realizing it’s night and you’re supposed to be on watch. But here are the real surprises about life on a 72-foot sailboat:

1)   Forget a tan, your new skin tone is black and blue

With the boat swaying back and forth, you’re bound to bump into something, or rather slam into something as you loose your balance. I have so many bruises that I’ve lost track and someone joked that we should start dating them. I’d put 5/8/11 next to the bruise on my knee and 5/9/11 next to my sprained toe, which I jammed against a metal hook on the boat while taking down a sail. I still can’t bend it so I’m hoping the adage “time heals all wounds” is actually true.

2)   Your dreams are on Ritalin

I’ve had more intense dreams while on this ship than I have in the past five years. Here’s the recipe for dreams on the boat: add two old friends who you haven’t seen in ages and who you feel guilty about losing touch with, add a strange location you’ve never seen, an impending hurricane, a hit man who’s after you and you’ve pretty much got a garden variety boat dream.

3)   The fish are gone!

Well, they’re not really gone but they’re not at the surface and you won’t see a single one on your journey from Tahiti to Rarotonga. The good news is, this also means they won’t get caught in the trawl that we drag behind the boat. It isn’t unusual to witness a “barren sea” because most fish don’t swim within the top three feet of the surface where the trawl collects samples. They are more often down below near algae and other creatures they can feed on.

4)   Cooking is now an Olympic sport

You think cooking for fourteen people on a tiny stove is difficult? Try doing it while you’re seasick and the boat is rocking back and forth. Additionally, baking in the oven becomes nearly impossible. When the ship lilts to one side anything you cook in the oven will be completely uneven. One night we tried making brownies and when we pulled out the pan a thick undercooked brown mound was on one side and a thin burnt section was on the other. On the upside, anything tastes great at sea and we happily ate the entire charred mess.

5)   You’re on a leash, literally

At night, to keep from falling overboard we all wear life vests and harnesses that clip onto a long line running along the inside of the boat. If you stand up suddenly and run off to do something you’ll feel a sharp pull and land squarely back where you were. Now I know what my dog feels like when I tie her up outside the grocery store. I’m sorry Nerf; I won’t do this again.

If you have any questions about life on the boat let me know and I’ll be sure to answer them. There are many more stories to tell.