When scientists reported that the massive beds of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera -- the equivalent of terrestrial rain forests in their ability to take in CO2, produce oxygen and provide rich habitat -- were disappearing from the coastal waters of Southern California, the cause proved hard to pinpoint. Restoration of the beds was urgently needed, but techniques to restore kelp forests proved elusive.

Becoming "gardeners of the sea"
This situation inspired me to form the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), whose initial mission was to shorten the distance between research and restoration in the marine environment. AMRF tested hypotheses, grew kelp spores, transplanted kelp and removed urban runoff sediments from rocky kelp habitat to find out what was hindering our native marine forest.

What we in the AMRF found is that restoration is complex. Restoring even a single component of an ecosystem that's been altered in so many ways requires making up for missing features. An overabundance of purple urchins and wavy top turban snails wouldn't let the baby kelp get started. The natural predators of the urchins and snails -- large lobsters and sheepshead wrasses -- had been fished off. We had to become "gardeners of the sea" and move the snails and urchins out.

Evaluating the ocean's plastic load
In 1997 we discovered another altered ecosystem purely by chance. We had entered our aluminum-hulled catamaran research vessel, Alguita (Spanish for "little kelp plant"), in the Transpac yacht race from Los Angeles to Honolulu to test a new mast and rig design. The return route normally avoids an area of light winds called the "North Pacific High" by going north up to the latitude of Washington before heading east to the Pacific coast. Because we had twin diesels and extra fuel, we decided to cross the doldrums under power.

This was the year of the largest El Nino on record, and for over a week, we had extremely light winds. For that entire time, the crew couldn't come on deck without seeing pieces of plastic debris floating by. Not big mats of trash, but a piece here and there. This set off alarm bells, and a scientific team came back two years later aboard Alguita to evaluate just how big a garbage problem there was out in the rotating currents known as the subtropical gyre. We trawled nets designed to catch zooplankton, the tiny drifting animals that form the base of marine food webs, and we were astonished to find that we caught more plastic bits than plankton.

Do your part: Recycle
Since that time, AMRF has focused on monitoring the extent of the plastic debris problem and searching for ways to keep plastics from entering the ocean in the first place. Ingestion of small plastics by filter feeders at the base of the food pyramid is known to occur, which raises toxicity concerns since these animals are known to absorb and concentrate man-made pollutants from seawater. Filter feeders can also activate some of the toxic compounds added to plastics in manufacturing, making these chemicals bio-available to other organisms.

As plastics have assumed the role of "lubricant of globalization," allowing manufactured goods to reach their destination in pristine condition, the pollution of the marine environment by plastics has accelerated. Less than five percent of plastics are recycled worldwide, and the ocean is downhill from everywhere -- in other words, the final repository for our trash. Furthermore, plastics do not degrade fully in the environment, and even after plastics photo-degrade into individual molecules, the polymers must decay further before turning back into the universal building blocks CO2 and H2O, from whence they came.