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Mrill Ingram

Heroes

When companies add tiny plastic beads to personal care products, they go surprising places.

This is one crazy life cycle.

Nothing better than singing in the bathroom.

Clip via "The Ellen Show."

But next time you're in there, take two minutes between songs to look at what you might be using on your face...


...or your teeth.

A lot of personal care products contain itty bitty pieces of plastic.

Image via Thinkstock.

Surprised?

The good folks at the Story of Stuff did a bit of investigating. What they found might make you think twice about what you're rubbing on your body.

They're called "microbeads," which is sort of a nice name considering the full story. Companies that make soap, makeup, facial scrubs, toothpaste, and other body care products often include tiny bits of plastic because it gives the products some texture.

There's no evidence these little beads do much. In fact, they are so tiny that they aren't very good at scrubbing, so you end up having to use the soaps and scrubs every day. Natural exfoliants like apricot shells work better — so much better that you wouldn't want to use the exfoliating products every day. See what happens here? You have to go back to the store more often to buy the body products with plastic exfoliants (which are cheaper than the natural alternatives, so companies like to use them). Whadda racket! But that's not even their biggest problem.

Those little plastic beads become tiny toxic bombs.

The beads go down the drain and into our rivers and oceans. Scientists have determined that after they leave your drain, they escape from water filtration plants and make their way into rivers and oceans. Acting like toxin sponges, they chemically "soak up" toxins from the water around them. Those little plastic beads can end up 1 million times more toxic than the surrounding water.

It gets worse: The toxin-filled beads are ingested by fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, which could be caught and eaten by you or me. From facial scrub to your stomach. How's that for a life cycle?

If you see any of the following ingredients: polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, or polymethyl methacrylate, know that you're cleaning your body with plastic and contributing to plastic pollution in the environment that's poisoning our fish — yikes!

Ban the beads!

We can have beautiful skin and teeth without them. They are polluting our rivers and oceans. They are nasty and toxic, and they're hurting fish (and potentially us).



What's happening to put a stop to plastic microbeads?
Right now, about 18 U.S. states including California, Canada, Australia, and several countries in Europe are considering banning products that contain plastic microbeads. Unfortunately, industry is pushing back with a bill that leaves loopholes for the microbeads to be replaced with other kinds of plastics. The Story of Stuff Project is leading a coalition of over 100 groups to get these tiny plastic beads out of commerce. Ban the beads!

Heroes

You know what climate change looks like. Want to know what it sounds like?

Sometimes hearing is believing.

We usually learn about climate change from things that look like this:

Image by Robert A. Rohde.

and this:

Chart by NASA (altered).

But what do a hundred years of temperature change sound like?

A geographer, a composer, and a group of musicians have given us a way to comprehend a changing climate through our ears.

Working with 135 years of temperature measurements, composer Daniel Crawford wrote a piece for a string quartet.

Each instrument represents a specific part of the Northern Hemisphere, with low notes representing cold years and high notes representing warm years.

The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone.


The viola tracks the midlatitudes.

Two violins complete the quartet, one following temperatures in the high latitudes...

...and one for the Arctic.

The creators decided to focus on the northern latitudes because that's where our planet's temperatures have really jumped. (Don't worry. They are working on another piece for the southern half.)

The music is telling us not only about the pace of climate change, which you can hear as the notes get higher over the measures, but also...

“Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic, which has warmed more than any other part of the planet."
— Daniel Crawford, composer

The composer says that for him, music is as scientifically valid as plotting lines on a graph.

He shows us how art and science work together to beautifully communicate about climate change. Take a listen.

Most Shared

Is it wrong to feed wild things?

Over 11 million people liked what he did, but some say it was wrong.

Is this man making a mistake?

João Silvestrini from São Paulo, Brazil, posted a video on Facebook of one of his daily visits from a young swallowtail hummingbird. It's a totally heartwarming scene — he calls from his kitchen window, and the bird slips inside and darts around a feeder. All the while, the gentleman keeps up a string of chatter — to us and to the bird.

