The Earth seen from the Moon - Maarten Vanden Eynde
Wend magazine Editor-in-Chief and Surfrider Foundation Ambassador Stiv Wilson is on a sailboat with Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation on an environmental research mission to explore plastic in the Sargasso Sea.
Here is his latest update, sent to Wend HQ via satellite:
Enroute to the Epicenter
29° 58.49 North
58° 02.39 West
Apologies for sending these a bit late.
After a few brief but busy days in Bermuda, the crew of the Sea Dragon is again underway. We are heading Southeast from Bermuda, bearing towards a waypoint where we believe the greatest amount of plastic density will be. But before I get into detail of the leg of this journey, I’d like to personally thank a few Bermudians for their warmth and generous support of the 5 Gyres project.
Our budget is tight so naturally one of our most intimate concerns has been our ability to provision well for this leg of the journey. Bermuda is crazy expensive, but thanks to the diligence of one our crew members, Leslie Moyer (who has been blogging about the trip), we were able to secure a sponsor for provisions. Thanks to Mr. Jim Butterfield, a local Bermudian businessman who happens to be in the grocery store game, Sea Dragon has never been so stocked.
On this leg, we’ve lost a couple crew members but gained some new ones. Joining us is a marine biologist from Giahanna named Elton, who is measuring CO2 density in the water as we progress. The goal is to get a transect of data that will illuminate the issue of ocean acidification. We have also been joined by Maarten, Marjolijn and Lam, all artists from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Maarten is a sculptor, working in mixed media and found objects around a central science of his own invention called Genetology (genetology.net and check links to other sources), that presupposes an apocalypse that shatters human historical context and imagines an archaeology like discipline in the future but of present time. Essentially, his concept is that history is always subject to relative interpretation and thus even fact, as we understand it, evolves, and thus the conception of the ‘now reality we experience’ will be different than our future perception of reality. Mostly, his work has been in organic mediums and found debris but after coming across the work of Charles Moore (Algalita Founder) in the North Pacific, Maarten was inspired to collect plastic debris from all over the planet, manipulate it, and build a reef like installation that re-imagines plastic debris as an organic building block, like coral. Each time the work is shown, it has grown, and the next showing of it is at The Amsterdam Art Fair in May of 2010. By then, it will have grown to four-by-five meters. The work in progress is supported by Fonds BKVB.
Big thanks to Aquapac, Keen, Patagonia, Blue Turtle, EcoUsable, The Surfrider Foundation, Ron and Portia at Pangaea Explorations (owners of the Sea Dragon and directors of the Pan Explore Project) and the VERY AWESOME FOLKS at Clifbar who sent us a 35-pound care package of pure energy to Bermuda.
