Reading: Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, by Donovan Hohn.
The author goes in search of 28,800 plastic bath toys that fell off a cargo ship in 1992. He ends up writing about how plastic waste cycles through our oceans, the cultural significance of things like rubber ducks, and his time on boats. Here are some pieces, in article form: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/01/0081345. Definitely worth a read.
"On tedious days at sea, you mention reading Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. What are some of the best books to read while at sea? I’d better limit it to what you could stuff in your carpet bag or your ergonomic backpack. Moby-Dick, of course. Conrad’s Typhoon and The Mirror of the Sea. H.M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle. Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (some of the science is out of date but not most of it and the descriptive prose is as wonderful as a tide pool). Peter Matthiessen’s Blue Meridian. A decent undergraduate oceanography textbook, such as Essentials of Oceanography. Jonathan Raban’s anthology The Oxford Book of the Sea. And lastly, a recent one, published after I finished my own seafaring, Philip Hoare’s The Whale."
I like this passage from an article in n+1: "The numbers Hohn cites, discrete and intelligible, though large, hint at a much more enormous scale, which might be called 'the infinitely large,' which in turn evokes what we know of the total daily goings-on of global manufacture and transport (although it’s never directly said that we know this, and surely we know it in a different way than “we know” what it says on cartons of rubber animals). Not only is the globalized world infinitely large, then; it is infinitely small, bounded by a single logic. Dishwasher safety is the perfect bathetic note for Hohn to strike about these rubber duckies, not just because of the easily available irony — safe for dishwashers and kids, destructive of the world in which those kids will grow up! — but because our lives are poised between these two scales: a hyper-controlled small private space, fit for a tale of the tub, and the macro-space of the oceans, where Leviathan — or Capital — sports and dives as the oceans acidify and a new continent of plastic assembles itself in the Pacific."
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