Atchafalaya Swamp
It’s true. For roughly nine hours last Saturday I was honored by Baton Rouge’s real mayor – the Honorable Kip Holden – to stand-in for him. (I wasn’t handed the paperwork until mid-afternoon, otherwise it could have been an all-day affair.). We took our new ‘SoLa’ film to screen for an annual conference of L.E.A.N. (Louisiana Environmental Action Network) and even before they saw the rough-cut, apparently someone leaned on the mayor’s office for the honorific. Included in the award was a certificate announcing that Saturday, September 26 was officially ‘Jon Bowermaster Day’ in Baton Rouge; needless, I carried both documents with me all day long, just in case I needed to bail myself – or any of my friends – out of trouble.
Spent Sunday with my friend Dean Wilson, roaming around the Atchafalaya Swamp in his flat-bottomed metal boat. Since we were there with him earlier this year, and last August, he’s had some good successes in his full-court press to protect the swamp, particularly the cyprus trees which have until recently been logged to make garden mulch. That practice, says Dean, has been stopped. Next up? Making sure that his activist ways are included as the state and some of its big environmental group allies include him at the table as protection plans are made, and money distributed. Over a late lunch of deer stew (Dean and very-pregnant wife Kara live just a few feet above swamp-level and are as self-sufficient as any family I’ve met) we laughed about his role in our new film. “You made the swamp look very good … and you even made me look good, which is not always easy.”
On Tuesday, September 29, in Washington D.C., National Geographic will be screening our award-winning, new, big, fun, informative, high-def film – TERRA ANTARCTICA, Rediscovering the Seventh Continent.
This National Geographic-sponsored exploration is a one-of-a-kind look at Antarctica from a unique perspective – sea level.
For six weeks we explored the Antarctic Peninsula by sea kayak, sailboat, foot and small plane, observing the fast changing evolution of this most remote place. Impacted by climate change – temperatures have warmed along the Peninsula faster than anywhere on the planet during the past 50 years – this part of Antarctica is also experiencing a boom in tourism and nations fighting over who owns what as its ice slowly disappears.
Given my interest in and commitment to exploring the world’s ocean and bringing back stories from it we couldn’t ask for a better honor than to be regarded as the film “that most effectively raises awareness and increases understanding about environmental and sustainability issues facing the oceans and its inhabitants.” That is exactly our goal.
We’re just wrapping up the editing of a beautiful, provocative film about Southern Louisiana – “SoLa, Louisiana Water Stories” – about man’s relationship with water in a part of the world where everywhere you look you’re surrounded by bayou, swamp or wetlands, the Mississippi River or Gulf of Mexico. Home to the most unique and vital culture in America, every Cajun has a story – or two, three or more – about … water.
Today too many of those stories are negative. SoLa’s waterways are home to some serious environmental problems, including oil and gas spills, petrochemical waste, fertilizer run-off from its neighbors and coastal erosion that is disappearing twenty-five square miles of Southern Louisiana each year.
This Saturday, we are screening a rough cut of our new film with our friends at LEAN in Baton Rouge. If you are in the area, please come by and join in the festivities.
A clean ocean equals jobs and wealth. According to the Public News Service more than two million jobs in the United States depend on the planet’s ocean. In New York alone, fishing, beaches and other ocean-related industries add tens of billions of dollars to the state economy. But all that depends on healthy oceans. Experts say declining fish populations, increasing pollution and “dead zones” are all signs the oceans are in decline.
Allison Chase, an ocean policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the threats to the health of the oceans also threaten economic health.
“Oceans contribute more than $24 billion to New York’s economy, and when the ocean suffers, New York suffers. For example, beach closings on Long Island cost the state $60 million in 2007.”
Last week, the Obama administration offered a plan to restore the oceans to better health by proposing the first-ever national policy for regulating the use of the nation’s offshore waters and coastlines.
Chris Mann, senior officer with the Pew Environment Group, points to the need for a coordinated oceans policy because more than 20 different federal agencies have jurisdiction over a portion of ocean management. He says the Obama approach would encourage competing agencies to work together to identify and fix the worst problems.
“If their boss, the President, says ‘I want you to make this a priority, and by God you kids play nice together,’ that’s a sea change.”
President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force is holding its only East Coast listening session this week. Fishermen, community leaders, scientists and the general public will be able to comment on the administration’s ocean plan on Sept. 24 from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence.
In my travels along the world’s coastlines I’ve seen thousands of miles of beaches nearly buried beneath plastic waste – bottles, beer crates, flip-flops, fishing cord, etc. – washed up from … well, that’s always an interesting question. Where exactly does all that plastic originate? A lot of it comes from boats (fishing, commercial, cruise, sport), some from landfills built too close the sea and some simply from lazy citizens who still toss garbage of all kind onto the beach or directly into the ocean.The Times has a great piece today about a novel program, being monitored by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, which has put tracking devices on three thousand pieces of garbage collected from individuals and businesses from Seattle to New York. The results of their trackings will be displayed in real time online and in exhibitions at the Architectural League on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.
