Jon Bowermaster: Dispatches from St. John – Day 2

by Jon Bowermaster on

Given its history of wildness, the 114-tent-and-boardwalk resort known as Maho Bay Camps is a perfect fit on St. John, as close to a true eco-resort as any I’ve seen around the world. Which surprises no one more than Stanley Selengut, the camp’s owner who put up the initial 18 tents in 1976. “That phrase – eco-resort – didn’t exist then,” says a longtime Maho Bay manager once explained to me. “Stanley and a bunch of his friends were down here and someone said, ‘This would be a great place for some tent platforms.’ Typical for Stanley, it may not have been his idea, he was the one that figured out how to get things done.”

In these days when any hotel that encourages you not to wash your towel every day wraps itself in a green banner, Maho Bay Camps is the real thing. Recycle-reuse-reduce is its watch-phrase. Showers are communal; potable water accessible in just a couple locations in the 14-acre compound; the restaurant is self-serve; urinals water-less; much of the energy needed to run 114 tents, reception, restaurant, internet solar-produced. In its art studios –open to all guests — glass is recycled by the glass-blowing studio, waste paper by the textile-makers and aluminum cans turned into pendants.

There is definitely a hippie-ish feel to the place, from the tie-dyed batiks made in the textile room to the “volunteers” who come for month-long stints, trading work for a free place to stay. During high season the place fills with families who’ve been coming now for two generations.

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I stay in tent-cabin, A-6, anchoring the far end of the boardwalk, closest to the beach at Maho Bay. It’s perfect for me. Through cracks in the deck flooring I can see the jungle below. The stove is propane, the refrigerator an Igloo cooler filled with ice, and table and chairs made of plastic. A box fan whirs, thanks to 24-hour electricity, necessary to keep the mosquitoes at bay. As I write, a frigate bird lands atop a palm just outside my window and white-tailed tropicbirds and brown boobys flit and soar. Inside, small anole lizards — gecko-like, with colorful, leaf-like dewlaps — do push ups in front of me, reminding me that this is their territory.

Letting the screen door bang behind, I find the head of Maho Goat Trail and wander down to the beach. From here it’s a mile-long walk to the start of one of the most beautiful of the park’s 22 official trails (there are countless unofficial ones, the former detailed in a variety of guidebooks and park service handouts, the latter marked with stone cairns and cryptic, handmade signs). I’m open to following any trail here since the only native mammals on the island are bats and there are no venomous snakes. The only surprise in the woods is the occasional wandering deer or donkey.

Later that one I hike down Cinnamon Bay Trail lured by its reputation for having an incredible lookout over Maho Bay. Inside the forest is dark, tropical, intensely green thanks to recent rains. The trail is narrow and steep to the downhill; you don’t want to slip. Strangler figs, kapok, cocoa, mango and bay rum trees are thick and tall, the undergrowth heavy with star-like teyer palms, sweet lime and anthurium. Turpentine trees – what locals have dubbed tourist tree – expose a pink skin beneath peeling bark. Guts, natural rocky drainages criss-cross the trail channeling water downhill; man-made swales – lines of strategically placed rocks across the trail – are angled to divert the rainwater and prevent erosion.

As I walk down, slowly to avoid slipping, a solitary black bat leads me. Small lizards, imported to the island centuries ago to help kill insects, run across the trail; a variety of snails meander. Yellow & black bananaquits dart among the trees, many of which are home to giant termite balls built in the low crotches. Halfway down the 45-minute hike the trees open up, exposing a western view from the island, over Cinnamon Bay to Trunk Bay and beyond.

As I walk I try to make out the stone terraces that once divvied the island into 100 sugarcane plantations. Everything was a clear-cut then, except for the mangoes and cocoa tree. Men, women and children slaved over the farms, in tropical heat.

At the bottom of the trail, just across from the long sand beach at Cinnamon Bay, sit the ruins of a two hundred year old plantation. Buildings, like the terraces, were constructed from stone, brain coral and occasionally imported red and yellow bricks from England and Germany. Tall stone columns, still standing, at one time supported the big room used to store brown sugar, molasses, barrels of rum and crushed and dried sugarcane stalks. There was a boiling and distillery house next door, where they used to make St. John’s Bay Rum (cologne, not alcohol!). Sitting on one of the stonewalls, sweating from the hike, nearly meditating thanks to the quiet of the forest, I can almost see and hear the young children climbing the bay rum trees, carefully stripping the leaves, putting them into sacks and carrying them off to be distilled.

