meet so many “small islands of people” working to raise aware-
ness about environmental issues. But then, his country has
changed so much, and developed so fast, in the past 30 years.
“If someone can bring all these islands together, it can
achieve more and tackle this problem in a much better way.
Behavior will change,” Dubey said. “I am very much an
optimist, a glass-half-full person.”
U
NLIKE THE EFFORT TO FIGHT
climate change, cleaning up plas-
tic litter in a river basin would have
an immediate and visible benefit
for the people who live there.
But like the fight against climate
change, the struggle can sometimes
seem almost Sisyphean—and at the same time essential, if
we are to avoid altering the planet irrevocably.
Toward the end of my stay in India, I traveled to Sagar
Island, at the western end of the 200-mile-wide Ganges River
Delta. Sagar sits on the Bay of Bengal at the mouth of a distrib-
utary of the Ganges called the Hooghly, 75 miles downstream
from Kolkata. To Hindus, this outlet of the river has special
spiritual significance. Every January, thousands of pilgrims
come to the island to bathe in the waters where Mother Ganga
meets the sea.
At the island’s southwestern point, near a lighthouse the
British installed to guide ships into the mouth of the river
and on to Kolkata, the beach was trash free when I visited;
Ganga had done her monsoonal cleansing well. As I walked
along, passing some out-of-season pilgrims, a few stray cows,
and a funeral party scattering ashes in the water, I thought
of all the other gifts that Ganga bestows on Sagar these days.
According to measurements made by Koldewey’s team,
aside from carrying away the visible trash, the monsoon rains
wash three billion microfibers a day out the main channel of
the river into the Bay of Bengal. There they join the growing
swirl of tiny plastic fragments in the oceans, whose harmful
effects on marine life are just beginning to be understood.
One of the expedition’s experiments, dubbed Message in a
Bottle, involved releasing a fleet of 25 bottles equipped with
electronic trackers to better understand how plastic behaves
in rivers and their outlets. Three bottles were released at the
mouth in Bangladesh. In the sea, plastic moves easily and
can travel hundreds of miles in a matter of weeks. Not long
after my visit to Sagar, the three bottles passed by where I
had stood. They were riding the East India Coastal Current,
destination unknown. j
A cap on
virgin plastic
production
would help
address the
climate crisis
as well. The
two crises
are linked.
Senior writer Laura Parker’s 2018 cover story on ocean plas-
tics won a Scripps Howard Award. Photographer Sara Hylton
is based in Mumbai, where she covers stories about gender,
Indigenous people, and the environment.
PLASTIC RUNS THROUGH IT 109