I met Captain Charlie back in 2001. He was going around to various meetings, with a couple of pages of bullet points, and talking to anyone who would listen about the large amounts of small plastic bits he was finding on his trans-pacific sailing trips. He started throwing out a net, and counting up the plastic that he found. He found kids to sift through sand and count the small pieces of plastic on our beaches. In this way, over the course of years, this individual citizen continued the drumbeat about our increasingly plastic ocean. Every piece of plastic we produce–the plastic cup we use for one drink, the plastic tampon applicator, the plastic grocery bag–is with us forever.

For many years, people said, “Well, they’re small pieces, they don’t matter.” Or “Plastics photodegrade.” Or “The plastic industry is too powerful.” And “We can talk about recycling, but we can’t talk about reducing plastic use.”

This week, Captain Charlie was featured on US nationally broadcast morning show, the Today Show. In just a few short years, he has helped transform the cause of plastics in our ocean and the call for reducing our plastic use from a radical idea to one so mainstream that Matt Lauer is talking about it.

I post this not simply to call your attention to the problem of plastics in our oceans, but also to illustrate that the path from radical leads to the commonly-accepted. Never be afraid to speak out, to be a radical in the world. Yesterday’s radical is tomorrow’s bandwagon. Individuals citizens can, and do, change the world!

See video of Charlie on the Today Show.

For Mac users, you need to use Firefox instead of Safari to see.

Photos in this post from AMRF (www.algalita.org).