1 week Ago By Paul Kilduff
For most, a trip to Antarctica would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience — for Jenny Hartigan, a science teacher at Alameda’s Lincoln Middle School, it was also a chance to bring back firsthand knowledge of how seemingly unspoiled areas are being affected by things we may not even notice here, such as the impact single-use plastics can have on a region at the other end of the Earth.The 25-year educator was one of 34 teachers from Canada and the United States chosen from more than 500 applicants for a spot in the Grosvenor Teacher Fellows program, a partnership between the National Geographic Society and Lindblad Expeditions that sponsored the two-week Antarctica voyage this past December (expeditions.com/globalassets/pdf/gtf_biobook_2024_.
pdf).The trip’s purpose was to collect information to help foster a sense of curiosity about an issue among her students “and then to identify who you could work collaboratively with to help solve this problem and really bring about change,” says Hartigan.Upon arriving in Antarctica, Hartigan was expecting to see plastic debris littering the landscape — a common sight in many parts of the world.
But the plastic junk she was expecting wasn’t there. Hartigan learned that researchers believe this is because the area is blocked off by the circumpolar current created by the Drake Passage — the water channel between Antarctica and Chile’s Cape Horn (britannica.com/place/Drake-Passage) through which ships used to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean before the Panama Canal was built — and which protects Antarctica from being flooded with plastic trash.
So everyone can sleep easy, right? Wrong. After some more research, Hartigan learned that in the last three years evidence of microplastics, tiny pieces of broken-down plastic, has been found in fresh snow in Antarctica.“So it’s there.
And when we talk about seeing plastic on the ground here and what happens to it, it doesn’t degrade for a long time. It just breaks down into small pieces. And it eventually makes itself to even this remote, amazing place like Antarctica,” says Hartigan.
What can be done about it?“I sent the students out with an app called the Debris Tracker, and they collected trash on campus and recorded it in the app. It maps what they found, where they picked it up and categorizes it as to what kind it is. Out of 876 pieces of plastic just under 600 were food wrappers.
And so then the next question is what can we do about that? Aside from just picking it up every day? Can we change the system upstream?” says Hartigan.Taking the bull by the horns, five of her students wrote letters to the Alameda Unified School District’s superintendent and food services director suggesting that the AUSD switch from plastic utensils in the cafeteria to wooden compostable ones. AUSD officials last month decided to do just that.
“A lot of the lesson is, ‘Who can we identify that has the power to change something?’ So they identified the food services director and the superintendent,” Hartigan said. “And the ones that did end up writing the letter were definitely interested in that project. They wanted to write.
They wanted to talk to that person.”Hartigan said one group of her students even called the school district’s food services director from the classroom on a cell phone.“I never realized that the plastic I use can end up in remote places like Antarctica.
It inspired me to look further into solutions and ways we can eliminate plastics to protect our planet. The impact we make on sea life and wildlife is bigger than you think,” said one of Hartigan’s students, Eleanor Pahati.Another student, Emelia Louis, said her letter to the food services director made her feel “very accomplished.
We were able to eliminate plastic utensils in our school cafeteria! I’m very happy, and I hope to keep making changes like this in my community.”Related ArticlesScientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica’s ‘doomsday’ glacier‘Rising Seas’ climate art, performance series returning to Alameda in MayChile’s speedy vaccination drive reaches AntarcticaNot all of Hartigan’s students were psyched about the prospect of dealing with bureaucrats, though. Instead, they made a rap video “and had to submit a script and include research,” says Hartigan.
As life-changing of a trip as Hartigan’s Antarctica experience was, it almost didn’t happen. Six weeks before she was about to leave, her father died. While grieving that loss, three weeks later she was hit by a car while riding her bike and knocked unconscious, breaking her collarbone.
“I do not remember what happened,” said Hartigan, who also was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 10 years ago.“I had to figure out what I was going to do, had to make sure my collarbone healed.”As a self-described “very independent person,” Hartigan was suddenly forced to rely on others for little things like hefting her luggage that she could no longer pick up due to the injury.
Her husband even offered to fly with her to Buenos Aires to help with the load.In the end Hartigan made the journey — including the two days it took for her tour group’s ship to navigate the Drake Passage to Antarctica — on her own. Now her students are reaping the benefits of her insightful journey.
Paul Kilduff is a San Francisco-based writer who also draws cartoons. He can be reached at [email protected].
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