Our Oahu contingent was only at the gathering for a few days, but we experienced enough to feel that post-gathering gooey, melty bliss. Really, this was a refreshingly drama free gathering, one we could feel good about-- if nothing else, we accomplished a major beach restoration-- having picked up and hauled vast truckloads of trash off the beach. Our oahu contingent did miss the final "naked beach clean up and microtrash party", but there's always next year, I suppose.

Anyway, I've been getting questions about WHY there was so much trash on the beach. Clearly, this wasn't just drunken partier trash, like we often must deal with. This was plastic trash from all over the pacific. I would estimate maybe 10-20% of the mass of the sand was actually just plastic bits of various sizes. The nature of the tides and waves was such that the sand and plastic mixture was washed inland to a surprising degree. Good thing no storms hit us during the gathering.

I have posted links before about the so called "Northern Pacific Gyre". In the pre-plastic days, the center of these gyres were teeming with life and birds, islands of naturally biodegrading mass. Nowadays the gyres are choked with islands of plastic trash, some literally 10 miles in diameter! Normally these trash islands stay put in the center of the oceans, but if the wind takes them off course, there is a very real threat that they can collide with islands such as our own. In this context, we can see that plastic trash washing up on beaches is a global problem. In most third world countries, they don't bother hauling and burying the plastic trash. They just rake it into a big pile at the end of the beach and burn it.

I have mixed opinions on the eco balance of using petrogas and petroplastic bags to haul plastic trash just so it can fill up some ancient hawaiian valley somewhere. In a way, I'd rather see it burned-- obviously some time and some place far away where no one will breathe it directly. But that was not the way of our gathering. We painstaking hauled up every little bit of trash we could to the nearest transfer station-- a good hour drive away if you drive as if you care about your vehicle.

We did good. Even the DLNR folks who checked up on us could see that, and they left us alone. As I said, it was virtually a drama free gathering, and it's a great relief after last year's vicious and immature nimbyism to have found a place where no one seemed to mind us doing our thing-- indeed, for those who love the Ka'u 'aina, our beach cleanup efforts were appreciated and even the wary locals trew us shakas as they saw our truckloads full of trash meandering out of the gathering site.

A very successful gathering by any measure. Mahalo, y'all.

--metta