How to make a difference for the world’s oceans in your own backyard (unpublished)

On a sunny Galveston island morning, local surfer Jeff Seinsheimer was busy teaching farmers market shoppers how to how to make reusable grocery bags out of old T-shirts. As chair of the Surfrider Foundation Galveston chapter, his was teaching part of a campaign with Turtle Island Restoration Network.

“Protecting the beach has become very personal to me, that’s why I joined,” Seinsheimer said. “I not only joined the Surfrider Foundation, but I am one of the charter members that helped form the Galveston Chapter, and I am actually the chairman.”

The ocean is a big place, most of which humans have yet to explore. People who work to protect it have many issues to combat – pollution, storm damage, acidification, degradation – but with time, that can change, according to both scientists and activists. Both scientists and everyday citizens have observed the effects of these issues and are taking action. All skill sets can work together to fight these issues and to save the ocean that joins them all together.

Ocean acidification is a natural process but can also be caused by humans who release CO2 into the ocean, said Kathryn Shamberger, assistant professor of the department of oceanography at Texas A&M University.

“We are literally adding an acid to the ocean, so I would say that is completely due to humans,” Shamberger said.

Fossil fuels and the gas industry are another part of the issues when combatting ocean acidification.

“Burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – it’s the majority of the carbon dioxide that we’re adding to the atmosphere, and that’s ending up in the ocean and causing acidification,” Shamberger said.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill spewed an estimated 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, according to research studies from Texas Sea Grant and the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. These research groups still study the effects of this oil spill while also researching how to prepare for inevitable future spills. Virginia Weber, development director of the 1894 Grand Opera House, moved to Galveston Island in 1983. Two years later, she experienced the reality of how an oil spill affects both tourism and local businesses.

“We had a lot of tar on the beaches, and that was a real problem for tourism in general and a problem for individual tourism destinations as well,” Weber said. “For instance, when people would come in with tar all over their feet, it gets all over the carpet. So hotels at that time had some little packets called tar-off that they kept in the rooms for people to take to the beach to get the tar off their feet.”

Large oil rigs can be seen from the beach of Galveston. Eddy Paloma, born and raised local Galvestonian, has seen the power of oil on the Galveston gulf while he worked in the shrimping industry.

“The rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is money,” Paloma said. “When I was leaving the industry, we had, I think, a rig count of almost 300 rigs, and that was a lot of rigs for the Gulf of Mexico.”

Paloma spent his childhood surrounded by varying forms of pollution, including DDT and boating wastewater.

“I used to work summer jobs where my Dad worked, where he helped maintain shrimp boats,” Paloma said. “Back then, it was a common thing to pump the bilges into the bay...which would have diesel fuel, oil, water; the shrimpers would literally just pump it into the bay, which then affected oysters, all that stuff...as I grew up, you could see things were getting regulated.”

One of the regulations is the 2015 Paris Agreement, an opportunity for almost 200 countries to take global government action to combat climate change. Scott Pruitt, the EPA chief and former Oklahoma attorney general, was quoted in an article by Reuters news service saying the U.S. should exit the agreement. Shamberger remains skeptical of the political efforts made by world leaders.

“The Paris Agreement in 2015 was the most recent and largest sort of global agreement to try to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, and that would help both global warming and ocean warming, as well as ocean acidification,” Shamberger said. “That is a really important starting point, but there are a lot of scientists that think that even if we meet the Paris Agreement limits, that it might not be enough to keep ocean acidification at a level that is tolerable for ocean ecosystems.”

Pamela Plotkin, associate research professor at Texas A&M University and director of Texas Sea Grant, agrees with this viewpoint.

“I think that there have been some good efforts by the federal government to move towards trying to reduce those emissions, and so if those efforts stay on track and on course I think we are headed in a better direction,” Plotkin said. “If those are undone, then we’re going to sit where we are and either continue to see what we’ve seen in our oceans; or, worst case scenario, continue to see our waters become increasingly more acidic.”

Plotkin grew up in New York during the 1960s before the EPA and other environmental protection measures had been put into place. Looking back, Plotkin said it was over four decades of environmental protections that have enhanced natural resources and the lives of those protected by these actions.