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Water Planet, w/ Leonardo DiCaprio

by Jon Bowermaster on


For ten years the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has funded social action, education and short films on environmental issues. The actor and environmentalist has a particular fondness – and concern — for the ocean as well as the global need for clean drinking water. Below, he speaks on his passion.

Consider this.

We live on a water planet.

Through the millennium the water cycle has supported all life.

Shaping weather, the seasons, and the climate, providing habitats for most of the world’s living things, and most of them including us are almost entirely made up of water.

Now consider this. Water is a finite source. A limited resource. Only a tiny fraction of the earth’s water is fresh.

It supports everything from agriculture and sanitation to aquatic ecosystems like rivers and streams. Water falls unevenly across the planet, while much of it is locked up in glaciers, permanent snow cover, ice and permafrost. Water is also stuck underground very deep in the earth and hard to reach.

To make matters worse, water is being threatened by pollution, overpopulation, climate change, mismanagement, and war.

Pollution is so severe that diseases are increasing in both humans and animals and habitats are being destroyed. Rain is turning into acid. So many chemicals flow into rivers and lakes that the actual composition of water in some places has been fundamentally changed.
Human encroachment is also drying out aquifers, diverting the natural flow of rivers and straining water supplies. Hidden in everyday consumption is the careless and unnecessary waste of water.

Dams displace millions of people and destroy whole ecosystems.

Global warming is altering the water cycle causing more severe and unpredictable flooding and droughts, ultimately shifting where water flows. Unregulated corporate privatization threatens access to water for the poor. Some governments fail to deliver water where it is needed most. These stresses have created military and political conflicts that will only get worse.

Ultimately, humanity is poisoning, squandering and overburdening water resources. The result is, that billions of people lack access to clean water. Millions of children die every year from preventable water-born diseases. Lack of clean water and basic sanitation cracks people in poverty. People are fighting and dying for it.

We are at a crisis point. We still have time to turn this around. We can conserve water and not waste it. Invest in smart water infrastructure and technologies. Increase environmental regulations from polluting industries. Tell government leaders to fulfill financial pledges for clean water Insure that water is not treated like a commodity.

But most important, we must recognize that access to clean water is a basic human right and the United Nations should adopt a global treaty for the right to water.

Water equals life, there is no separation. By protecting water, we can protect ourselves and this blue planet for future generations.

Message in a Bottle, w/ David de Rothschild

by Jon Bowermaster on

When Thor Heyerdahl sailed his balsa wood raft Kontiki across the Pacific Ocean, he was trying to prove that the settlement of the region emanated from South America; by contrast David de Rothschild’s boat the Plastiki – constructed solely from plastic bottles – is now a third of the way from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, attempting to draw the world’s attention to the fact that the same ocean is now home not to exploring people but vast acres of man’s detritus. Below, as excerpted from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide he comments on his journey.

There has never been a better example of using adventure to inspire, engage and change perceptions of an existing reality than Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits in the South Pacific. In 1947 the Norwegian adventurer set out to prove that pre-Colombian indigenous people from South America could have populated the Polynesian islands by migrating- no fewer than 4,300 miles- by boat. Heyerdahl and his crew traveled to Peru, where they constructed a balsa wood raft using only those materials and knowledge that would have been available before European influence. Six adventurers clambered aboard the boat they called Kontiki and sailed it across the Pacific to test Heyerdahl’s theory of oceanic migration.

The raft made it; his theory did not. But the Kontiki’s storyline created one of the most compelling and captivating adventures of the last century. It danced across the imaginations of multiple generations, sowing the sense of excitement and freedom that comes with following one’s dreams.

Heyerdahl’s adventure was sitting foremost in my mind in late 2006 as I struggled to come up with a compelling method to illustrate one of the most significant and unnecessary manmade environmental, and now health, issues of our time. There had to be a way to stem this plastic plague, a plague that’s ultimately been driven by our over consumption, miss-use, lack of recapture and inefficient design.

As I walked to the Adventure Ecology offices one morning, I was pondering the question: what do we have in our time that’s readily available, as plentiful as balsa wood, and could be used to construct a craft for a journey that would both highlight all the messages above and test a theory a la the Kontiki in the open ocean? The answer was literally at my feet. Plastic bottles.

