Chris Belland's - "Hindsights & Insights"
Friday, October 9, 2009
Death lurks in the mangroves of Key West -- a true eyewitness account

By CHRIS BELLAND Citizen Columnist

There is death in the mangroves all around Key West. If you don't think so, go look.

Last weekend, the city of Key West sponsored a citywide cleanup of the island. I guess it's kind of like spring cleaning, except it's in the fall and just prior to the beginning of our season.

Anyway, the call went out to meet at Bayview Park and I went. We have had many of these in the past, but this one was particularly well attended. Mayor McPherson and City Manager Jim Scholl were there as they usually are and, of course, so was Annalise Mannix, who is always there and deserves appreciation from us all for shouldering the organizational burden of these efforts ever since we started doing them. Many of the usual suspects were there, too, like folks from Key West First State Bank, Sunrise Rotary, GLEE and a whole team from Diamonds International. Some who should have been there weren't, but then, like the entire notion of "being green," it's a choice.

I was assigned the mangroves at the intersection of North Roosevelt and Palm Avenue. It's a stretch of mangroves on both sides of the entrance to Kingfish Pier. I got my picker, gloves and bag and went to my area where I found myself alone, which at first was fine with me, until 30 minutes later when some poachers from First State Bank started working my claim from the other end. As it turns out, it was good they showed up.

If we could figure how to turn plastic back into oil, we could turn the Saudi Arabians back into nomadic tribes. My lord! I have never seen so much plastic crap since, well, the last cleanup.

There were plastic bags -- which the Florida Legislature, by unanimous vote, has made illegal for municipalities or counties to ban or tax, at the behest of a lobby group called Associated Industries. (I wish I was kidding.) -- Styrofoam cups, bicycle lights, plastic bags, water bottles, coffee creamers, plastic bags, bottle caps, cigarette butts, plastic bags, aerosol cans of engine starter, air fresheners, chunks of Styrofoam coolers and lobster traps, plastic bags, miles of rope and monofilament line, plastic bags, water jugs and rubber flip-flops. Did I mention there were quite a few plastic bags?

The hard part for me was doing this and seeing all these forms of plastic in various stages of photodegradation. In other words, they were breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and I know the bisphenol (it makes plastic clear) and phthalates (they make plastic flexible) and the benzene and styrene is Styrofoam and the cadmium, lead and arsenic, if I hadn't picked them up, were, in time, going to be eaten by fish or birds that in turn, being in the food chain, would be eaten by ... us.

Experts agree that we don't have to look too far to find reasons for the epidemic of cancer, autism, infertility and hormonal disorders in our society. My opinion is, just look in our mangroves.

I worked until I was drenched in sweat and it kept dropping from my forehead onto my glasses and I literally couldn't see anymore. As I was shoveling my stuff into the bag, an elderly fellow and his dog came walking up the pier from where, apparently, he lived on a boat. He was carrying his garbage in a plastic bag. When he saw me, he held out the bag and asked, "Here, you wanna recycle this?" When I, as politely as I could, declined, he walked off muttering, "Yeah, they don't recycle around here."

The salt in my well-earned wound came as I was tying off the bag and a group of three men and four boys were coming from their car loaded down with spear guns, Styrofoam coolers, plastic buckets full of plastic water bottles and plastic bags of food.

I thought to myself, I'll probably see that stuff on another day, and I went home.

Chris Belland's Hindsights & Insights column appears here on Sundays. Belland also writes a biweekly column on environmental issues, which runs in our Sunday magazine, Solares Hill. At times Belland can't stop writing, resulting in his columns appearing unexpectedly on other days, as well. All of his previous columns are available on his blog: hindsightsandinsights.blogspot.com. Contact Chris at cbelland@keysnews.com.