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(image flickr/bagmonster)
Hello:
I want to tell you a story. Five years ago I started a plastic bag ban campaign in Portland, Oregon, my hometown. It took a tremendous amount of organizing, a lot of volunteer time, and constant pressure endlessly applied to ultimately win a victory. This past fall, we expanded that bag ban from affecting 200 stores to 5,000. That's a huge victory for the sea turtles. For the Ocean.
I started caring about the plastics in the ocean problem from being a surfer in the Pacific Northwest. I saw plastic where it shouldn't be and it changed my life forever. A year later I took my first trip with 5 Gyres to the North Atlantic garbage patch. I felt anger, shame, and helplessness. That day, in the middle of the ocean, I quit my job to work for 5 Gyres full time, even though the organization was young and no one was getting a salary.
But I believed in what 5 Gyres does. I believed that the science learned from our expeditions would be a very powerful tool to enact common sense plastic policies around our country and around the world. Well, it's working. On plastic bag policy, what 5 Gyres does exactly is this: we provide evidence gathered from the ocean and take it to policy makers, industry and advocates. We train activists and empower them to act. We provide expert testimony on the interaction of plastic in the ocean with chemicals, marine life, and ultimately what the implications
of this relationship is for human health. And we have the guts, dedication and grit needed to win. I've spent the past two years dismantling industry rhetoric, to get at truth. We can't compete with Big Plastic's money. What we have is Big Truth.
From Seattle to Los Angeles, Chicago and eastward, 5 Gyres is helping pass common sense policy that is severely decreasing plastic bag pollution in our oceans and turning the tide of this marine eco-disaster that is plastic pollution. In Oregon alone, we'll see a net decrease of 500 million single-use plastic bags. Though no one knows the overall populations of sea turtles worldwide, we know two things unequivocally: sea turtles mistake plastic bags for one of their staple foods, jellyfish. Two, we know that stopping plastic bags from getting in the ocean gives them a fighting chance for survival. But 500 million is just a start.
I need your help. In 2013, my work on plastic bags expands to the East Coast, working in Philadelphia, New York City, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. I'm asking you to help me raise $10,000 to support my bag policy work. This allows me to organize campaigns all over the country and train volunteers to become expert activists on the subject and build victories in their communities.
Quite simply, where we go, bags don't blow. Please donate to support our 2013 work. Do it for the ocean. Do it for the turtles. But please donate now. Every bit helps.
For Our Oceans,
Stiv J. Wilson
Policy Director
The 5 Gyres Institute
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