WHEN Charles Moore sailed his 50-foot catamaran Alguita through one of the remotest, least-visited parts of the Pacific Ocean in 1997, he was appalled to find plastic flotsam everywhere.
This discovery of what has come to be called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a vast area of the central Pacific where debris accumulates because of ocean current patterns - set Moore off on a crusade to measure, identify and, ultimately, try to prevent plastic pollution of the ocean. A decade and a half later, Moore's obsession has led to several scientific papers, documentary films, numerous media appearances, and now a book.
"I wasn't the first to be disturbed about plastic trash in the ocean, and I wasn't the first to study it," he writes in Plastic Ocean. "But maybe I was the first to freak out about it."
And freak out he certainly does. Chapter by chapter, Moore recounts his growing alarm as he learns about the abundance of plastic debris in the ocean and the ways it can get there. He also documents the clear harm that seabirds and marine mammals suffer when they become tangled in abandoned fishing nets or swallow balloons or plastic bags. And he makes a tentative case that even the smallest shards of plastic - the size and shape of plankton, and thus likely to be eaten by fish and other planktivores - may carry a payload of toxic chemicals into the food chain.