Modern society produces piles upon piles of plastic bottles. And while the United States leads the world in the consumption of bottled water, it is truly a global phenomenon. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, worldwide consumption reached forty-one billion gallons of water in 2004, an increase of fifty-seven percent in just five years. We chug and chuck, chug and chuck, day after day, month after month.

The plastic water bottle epitomizes the absurdity of our throwaway society. Each and every day, Americans consume 70 million bottles of water. That adds up to nearly nine billion gallons of water annually at a cost of approximately $11 billion; despite the fact that both the purity and taste of water flowing from the taps in our homes and workplaces is of equal or better quality. An even crueler irony is that according to the nonprofit research organization Pacific Institute it takes two liters of water to manufacture a one-liter plastic bottle. And the energy used during the life cycle of a single-use plastic bottle – from making the bottle itself to filling, shipping, chilling, and finally disposing of it – is equivalent to filling it one-quarter full with oil. Far from being “natural” or even virtuous, as many consider it, bottled water is the poster child for wasteful indulgence.

So the next step in thinking was logical. We need to re-design, re-value, reduce, reuse, and ultimately rethink our use of plastic so that it can contribute to solutions rather than compounding the problems. And with a respectful nod to the Kontiki and its audacious, attention-grabbing voyage, the Plastiki expedition was born!

The goal started out as sailing across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, to bring a global spotlight on to the plight of our oceans and marine life at the hands of plastic debris. However realizing the enormity of the problem it became apparent that if our expedition was ever going to capture hearts and minds as well as foster the creation of solutions we couldn’t just sail on any old vessel.

To this end a simple yet compelling concept was developed: construct a boat entirely out of two-liter plastic bottles, recycled waste products and innovative materials. We thought that if Plastiki could showcase smart designs that rethink the waste polluting our seas as a resource, not only a la Heyerdahl, the vessel could garner media attention on behalf of our imperiled oceans but the project would be an opportunity to develop solutions that could help to revaluate waste materials, like how we use them, what we use them for, and most importantly our disposing of them. We were hoping for a good chance to finally stem the rising tide of plastics.

Stories From a Blue Planet, w/ Alexandra Cousteau

by Jon Bowermaster on

In 2009, Alexandra Coustau’s Blue Legacy Expedition took her and a small team of documenters to five continents in one hundred days, in search of clean drinking water. Though occasionally far from the ocean, she found herself constantly seeing the link between the sea and mankind’s sustainability, as well as to her grandfather, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who would have been one hundred years old this year. Below, as excerpted from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide she reflects on her career.

The ancients told of water. Carved deeply in stone and crafted carefully in story and song, their superstitions and histories and wisdoms cascade across centuries and flow through our lives today: “From the heights of a mountain…” “By the banks of a river…” “Upon the shores of a homeland…” and so the stories go. And so we tell them still. For history has always been written in water.

And yet, for all the wonder and worship, throughout most of human history, the mysteries of this water planet were out of sight and beyond understanding. The oceans were vast unknowable surfaces across which ships sailed bravely in search of wealth or distant lands and adventure. Beneath this plane lay a mysterious void filled by the wild creatures of myth, an inexhaustible supply of fish, or some combination of both. Rivers cradled civilizations, nurturing the evolution of societies while carrying away the waste and transgressions of communities. And the rains came as they would for reasons most everyone could explain but seldom in the same way or for the same purpose. So man spoke of water as one who sees without knowing- hoping somehow to explain the wonders beyond and beneath the water planet he called home.But as time passed, the siren call of exploration tempted the hearts of both pilgrims and wanderers to pierce the dark night of ignorance and see the planets spinning-to step beyond the binding traditions of mortality and think the thoughts of gods. And they too told of water. Some throwing sheets into the wind would rush to the edge of the world to drown echoes of scorn beneath a bending horizon. Some would chart water’s course through our veins and some would harness its steam to build a bigger and better life. So story follows story as man wielded reason and exploration to unravel the mysteries of his world.

But in spite of centuries of charting the expanses of her boundaries, no one had yet searched out the depths of her oceans and this frustrated my grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Tethered to shallow, short dives by the aching in his lungs he longed to see more, to know more and so, as centuries of explorers before him had done, he sat down with a friend to rewrite the boundaries. The invention they would call the “Aqua Lung” in 1943, allowed humans to explore the underwater world for the first time, opening new fields of study and changing how we understand much of our natural surroundings.

