What the water tells me
By
© Shutterstock / Wonderful Nature
There is a particular quality of light on Hull Creek in the early morning — the way it filters through the cypress and tupelo and lands flat on the water — that makes the world feel very still, and very honest.
My daughter and I paddle these creeks and backwaters of tidal Virginia as often as we can. We watch the great blue herons fish in the shallows. We track the osprey. And every single time, we see plastic. A bottle lodged against a root ball. A fragment of foam caught in the reeds. A tangle of film that didn't make it to a bin. The water doesn't lie.
This stretch of tidal Virginia feeds into the Potomac River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay — the largest estuary in the United States, and one of the most ecologically rich. Blue crabs, striped bass, migratory waterfowl. Oyster reefs that once filtered the entire bay in days. This is a watershed that millions of people depend on, and that millions more grew up loving. It is also a watershed that is choking on plastic.
I've spent years working on plastic pollution at WWF, traveling to treaty negotiations in Nairobi and Busan, sitting across from corporate executives and policymakers, poring over lifecycle analyses and waste management data. I believe deeply in the power of systems change, corporate commitments, and binding global agreements. That work is urgent and necessary.
But if I'm being truthful, it is the water that keeps me honest.
© Erin Simon
Earlier this spring, I joined WWF's Give an Hour for Earth challenge by cleaning up the banks of the Potomac River. There's something clarifying about picking up trash with your hands — about holding a plastic wrapper that has traveled from someone's lunch to the river's edge, and knowing that it won't stop there. That wrapper has a destination. Rain will carry it to the Anacostia or the Potomac. The current will take it to the Chesapeake. And the Bay will deliver it, eventually, to the sea. Every piece of litter is a message from inland to ocean that we never meant to send.
The Chesapeake and the Potomac are not remote wildernesses. They run through the backyard of the American capital. They are fished and sailed and paddled and swum by people from every walk of life. And yet, like waterways everywhere, they have become conduits for plastic pollution, a visible symptom of a broken system.
That is, ultimately, what drives my work: we draw resources from the earth, make something designed to be thrown away, and leave nature to carry the cost.
Plastic doesn't just appear in the ocean. It gets there because we designed a system that produces hundreds of millions of tons of it each year, much of it intended to be used once and discarded, with no serious plan for what comes next.
This is why WWF has been advocating for a global plastics treaty and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) here in the US. Both are policy mechanisms that address the entire lifecycle of plastic from design to production, reuse, and disposal.
The data is not abstract. The oysters in the Chesapeake are ingesting microplastics, and the fish my daughter may one day catch in these creeks are, too. And out in the open ocean — in the gyres and the deep-sea trenches and the bodies of seabirds far from any shoreline — plastic has become as ubiquitous as water itself.
© Chesapeake Bay Program
On World Oceans Day, I think about all of it. The treaty rooms and the corporate boardrooms. The lifecycle analyses and the policy briefs. And I think about the creek at first light, and my daughter pointing to a heron, and the piece of plastic I quietly grab so we can talk about where it came from and how it got here.
The oceans don't begin at the shoreline. They begin in every watershed, every creek, every parking lot drain. And they are asking us, clearly and consistently, to do better.
We can. We must.
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© WWF-US / Darren Higgins
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