Preaching environmental gospel from the bow pulpit—World Cruising news

by David Schmidt, Sail-World Cruising Editor on 6 Dec 2015 Given the ongoing and high-level 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference (November 30-December 11), coupled with the fact that it’s borderline impossible to open a globally minded newspaper or a news-related website without seeing screaming headlines about rising sea levels, China’s horrendous air-pollution problem or rising global temperatures, it’s clear that macro-level environmental awareness is fast becoming a mainstream topic. While it’s certainly encouraging to see the world’s leaders coming together to discuss climate change, one has to wonder what exactly they can do about the problem on an individual level.

Fortunately for us sailors, the ocean, our vessels and our friends and colleagues provide the perfect venue, the perfect pulpit, and a primed and ready audience, provided, of course that you can get them out sailing.

A small, personal rewind: When I was a kid growing up (yes, we had electricity), I was always pestering my parents for rides down to the yacht club, where I would dutifully find my way to a raceboat, or to the crew-wanted bench, where I’d hope to get scooped up and whisked into the world of adults. And while plenty of other kids my age contended themselves with traditional team sports and social happenings, I found myself way more at ease in my sailing fraternity, learning the ropes of running a foredeck while also getting a big lesson in how adults behaved.

Needless to say, I got hooked quickly, and I found myself emulating the actions that I saw my adult sailing friends exhibit while onboard. While this, of course, led to my mother frequently stuffing bars of soap into my mouth for “cursing like a sailor” (I wore that one as a badge of pride), my Dad certainly didn’t mind the extra skills that I was bringing onto his boat during beer-can chases or offshore cruises.

The only trouble was that in the early-to-mid 1980s, there was a much lower level of environmental awareness than there is thirty-some years later. For example, I would regularly see beer cans drained and then ceremoniously torn in half and discarded overboard, sometimes chased by errant cigarette butts, bits of rigging tape, or plastic zip ties. And while I never saw bags of garbage jettisoned, I certainly witnessed plenty of small-scale environmental atrocities that my parents quickly corrected, once I arrived back aboard their boat.

Here, the important bit was that I was a young, impressionable kid who wanted to be accepted by my sailing mentors and peers, and who was simply emulating the behavior to which I was exposed.

Flash forward a decade and I found myself finishing a dual major in English and Environmental Studies at an American university. There, I learned about the devastation that plastic brings to the marine world, and I also learned about the Tragedy of the Commons, shared resources that are quickly overwhelmed or decimated when individuals act solely in their own self-interest.

While it’s true that a single beer can tossed into the brine won’t do any measurable damage to an ecosystem as vast as an ocean, the simple fact remains that environmental damage and degradation is easy to measure if the same action is repeated thousands-or millions-of times.

Even worse, as Australian racer and cruiser Ian “Thommo” Thomson notes in his excellent piece, “Don’t be a Tosser” (inside this issue), today’s aluminum cans are lined with plastic, as are the pop tops on beer bottles. Toothpaste and other common household personal-care products are commonly loaded-up with insidious plastic “microbeads” that-whist tiny-will be polluting the world’s oceans long after the individual user has returned to the great cruising rendezvous in the sky. The same goes for synthetic clothing (when polypropylene is washed, tiny bits of plastic are released into the wash water, which eventually finds its way into our global oceans), and for myriad other seemingly innocent actions that take place millions of times each day, globally.

This brings us to cigarette smokers. While I was impressed to learn how exhaled smoke can help a helmsman to learn more about airflow on an extremely light-air day, I was a lot less impressed to learn about the side effects of smoking, including the truly shameful habit of “innocently” tossing spent cigarette butts overboard. These butts contain filters that are commonly made of plastic, which will long circle the planet’s ocean gyres, albeit in the form of partially broken-down bits, long after the smoker has succumbed to his bad habit’s other ill effects.

So where do our boats, our friends, and the planet’s oceans (and waterways) come into play? Much like I was a young, gob-smacked kid with a raging sailing problem and a constant desire to be around other like-minded souls, I was also impressionable, as many youngsters-and greenhorns-tend to be. Moreover, when stepping onto a new boat, I was always mindful of the fact that while I was on board, the skipper’s word was the rule of the land.

This last bit is key, as our boats become the perfect platform to teach better environmental responsibility, ranging from properly recycling all aluminum cans, plastic bottles (better still, use a water-filtration system and Stainless Steel drinking cups-a la Thommo’s suggestion-to avoid exposure to the BPA that has leached into bottled water) and discarded cardboard, to never tossing a cigarette butt overboard, to ensuring that all garbage goes into the proper onshore waste bins.

While this might seem like a simplistic band-aide solution to a gaping global wound, the simple fact remains that we send our world leaders to Paris to try and save the planet, but we have a great opportunity to educate our friends, family and colleagues while taking them out sailing.

Odds are excellent that your crew will respect your word as skipper, but should any of your crew complain about strict adherence to proper environmental ethics, simply suggest that next time they might like to instead try warming the crew-needed bench, rather than fouling your sailboat with their last-century mindset. After all, there’s little point in rewarding someone with a ride aboard your hard-earned steed if they are intent on turning a cruise into their own miniature Tragedy of the Commons.

Also inside this issue, don’t miss Thomson’s full article, learn more about the 2015 Down Under Rally, and get the full download from the 26th ARC Caribbean 1500. Enjoy!

May the four winds blow you safely home,