It really is a lovely moment ... BUT —

Some people sharing the video judged him by declaring, "leave wildlife alone." The argument for this is that feeding and taming wildlife sets a bad example and likely does more harm than good.

So, was he wrong?

I say no. And here's why.

GIF via Giphy.

It's true, feeding animals can be dangerous — and mostly for the wild things:

  • Pop-Tarts don't grow in the wild (i.e., people food isn't good for animals).
  • Getting animals used to you can put them at risk for getting hurt by other, not-so-nice people.
  • Feeding wild animals means they get close to you, pets, and each other in a way that can spread disease.
  • What starts out cute can become a bad habit (e.g., a raccoon scratching at your screen at 2 a.m. looking for a snack).

But feeding them is often our easiest way of making a connection. And as humans, we crave that connection in a big way.

From the time we are children, we begin building deep, emotional relationships — both real and imagined — with animals. I'm not just talking about household pets either. Think about all of the animals in origin stories from indigenous people. Or how about the books we read as a kids: "Winnie-the-Pooh"? "Charlotte's Web"? "The Jungle Book"? Or what about the origin stories of Spider-Man, Wolverine, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? The trips to the zoo? For example, check out the animal love shared by this cutie on Humans of New York.

And the fascination doesn't end there. Even as adults, it seems that many of us feel a bit desperate for some kind of connection to the animal world. After all, animals do rule the Internet.

It makes sense. Whether or not you feel any personal, emotional connection to animals, the reality is that our cities are growing, and so is the wildlife in them.

We physically share their space and our lives are really interconnected.


You affect animals by whether or not you plant flowers (even in a window box, the right plants will delight bees, butterflies, or hummingbirds), you let your cat go outside without a bell, you toss picnic leavings in the bushes, or you take the time to help a wounded wild thing.

I once encountered a duck with one of those triple-barbed fishhooks caught on the underside of its wing. Lacking any other way of catching it, I pulled off my sweater and used it like a net to toss over the duck's wings and head so I could pick it up and carry it to a nearby vet. The woman at the desk admitted the duck and — as I stood there in my bra — asked me if I needed my sweater back. Oops. That's how instinctual my desire to hold and help this animal was. And I know I'm not the only one who has been there.

If we as humans crave a connection with other animals and believe that building relationships with some of the wonderful creatures who share this earth with us is part of our humanity, it doesn't make sense to have hard and fast rules that separate us from them.

So how should we interact with wildlife? The best answer is "Do it mindfully."

The Internet makes it darn easy to find out about all kinds of urban critters. It'll tell you that scruffy looking little bird hopping about under the bushes is probably a fledgling and its parents have their eyes on it. Or about those birds making a racket up your chimney or what the large bees want with your back door. You can learn what's harmful to them and what's helpful. And, of course, it's best to call local wildlife experts for help if you see a hurt animal.

Sharing the world with animals does involve stepping back, but it takes stepping forward too. Thanks for the inspiration João!

(Note the translation below.)

Heroes

She helped unlock mysteries of one of earth's most remote, beautiful places.

Even as a girl, she dreamed of flying.

Reading this is almost enough to make you dizzy:

"The Cessna wheels over a blowing whale. My passengers, both marine mammal researchers, peer down a wing at her. She blows again. Twisting the airplane's control, the horizon wobbles in the windshield and then suddenly tilts sharply. ...


Next to me, the researcher hangs farther out the open window, her hair lifted like Medusa's snakes. 'Oh look!' she says, pointing. The blue whale gives one last blow, kicks up her fluke, and dives. ... The researcher jots something down in a notebook and then quickly reaches into the backseat for a plastic bag. Few people have the stomach for this kind of flying and I carry a supply of zip-lock plastic bags. ... Opening an Oxxo bag instead, she turns to me and politely asks,'Would you like a cookie?'"

— Sandy Lanham


Wildlife pilot Sandy Lanham wrote this about her work flying over one of earth's most remote, dramatic places.

Thanks to her, we know a lot more about the incredible creatures that live there.