The thrill of what he saw-of what he discovered-was more than he could contain and soon, he was back at the drawing board to design gear for my grandmother Simone and eventually even for my father Philippe.

Just four years old when his father taught him to dive, my father was so exuberant about all he saw beneath the calm surface of the water – a darting school of fish here, a brightly colored coral there, a waving forest of life just beyond – that he repeatedly tried to call out to my grandfather. He was blissfully unaware that each exclamation caused the regulator to fall out of his mouth, which my grandfather deftly and repeatedly replaced to keep his small, excited son from drowning.

When they finally got back aboard the ship, my grandfather scolded my father for his reckless enthusiasm saying, “You must be quiet underwater because it is a silent world.” My grandfather’s description of the new world to which he had introduced my father that day later became the title of his best selling book and Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World. And so we Cousteau have joined the generations of those who tell the stories of water.

Twenty-six years, a host of inventions, discoveries and awards would pass from that day. President John F. Kennedy would bestow the National Geographic’s Gold Medal on my grandfather at a White House ceremony honoring his work. The award-winning series he developed with my father, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, would be welcomed into living rooms around the world. His storytelling would launch a new generation of environmentalists and forever change how we see the oceans. And then Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I remember my grandfather telling me that the day he saw the headlines “Two Men Walk on the Moon” (knowing my grandfather, probably not without some healthy envy) was the day he knew our perception of the world would forever change. For the first time, we saw ourselves from outer space and realized unmistakably that our planet is in fact blue. Finally, people would see what he saw everyday from the deck of the Calypso: We live on a water planet.

The World Is Blue, w/Sylvia Earle

by Jon Bowermaster on

Sylvia Earle’s ocean experiences span seven decades and have taken her to every corner of the ocean planet. She is the first to remind us that we know very little about ninety-five percent of the ocean and its undersea world. When she talks, all of the world’s ocean lovers listen.

A National Geographic Explorer in Residence, founder of the Deep Search Foundation, and former chief scientist of NOAA she was dubbed “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker, a living legend by the Library of Congress, and Time magazine’s first Hero for the Planet, Sylvia has led more than 100 expeditions and been awarded more than 100 national and international honors, including the 2009 TED Prize for her wish “to explore and protect the ocean, blue heart of the planet.”

This month she led Mission Blue, a TED-sponsored gathering of ocean experts in the Galapagos. In an excerpt from my new book, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide, Sylvia discusses her love:

Diving into the ocean is rather like diving into the history of life on Earth. Nearly all of the major divisions of plants, animals, protists and other forms that have ever existed have at least some representation there, while only about half occur on the land. In a single gulp of plankton-filled water, a whale shark may swallow fifteen or so of the great wedges of animal life — fish, copepods, arrow worms, flatworms, jellyfish, comb jellies, salps, the larval stages of starfish, sponges, polychaete worms, peanut worms, ribbon worms, mollusks, brachiopods — and more.
Some think of the ocean as a great basin of sand, rocks and water, but it is really more like an enormous bowl of blue minestrone where all of the bits and pieces are alive. During thousands of hours suspended in the ocean’s embrace, I have been wreathed with jewel-like chains of luminous jellies, glided side by side with dozens of dolphins, been nose to nose with humpback whales, had close encounters with curious squids, and been followed around coral reefs by large, inquisitive groupers.

I have come to understand that every drop of ocean has carbon-based life in abundance, although most are too small to be seen without powerful magnification. Thousands of new kinds of microbes recently have been discovered thriving in each spoonful sample of what appears to be clear, lifeless seawater. Some miniscule blue-green bacteria are so abundant and productive that they generate the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take, but their existence was not detected until the 1990s.

More has been learned about the nature of the ocean – and its importance to all that we care about – in the past half century than during all preceding human history. A turning point came with the view — first seen by astronauts — of Earth as a blue sphere gleaming against the vastness of space. With increasing urgency, people wondered, “Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere in the universe?”

The quest begins by asking, “Where is the water?”

That’s the first question astrobiologist Chris McKay poses in his on-going search for life on Mars, the moons of Jupiter, and beyond. “Water,” he says, ” . . .is the single non-negotiable thing life requires. There is plenty of water without life . . .but nowhere is there life without water.”

No water, no life; no blue, no green or, as poet W. H. Auden points out, ” Thousands have lived without love – not one without water.”