Her Stand-Up Paddleboard Is a Platform for Campaigning Against Plastic Pollution

By Patrick Rogers
Lizzie Carr was navigating a stretch of the Hudson River north of Yonkers, New York, recently when she spotted it—a hunk of plastic so large and out of place that she was momentarily at a loss to describe it.
The sloping side helped her put her finger on it: It was an outdoor playset, with a big slide attached. "Pink and yellow and blue, and just caught up on a rocky shoreline," she recalls. "Trapped, basically."
As to how a piece of backyard debris may have ended up on the bank of one of the nation's busiest and most scenic waterways, Carr could only wonder. "You're thinking, how on earth did this get here? It came from somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea where."
In fact, few people probably have more firsthand knowledge of the plastic pollution that clogs our waterways than Carr does. Days earlier, the Surrey, England–born athlete and activist had begun the latest in a series of long-distance endurance challenges undertaken on a stand-up paddleboard to bring attention to the contamination of rivers and streams. In 2016, she traveled the length of England on inland rivers and canals—a distance of 400 miles that she covered in 22 days. In May 2017, she made history by becoming the first woman to paddleboard solo across the English Channel.
For her most recent eco-adventure, Carr ventured to Albany, New York, where she set off at dawn on September 6 to travel 170 miles of the Hudson River in the company of her trusty 13-foot inflatable paddleboard. From the state capital—a lingering hot spot for toxic PCB contamination—she paddled south to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, where the tidal flow of the river meets the Atlantic Ocean in New York Harbor. Her goal: to highlight the fact that 80 percent of debris that ends up in the oceans originates on land, finding its way to our seas through inland waterways such as the streams and tributaries that feed into the Hudson.
Though our plastic addiction fueling this environmental crisis is becoming increasingly well known, Carr notes that coming to terms with the scope of the pollution can feel overwhelming. And rather than bombarding people with stats and figures around the issue, which are "almost incomprehensible," she says, "we need to break that down and make it accessible to people in a way that makes them feel they can contribute by cleaning up their local waterways and reducing consumption of single-use plastics."
With that mission in mind, Carr organizes trash cleanups and paddleboarding demonstrations once or twice a month during the summer, as she did for dozens of volunteers during her Hudson challenge. Throughout these endeavors, she leads by example. Out on the water, she carries a handheld garbage picker, and she has plucked thousands of pieces of plastic from the surface—beverage bottles, Styrofoam food containers, balloons, balls, and countless disposable shopping bags.
On shore, she instructs volunteers who attend her cleanup events on how these consumer goods break down over time into microplastics that kill marine animals and birds when they are ingested in place of food. Larger pieces of plastic ensnare sea turtles and strangle seabirds.
Despite the serious nature of the work, Carr thrives on being out on her board and inspiring others to join her—both in sport and in mission. "Lizzie has created an accessible way for people to get involved in protecting waterways," says Jen Benson, outreach director of Riverkeeper, a Hudson River advocacy group that worked with Carr to set up a pair of cleanup events in Poughkeepsie and Croton-on-Hudson. "She comes at it from a fun, alternative angle by saying, 'Come out and try paddleboarding' and at the same time, as Lizzie puts it, 'You have to pay your nature tax.'"
Carr on her Hudson River voyage.Joel Caldwell / The Hudson Project
A lifelong athlete, Carr more or less stumbled upon the sport of paddleboarding four years ago at a very different time in her life. In 2014, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and underwent treatment involving surgery and radiation therapy. Fortunately, the treatment worked, and with her cancer in remission, Carr left London and her corporate job as a project manager at a creative agency to recuperate at her father's house in the Isles of Scilly off England's southwest coast.
There, she saw people paddleboarding and decided to give it a try. "It was a great low-impact way for me to recover my fitness, and almost like meditation—very calming, which I really needed at the time." She was smitten.
Back in London, however, Carr's new sporting passion brought her face-to-face with another ugly reality. "It was only when I started paddleboarding on the canals where I live that I started to understand the scale of the problem with plastic pollution," she says. Everywhere she looked there were bags, bottles, and wrappers of one kind or another—goods used once by consumers, then discarded without a thought.
"I guess I was in a bit of an environmental stupor, but that was a wake-up call," Carr says. Compelled to draw attention to the issue, Carr soon gave up her job and in 2016 launched the #PlasticPatrol initiative, which encourages people to pick up plastics from waterways, photograph them, and plot the geotagged examples on the organization's interactive map.
