The boat ahead of us makes a turn in the river to Tortuguero.
Boats to Tortuguero
Today we traveled to Tortuguero National Park in the northeast Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. This is one of the country’s 26 national parks, and the one most known for hosting the hatching grounds for several species of endangered sea turtle (“tortuga” means turtle). It is also known for its network of rivers and canals, accessible only by boat. To get there, we had to travel about 2 hours on back roads to the boat station, then transfer to a boat that took us another hour up a river with all kinds of curves and switchbacks.
The grounds of Laguna Lodge.
The lodge and grounds where we stayed at Tortuguero were gorgeous, and the food was terrific. People are not supposed to swim in the ocean, but the lodge had a pretty nice pool. That afternoon we did a service project cleaning up a stretch of beach near the hotel, and I saw first hand why people don’t swim in the ocean: It is filled with plastic and styrofoam pollution.
Plastic pieces washed up from the ocean litters the beach.
This photo is a very typical look at the beach. First, the sand is black because it’s all from volcanoes. It’s very rich. But second, you can see all the pieces of plastic and styrofoam in the seaweed. The beach is covered with plastic washed up by the ocean tides from around the world. Most of the pieces are small, an inch or two at most. This makes cleanup back-breaking and challenging work because you are bent over all the time. If you are lucky, you can sit in a piece of driftwood and sift through it.
Beach cleanup at Tortuguero National Park.
Besides plastic and styrofoam pieces, I found several small glass vials, some combs, nail polish, several shoe bottoms, and a toothbrush. Frankly, it’s disgusting. What the h*** are we doing to this planet?? What freaks me out the most is, most of this has happened in my lifetime – my generation did this. What freaks me out next is, how on earth do you clean all this up? Our student group of 14 filled several large trash bags in an hour, and we only covered maybe a half-mile of beach. I have read about this issue before, but seeing the scale and complexity of it for yourself is totally different.
This village along the river in Tortuguero held a small disco where we hung out at night.
An organization called 5 Gyres recently did a study showing there are 270 trillion tons of plastic in the oceans, or 5 trillion pieces, most of them small pieces of plastics just like I saw washed up on the beach in Tortuguero. Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is actually two large patches of plastic garbage swirling in the northern gyre of Pacific Ocean. It turns out there are actually five such gyres in the oceans, each graced with its own garbage patch, as well as plastic spread through the rest of the ocean. Scientists studying the Midway Atoll, a group of small islands in the Pacific 2000 miles from the nearest continent, found dead sea birds, and the stomachs of those birds were filled with plastic. Plastic pollution also hampered the search for the missing Malaysian aircraft last year. Our pollution is so pervasive that scientists say it is actually creating a new layer in the geological record of the planet.
The entrance to Tortuguero National Park.
What can we do to address a problem as widespread and complicated as this? It is certainly going to take some creative thinking to solve. Maybe have inmates scour the beaches and do the hard cleanup work that we did? Could some kind of machine be invented to suck up the plastic and styrofoam but leave organic matter and sand? This solar-powered water wheel is cleaning up plastic pollution in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and this young man has invented a plastic-catching system to clean up the oceans.
Fortunately it is not yet turtle season in Costa Rica – apparently the locals come out and clean up every year for that. They love the turtles. I want to come back sometime and volunteer for the Sea Turtle Conservancy or another turtle conservation group.