Captain Moore discovered the floating “plastic island” in the Pacific 20 years ago – and has been fighting plastic pollution ever since. Come hear Captain Charles Moore, discuss his research and book Plastic Ocean, and how to take action to stop plastic pollution.
Learn the shocking truth about the unintended consequences of the “Age of Plastics”… …how we got here, & what we must do to stop adding to the millions of tons of plastic choking the world’s oceans.
At this event you’ll also have an opportunity to help stop plastics at the source and submit public comments against the proposed fracked gas to methanol export facility in Kalama, WA.
If you can’t come to the February 12th event, there is a youth-oriented event with Captain Moore on February 15th which is also open to the general public.
Captain Charles Moore Biography: Captain Moore founded Algalita Marine Research Foundation and Long Beach Organic simultaneously in 1994, to deal with urban runoff through creating organic community gardens and reforesting the giant kelp off the southern California coast. In 1995 he launched his purpose designed, aluminum hulled research vessel, Alguita, in Hobart, Tasmania, and organized the Australian Government’s first “Coastcare” research voyage to document anthropogenic contamination of Australia’s east coast.
Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita and its Captain found their true calling after entering the 1997 Transpac yacht race to Hawaii in order to test a new mast that replaced one broken off near American Samoa. On his return voyage, Captain Moore veered from the usual sea route and saw an ocean he had never known, “Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.” His 1999 study shocked the scientific world when it found 6 times more plastic fragments by weight in the surface waters of the central Pacific than the associated zooplankton. His second paper found that plastic outweighs zooplankton by a factor of 2.5 in the surface waters of Southern California. Ever since, Captain Moore has dedicated his time and resources to understanding and remediating the ocean’s plastic load.
His work has been featured on Good Morning America, Late Night with David Letterman, Nightline, the Colbert Report, Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons documentary “Trashed,” and the National Geographic special “Strange Days on Planet Earth.” In 2013 he received an honorary Doctorate from Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia and in 2014 he received the Peter Benchly “Hero of the Seas” award designed by Wyland at the California Academy of Sciences Museum of Natural History in San Francisco. He recently returned from 6 months at sea, from the winter of 2016 to the summer of 2017, surveying the extent of plastic contamination in the South Pacific Garbage Patch and along the coast of Chile.
Tickets: http://350pdx.nationbuilder.com/plastic_island_an_evening_with_captain_charles_moore.
