Palin vetoed a paltry $150,000 for funds to assist a heroic effort by two plain old outdoorsmen and a bunch of volunteers who believed in the project to clean up Alaska's coastline. Camping in remote areas sometimes 54 days straight at their own expense, "
Palin had vetoed the appropriation because it wasn’t among her priorities . . . ."
http://www.alaskamagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=316&Itemid=141 Decades' worth of marine debris is fouling our coastline, but a handful of passionate people are determined to clean it all up, one piece at a time.At first, the beach looked nearly clean. A strand of yellow rope looped over a piece of driftwood. An oblong buoy nestled among round rocks. The stuff looked like decorations in a seafood restaurant. It almost belonged.
But then other items popped into focus: a plastic water bottle, a pulverized lump of Styrofoam, a quart container that once held motor oil. On a remote, sunny beach in Prince William Sound these unnatural things clearly didn’t belong.
Reaching out for a single piece of trash was enough to dissolve anyone’s illusion that this place was pristine. Trash was everywhere. Shards from a discarded Cup-of-Noodles, pieces of fishing net, a plastic bottle cap. And there were odd things: the core of a TV set, a shampoo bottle with Russian writing, fragments of a plastic sink.
. . .
Volunteers who take such trips to clean beaches tend to return—it’s addictive. Chris Pallister, Ted Raynor and Doug Leiser are hooked worse than anyone. They have organized the project for several years, yielding a collection of clean islands and happy volunteers. In the early years, up to 100 people would go out for a weekend each spring, chipping in for gas, moving from beach to beach by skiff or in a swarm of kayaks, and camping on the islands.
After four years, the three organizers did a little math. They divided all the shoreline of Prince William Sound— about 3,500 miles—by the distance they had cleaned—70 miles—and came to a discouraging conclusion. Their work, for all the good feelings it generated, could be called a symbol or a token, but not a solution.
“We figured at that rate, it’s like 200 years to make a trip all the way around the sound,” Pallister said. “We’d better put more effort on it.”
That was the point at which a hobby became a career.
Raynor was ready. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill he organized a volunteer cleanup by people who refused Exxon’s money but wanted to remove the oil. Raynor had never found a vocation that suited him—not fishing or skippering charter boats, nor working as a computer tech. In his 40s, he craved the satisfaction of cleaning beaches. It made him feel good to work hard with others to do something real, with his hands, for the environment.
. . .
Pallister had lined up more than 30 supporting agencies and businesses to supply equipment, supplies, money for the workers, fuel, food, boats, and so on. Most of the money for a month of work would come from two grants: $115,000 from NOAA, and a matching grant from a special legislative appropriation of $150,000.
But the day before the crew left for Gore Point at the beginning of July, word came that Gov. Sarah Palin had vetoed the appropriation because it wasn’t among her priorities and had come through the noncompetitive earmark process. The workers launched anyway, not knowing how they would pay to remove the material from the beach after they gathered it up.
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