Humpback whale mama with her baby, taken during a flight with Sandy. ©Florian Schulz/ visionsofthewild.com.

The Sea of Cortez (aka the Gulf of California) is chock-full of sea life. But for a long time, no one knew what all that marine life was doing.

Jacques Cousteau called it "The Aquarium of the World." Blue whales, fin whales, gray whales, hammerhead sharks, whale sharks, marlin, Humboldt squid, and five different species of sea turtles frequent the gulf. But no one knew much about how all those marine creatures were behaving. It's a big place and hard to get to. Most researchers who traveled there had to hug the coast in boats, just dipping their toes in. Wildlife biologists were desperate to learn more.

The Gulf of California lies between Baja and mainland Mexico. Image via Wikipedia.

In 1990, Sandy Lanham had been living in Arizona and was trying to figure out what to with her life. She'd worked with children and had been a flight instructor, a belly dancer, and a print salesperson. What next?

She loved wildlife and she loved flying. As a girl in Michigan, she would lie on her back, looking up through the trees, watching airplanes go by. She had recently acquired a very small, very old plane — a 1956 Cessna that she said was the oldest model still in the sky.

"Bad paint. Good heart," she said of that plane. She nicknamed it Emily. Image by Kaye Craig, courtesy of S. Lanham.

Then The Nature Conservancy contacted her. They desperately needed a pilot to fly a wildlife recon mission. It changed her life.

Her first flight was an eye-opener. They were looking for endangered pronghorn antelope in Mexico. The numbers of pronghorn were very low, and the only way to find them in an area that big was to survey from the air.

During that flight, she learned that researchers of all kinds of wildlife in Mexico were eager to learn more about the Baja peninsula and the Sea of Cortez. There was very little money for wildlife research in Mexico, and no one had access to airplanes to do surveys from the air. Sandy realized she could pair her love of flying with her love of wildlife and fill this gap.

In 1991, Sandy founded Environmental Flying Services to get scientists up in the air, flying after the wildlife they so much wanted to understand and help.

The beginning was hard. Researchers helped out with fuel costs, and she wrote grants to foundations to cover her expenses. "I even resorted to going into restaurants and stealing toilet paper," she remembers.

The first proposals she wrote were turned down. "I was just too weird," she told me. " A woman, wanting to fly a plane, in Mexico, to survey a bunch of different wildlife — it didn't fit in anyone's funding categories."

Finally, she landed a couple of small grants for a few thousand dollars each, which helped her convince other funders that she had a lot to offer. Ultimately, with their help, she flew over 10,000 hours with wildlife researchers and photographers (sharing the costs for about $4.5 million worth of research flights).

Sandy's flights allowed photographers to take photos like this one of fin whales grabbing a snack. ©Florian Schulz/visionsofthewild.com

Sandy helped unlock many mysteries about Baja's wildlife.

She helped researchers discover new prairie dog colonies in northern Mexico and develop recovery efforts for endangered pronghorn antelope, and she helped us learn that the Sea of Cortez is a nursing ground for blue whales, the first such nursery ever discovered. She also saw rare events, such as sperm whales ramming heads.

Getting a head count on pronghorn antelope. Gail Collins/U.S. FWS.

As one researcher put it, "without her, we don't fly."

Sandy was awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 2001 for her dedication to getting hard (what she calls "crunchy as krill") data on all kinds of wild animals. This data is critical for protecting the incredible animal life in the gulf.

Blooming amapa trees near Manzanillo, Mexico, seen on a search for leatherback sea turtles. ©Carl Safina.


Avocets wheel over the Midriff Islands, Gulf of California. ©Luis Bourillon.

In her 24 years of flying with Environmental Flying Services, Sandy Lanham helped us discover critical information about earth's creatures and what we might do to protect them. She's an aeronautical ace and a diplomat, connecting passionate people on both sides of the border and creating a culture of respect and environmental teamwork across the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

Thanks to her work, gorgeous pictures like this one exist for us all to enjoy:

The Pinacate, ancient volcanic mountains in northern Mexico. ©Jack Dykinga.

Hats off to you, Sandy!

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