According to Charles J. Moore, author of the New York Times OP-ED article, “Choking the Oceans With Plastic,” our oceans are becoming oversaturated with a wide variety of plastics. Moore, who is a captain in the U.S. merchant marine, uses compelling story telling skills to compose his observations at sea into an easy to read narrative that grasps the attention of the average reader. Although Moore’s article reads well and is a genuine expression of his concerns for the pollution of Earth’s oceans, there are several faults with his writing.
One major criticism of Moore’s opinion piece is that it fails to properly quantify the plastics he mentions. Upon first reading the article, I did not know much about how much plastic actually pollutes our oceans. After reading the article, I was under the impression that there are patches of plastic so thick people could actually walk on them. After all, Moore did state that he “even came upon a floating island… that had solid areas you could walk on.” I believed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looked like a giant plastic island. However, upon further discussion in class I realized that Moore’s article failed to properly quantify his findings. He does not give any solid measurements, but aside from passively avoiding quantifying his opinion he also actively avoided doing so by using vague qualitative words that have little meaning. For example, Moore claims that he was “utterly shocked to see the enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste” from his last trip in 2009 and that he and his colleagues “estimated that some 2.3 billion pieces of plastic” had flowed into the ocean from just three days of sampling.
How much of an increase in quantity did he actually observe? How did he calculate that 2.3 billion pieces of plastic had flowed into the ocean? Furthermore, how was he able to come up with such a large number over a timespan of just three days?
Another criticism of Moore’s opinion piece is that it offers no viable solution for the plastic problem he discusses. Majority of his article is spent riling up the reader into believing that “more animals are killed by vagrant plastic waste than by even climate change,” and that “plastics are a nightmare to recycle.” Moore points a finger at the aquaculture industry for contributing to the problem, but he offers no plan for cleanup or prevention. Instead, Moore simply mentions plastic containment methods utilized by Britain, the Netherlands, and California.
Perhaps the most important criticism of Moore’s OP-ED is that it takes advantage of the common reader. Being that most readers of the New York Times are not necessarily well educated scientists, they would not be able to critically read this article and notice its flaws and exaggerations.
For anyone interested in reading more about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, here is the citation for an article I found online:
(Couldn’t attach the link for this one but it offered quantitative data and addressed the “island of plastic” misconception that I had)
Kostigen, Thomas M., and From Discover Magazine. “The world’s largest dump: the great pacific garbage patch.” Discover (2008).
By: Viviane Wahba on September 10, 2014 at 7:27 pm
After reading this article and listening to the discussion in class, I too came to the conclusion that this article has many faults. I was very curious as to how such an article could be published in the New York Times, especially because it seemed to lack a scientific side. In the article, Charles Moore briefly mentions his study on the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers as well as an over quantified number of the amount of plastics found throughout the Earth’s oceans. You mentioned that Moore “uses compelling story telling skills to compose his observations at sea into an easy to read narrative that grasps the attention of the average reader.” While this is said as a sort of criticism towards Moore, after researching him myself, I would considered that statement a fact. In a TED talk given by Moore, he talks about how plastic trash is polluting our oceans. He gives examples of shorelines where an obscene amount of plastics and other trash are seen and shows pictures of numerous bottles spread across bodies of water and the shoreline. In his talk, similar to the article, he does not give a solution to the problem. Rather, he states the problem and tries to level with the average person how using plastic is harmful to many creatures. (He even brings in the example of the albatross!)
After I watched this video and read the article, it became clear to me that Moore got exactly what he wanted out of the article. Yes, he may have taken advantage of the average reader, not giving accurate information and stating hypotheses that are virtually impossible to test. However, it seems that his ‘job’ is to simply spread the awards of plastics in our bodies of water and make the average person aware of the problems that it causes.
Here is a link to the TED talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7K-nq0xkWY
By: juliapare on September 11, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Thanks for posting that contrasting article! After reading the Moore article and watching the SEA video, I had two conflicting views of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — one where a mass of plastic was sitting in the ocean, as I’d previously been told, and the other where it was simply an area with a high level of pollution but no conglomerated plastic debris. It is interesting to note that both Moore and Kostigen were on the same ship and expedition (The Alguita). Mentioned in the Kostigen article is also a quote from Alexandra Cousteau, who says that awareness and education are the keys to ocean preservation. It seems to me that Moore is working more on the awareness part in his article rather than the education element.
You mention the fact that Moore gives a seemingly arbitrary number for the pieces of plastic that flowed into the ocean (2.3 billion). In this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/9253665/Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-has-increased-100-fold-since-the-1970s.html, the statistic of 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are present per square kilometer of sea (United Nations Environmental Program) but again, it would be nice to know what size piece is categorized as “litter.” (What’s the smallest it can be?)
I find it unusual that these articles have not mentioned possible health effects on humans. While mercury poisoning is a concern for fish eaters, what about plastic content in fish? Perhaps if some conclusion about marine plastic’s direct harmfulness to humans were made, more concern would be directed towards the problem.