“You can find whales off the mouth of the Hudson River in New York harbor, which is just shocking to me, because when I was a kid, you couldn’t even walk by the Hudson it was so polluted,” Plotkin said. “Reducing those protections is not, in my opinion, a wise thing to do and I think we can find a balance between business and industry and our natural resources that will benefit everybody, because if we don’t have our natural resources, we won’t have our planet.”

Carbon dioxide is far from the only pollutant in the gulf waters. Olivia Taylor, sophomore Marine Biology major at Texas A&M University at Galveston, believes microplastics are the next hot topic in science now that global warming is well known.

“It’s really becoming a big and more widely acknowledged problem, and I feel like the plastic issue, that’s where it’s going to start heading to,” Taylor said. “People are going to start realizing that it’s more of a major issue than we’ve all been believing it to be. Once it’s realized, that’s when you can start implementing major ways to conserve and prevent further damage.”

Taylor is assisting Russell Cole, junior marine biology major at Texas A&M University at Galveston, with his research project traveling the coastlines of the world to sample the high-tide line of beaches to determine the abundance and destruction of microplastics in marine sediment.

“Microplastics and plastics in general are a great concern in terms of pollution, partly for the reason that they are so ubiquitous in the world, and the reason that we love them so much,” Cole said. “Most of the benefits generally revolve around the fact that they don’t break down easily, but this has evolved into the problem..all the plastic that has ever been made still exists in the world.”

Plastics are not biodegradable, and instead break down by UV radiation, waves, pressure, or other harsh environmental factors, Cole said. Eventually, the plastic material breaks into a chip that cannot break down further and absorbs harmful pollutants. Across the world, microplastics are becoming a growing issue, and Texas beaches are not excluded, he said.

“Even in the early work that I have done, I have seen microplastics on the beaches of Texas,” Cole said. “If someone visiting a Texas Coast this summer cares to look at the high-tide line, they’ll probably find small Styrofoam balls or little round plastic beads, and that could be from any number of cities or from around the world.”

Despite all the environmental pressures facing the ocean, there is hope. What happens at the federal regulatory level will determine if progress is made through research and funding and regulation of pollutants, such as the Texas Sea Grant and the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.

Although regulations and education have helped prevent some pollution from ending up on the shores, Seinsheimer warns that it is not enough yet. Beach cleanups are conducted by the Surfrider Foundation Galveston Chapter to combat pollution directly on the shore.

“Take pride in knowing that a single person can make a difference,” Seinsheimer said. “A drop in the ocean becomes a ripple, becomes a wave. A great case-in-point is we’ve adopted the Bolivar side of the ferry landing as our beach to clean up, because the Galveston beaches are kept so clean by the parks board.”

There are actions anyone can take to lessen their effects on pollution and carbon emissions, such as not leaving chargers plugged in, turning off the lights when they leave their house, and maintaining proper air pressure in their vehicle tires, according to Shamberger.

“It seems almost silly to tell an individual person, ‘Oh, do these little tiny things,’ it doesn’t seem like it will make that big of a difference, but if you multiply that by the entire population of the U.S., you start saving a ton of energy, and the more energy you save the less carbon dioxide we’re putting in the atmosphere,” Shamberger said. “So if we all did the little things, it would make a big difference.”

Shamberger promotes taking action through personal efforts to combat harmful pollutants, such as reducing waste.

“One great thing that sort of anyone can do is just to try to reduce pollution in general,” Shamberger said. “So even if the things you’re doing don’t affect ocean acidification directly, the more stresses we can take out of ocean ecosystems, the better shape they’ll be in to handle ocean acidification and ocean warming, sort of global problems.”

Seinsheimer suggests finding a cause people are passionate about, and helping in any way possible. His focus to keeping access to the beach open, clean and beautiful. Making reusable bags at the farmers market is just one of many methods to aid his cause.

“Surfers, you know, we want to protect what’s there to make the waves for us, and we want a clean beach when we go to it,” Seinsheimer said. “So we ask everyone to get on board with that.”