How shoes floating in the Pacific pointed to a scary environmental problem

The scariest book I’ve read this year isn’t about terrorists, serial killers, or zombies. It’s about a pair of Nike shoes floating in the ocean. Bone-chilling, huh? Well, it is, according to Loree Griffin Burns. Her absorbing Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion (Houghton, 2007) starts placidly enough, describing ocean currents. Sailors have known about them for centuries, using them as fast lanes in the middle of the ocean so they can travel to their destinations more quickly. Ben Franklin studied one of those currents, the Gulf Stream, and made the first map of it.

Modern scientists have identified many of these currents, and one of those experts, Curt Ebbesmeyer, became a leading figure in oceanography because of those floating athletic shoes. Curt’s mother had read that hundreds of Nikes were washing up on beaches near Seattle. Where had they come from? Curt investigated. Five cargo containers, it turned out, had tumbled into the Pacific Ocean during a storm—releasing thousands of shoes. Where they landed told Curt and others about ocean currents—and where ocean trash was going.

What is so frightening about this floating junk is where it comes from. You might think that most trash in the ocean comes from ships or from people who live near the shore. This is false. Most of it comes from storm sewers and rivers that flow into the ocean. Even supposedly landlocked cities contribute. And plastic devastates sea life.

So put down your plastic bottles of water and find a glass or a reusable container. Then grab a copy of Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming (Orchard, 2007). As most of us know, our beautiful planet is heating up. Yes, the Earth has gotten hotter before, but it has never gotten this much warmer, this fast. David and Gordon explain the number-one problem simply: we are producing too much carbon dioxide. So, what can we do to absorb all of the CO2? For starters, we can plant more trees. We have been cutting them down like crazy, and those trees normally absorb huge amounts of that dangerous gas.

Soon, we will be getting new dictionaries for our media centers that contain revised definitions. “Permafrost” used to mean “permanent frost.” Well, the Arctic permafrost is melting, so we were wrong about that word. And we won’t be using “coral” to describe that soft pink-orange color anymore. Many coral reefs are turning white. They are also becoming weaker and breaking apart.

And the oceans are getting more water in them because the icebergs are melting. When that happens, beaches flood. Look at the abandoned beach house on page 44 of the Guide. That beach at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina has been losing about 12 feet every year.

If you want a more hopeful picture, turn to page 13 in Al Gore’s children’s version of An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming (Viking, 2007). The photo, taken from a spacecraft in 1968, was the first view of Earth from space. People around the globe realized how fortunate we were: scientists called Earth the “Goldilocks planet”—not too hot, not too cold, just the right temperatures to sustain life.

Being “green” seems to come naturally to young people. Kids in the U.S. know that we use a higher percentage of problematic fossil fuels than any other country. What could happen if we ignored the warnings? Miami, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., could disappear underwater. More than just dictionaries could need revising. What can your booktalk listeners do? These books remind us that even small actions can make a difference.