New York City garbage in the Hudson River.
To date, people have registered more than 50,000 verified instances of plastic pollution in waterways via the #PlasticPatrol app, thanks to the publicity generated by Carr's paddleboarding challenges and her other activism. The result is a devastating global portrait of the extent of marine plastic pollution, with pictures of floating debris, abandoned fishing nets, and entangled wildlife in Northern Ireland, the Canary Islands, Cambodia, and 15 other countries.
"It affects marine life in so many different ways," says Carr. "I often hear people during our beach-cleans say, 'I can't tell whether this is a bit of plastic or a shell'—to which I say, 'If you can't tell, imagine how a marine animal feels.'" (One study found microplastics in the guts of 36 percent of 10 species of fish pulled from the English Channel.) "Because of the fish eating plastics, and because we're eating the fish," Carr adds, "it's also starting to become part of the human food chain. It's scary when you think about it, and it all just starts from what we're buying from the shops every day, from what our manufacturers are producing every day."
As Carr campaigns for new laws to curb the production of plastics and urges people to make simple behavior changes, like using canvas shopping bags and giving up disposable plastic straws, she has witnessed a gradual shift in consumer culture in the United Kingdom, she says. "We've had legislation that has banned microbeads in our products and put a five-pence tax on plastic bags, and we're looking at other ways to reduce plastics. There's been a tipping point." She's cautiously optimistic that if more consumers become involved in the effort, then corporations will feel the need to get on board, for example by making changes to their packaging and shipping practices, which could have wide-reaching effects.
In the meantime, Carr is focused on delivering her message as far and wide as she can—which is one reason she decided to bring #PlasticPatrol to New York this past summer. Along her Hudson River voyage, the challenges she encountered weren't strictly garbage-related. Beyond the playground equipment in the water, she also steered clear of huge cargo vessels and dodged smaller pleasure craft and fish that leaped out of the water as if to greet her. Strong winds and currents slowed her progress, and thunderstorms arrived seemingly out of nowhere, sending her hurrying to the shore for safety.
Tracking her progress via GPS map was volunteer Jana Johnston, from Vienna, Virginia. Johnston had read about Carr in an in-flight magazine on her way home from California last year and reached out to offer her support. In September she traveled to New York City to enlist the help of local environmental groups, scout accommodations for Carr and her support crew, help publicize her journey, and cheer her on along the final stretch.
As Carr quickly fell behind schedule because of bad weather, Johnston began to fear that all the hard work they had put into the Hudson challenge might have been in vain. "Two days into this, I was thinking, I don't think she's going to be able to do it. Why were we thinking she could? But then, all of a sudden, Lizzie did 19 miles the next day. I knew she had it licked."
When the two finally met in person at Manhattan's Pier 26 on September 14, closing Carr's eight-day journey, the paddleboarder-activist cried tears of joy and relief, recalls Johnston. And then she pondered where her next challenge might take her.
New fossils uncovered in Argentina may belong to one of the largest animals to have walked on Earth.
- Groundbreaking Fossil Shows Prehistoric 15-Foot Reptile Tried to ... ›
- Skull of Smallest Known Dinosaur Found in 99-Million-Year Old Amber ›
- Giant 'Toothed' Birds Flew Over Antarctica 40 Million Years Ago ... ›
- World's Second-Largest Egg Found in Antarctica Probably Hatched ... ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
A federal court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration's rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
- Pruitt Guts the Clean Power Plan: How Weak Will the New EPA ... ›
- It's Official: Trump Administration to Repeal Clean Power Plan ... ›
- 'Deadly' Clean Power Plan Replacement ›
Trending
By Jonathan Runstadler and Kaitlin Sawatzki
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have found coronavirus infections in pet cats and dogs and in multiple zoo animals, including big cats and gorillas. These infections have even happened when staff were using personal protective equipment.
Gorillas have been affected by human viruses in the past and are susceptible to the coronavirus. Thomas Fuhrmann via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
- Gorillas in San Diego Test Positive for Coronavirus - EcoWatch ›
- Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In ... ›
- Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's ... ›
- Utah Mink Becomes First Wild Animal to Test Positive for Coronavirus ›
By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
- Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate and Green Recovery Plan ... ›
- How Biden and Kerry Can Rebuild America's Climate Leadership ... ›
- Biden's EPA Pick Michael Regan Urged to Address Environmental ... ›
- How Joe Biden's Climate Plan Compares to the Green New Deal ... ›