Trash-to-be-tracked, Photo by Kevin P. Casey
What caught my eye was the comment by the lab’s director Carlo Ratti on how the project might impact people to pick up after themselves. “If you see where a plastic bottle ends up, a few miles down the road in a dump, you may want to get tap water or some other container for the water,” Mr. Ratti told the Times.
I’m going to call M.I.T. and encourage them to expand the program, to attach tracking devices specifically to a wide-range of plastic used near a coastline or on an international container ship and see just how much of it ends up in the ocean … and then what path it takes once there. I wonder if those tracking devices are waterproof?
Spent a couple great days on Rangiroa, one of my favorite stopping-off points in Polynesia, in part because of the fun, small adventures we had here exactly seven years ago, with kayaks. I know it was seven years ago because I can remember sitting in the linoleum-floored great room of Pensione Glorine, watching grainy black-and-white images of the WTC towers crashing down, one year after.
Photo, Pete McBride
A lot has changed since, though the lagoon here stays much the same: Huge. Fifty miles by twenty miles. Then we paddled across it, around it, camping on its sand motus, convening with hermit crabs, luxuriating by simply laying back in the sand and watching the frigates soar on the thermals above. My travel partners then have remained so; Pete McBride and John Armstrong were with me in Antarctica last year, Alex Nicks and I have made several films together since, sadly Willie Williams – who looked after our logistics and always knew exactly where we were on the map – is somewhere soaring on thermals of his own, hopefully with a view of his own special paradise.
Every time I come to Rangiroa I look for my friend Ugo, a local guide and raconteur; usually without luck, since he’s often out exploring the far corners of the big lagoon. Today I’m lucky and find him pulling his wooden boat, the Oviri, up to the cement dock. I first met Ugo in 2001, a very unsettling meeting since while I waited on the sand beach for him – with his wife – Ugo had gone missing. For twenty-four hours no one knew where he was, other than he had taken two fishermen out in his boat.
When he finally showed up, he blamed it on a recalcitrant engine … and big winds. “When I finally got the engine to start, the winds were so strong we couldn’t even try to come back. So I tipped the boat on its side on the shore, used it for protection, and we stayed that way all night. It was nothing!”
Then, and several times since, Ugo has taken me to his secret garden, so to speak. Here’s how I wrote it then:
“C’mon friends, follow me, c’mon, meet my pets,” Ugo shouts, tossing another chunk of bloody bonito into the quintessentially-cobalt South Pacific. “The heads, that’s what they like best.” A gentle big-man, smelling of gasoline and sun block, his solid, sun-browned body quakes with excitement as he dips his hands repeatedly into the white plastic bucket of fish-parts resting on the back of his 40-foot cutter “Oviri” – Tahitian for “Wild” – bobbing in rough seas.
With each handful of chum come more carcharinus melanopterus – black-tip sharks – two dozen, three dozen, 50, 100, 200, so thick it’s impossible to count them, to separate them, for all their swarming and churning just below the surface. With hands like catcher’s mitts Ugo pulls off his clear plastic sandals, replaces them with swim fins, and reaches for his mask and snorkel.
“They’re waiting for us,” he shouts as he jumps smack into the midst of the swarm. He is so positive – so convincing that there is nothing to worry about, being inches from the snapping choppers of eight-foot long, 400-pound sharks even as he continues to toss them bloody fish parts, despite that he’s missing part of a thumb for having gotten “lazy” during one such feeding – that I follow. When I open my eyes, four-feet below the sun-sparkled surface, there are literally hundreds of big sharks circling. Me.
“Look, down there,” shouts Ugo when we surface. “Lemons! Big ones! WELCOME, MY FRIEND, TO SHARK CITY!”
Ugo is a true man of the sea. He has three boats and a simple beachside house on the lagoon of Rangiroa, the world’s second-largest coral reef atoll and the best known of the 78-atoll Tuamotu chain north of Tahiti. His father was a local hotelier. Ugo, 36, speaks good surfer’s English because half his life ago his father handed him a check for $30,000 and a plane ticket to San Francisco. “Go to UC-Berkeley, get an education, learn English,” was his directive. He followed orders . . . but only halfway. Days after arriving in the U.S. he discovered Half Moon Bay, bought a board and made surfer friends. Two years into his scam – complete with phonied “reports” from school – the gig was up. His punishment? Live, and live off the sea, on this beautiful spit of coral-and-sand-and-rubble here in the dead center of the South Pacific.
“Not so bad,” Ugo laughs. From the back of the “Oviri” Ugo continues to play. Baiting a 50-pound baby black-tip with a fish head tied to a plasticized line he pulls it, thrashing, into the air. The struggle lasts 30 seconds before the shark opens its mouth – wide, exposing a long line of fine, sharp teeth – lets go and swims off.
Flicking pieces of bait off his forehead with a giant finger, Ugo grins, his smile as wide as the shark’s mouth. “This, my friends, is paradise! No?”
Today, Ugo reports the sharks are growing in number. “And now I have a lemon shark nearly as big as my boat! We should go see it! Now!!!”
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