Sunset at Boracay

The Philippine authorities have completely closed the vacation island of Boracay, its #1 sun and fun destination for both foreign and domestic tourists, for the next 6 months. They are calling the island a cesspool. Literally.

It takes a serious “state of calamity” to turn away the kind of money the island brings in. Over $US 1 billion, 20% of the country’s tourism revenue, is generated by some 2 million tourists visiting this tiny island every year. And that is exactly the problem.

This popularity, combined with overdevelopment and inadequate infrastructure, has destroyed the very things that attracted all those people in the first place. Businesses have been dumping sewage and trash directly into the ocean and thousands of what they call “illegal structures”, squatters’ shacks without facilities, have been built along streams and outlets draining directly to the oceans. The island is trashed, the environment destroyed, those crystal clear oceans on white sandy shores are filled with litter and human waste.

During the time of closure they will get started on fixing what has become a totally inadequate infrastructure for sewage treatment, garbage, and roads systems although fixing what’s wrong with it will take much longer than that.

I never visited Boracay when we lived in the Philippines as the crowds never appealed to me, but I did have occasion to witness (and touch) first hand an ocean beach destroyed. It was on the final morning of a weekend stay at a beach in southern Luzon, a few hours’ drive from our home in Manila. I went out for a final snorkel and was hovering above the nearby reef off the beach when I became aware of a sensation of something getting caught between my outstretched fingers and gliding along my bare arms. My first thought was that it felt like seaweed or kelp or something like that but when I raised my eyes to look I saw that it was garbage! Wrappers and plastic bags, juice boxes and plastic water bottles and who knows what else – it was so thick and plentiful that it seemed like a garbage truck just around the edge of the cove had dumped its contents into the ocean leaving the tides and currents to bring it our way. But that would be mad. It would assume the town had a garbage truck.

So last month the government shut the entire island of Boracay down as they do whatever they’re going to do. They are sending in 600 police officers including a riot squad to patrol the beaches presumably to make sure no one sneaks on to them. Although another way of looking at the police presence is that a lot of people are at odds with the government’s decision to close the island including local business owners and the 17,000 people who earn their livelihoods in the tourist industry and are now out of work.

Long Beach, Tofino, west coast of Vancouver Island

Of course the Philippines is not the only one with problems. The entire planet is affected by human trash. On our recent trip to the west coast of Vancouver Island we noticed garbage collection zones at the pathways to the beaches where people can deposit stuff they’ve picked up on their walks as well as, I suppose, from larger more organized volunteer cleanups. Most of it is consumer plastic and fishing equipment and the Tofino area still picks up identifiable debris from the Japanese tsunami of 2011. You could see a lot of fishing lines, nets and ropes, that is particularly problematic for wildlife. We did pick up large pieces of plastic that had rolled onto the beach with the tide but what was also disturbing is, if you look closely at the sand, there are a lot of really small pieces of plastic as well. All of this is really having an impact on ocean wildlife. Recently a sperm whale dead on a Mediterranean beach in Spain was found to have ingested 64 kilos of plastic. I’ve personally witnessed sea lions with plastic ropes circling their necks, cutting into their flesh, just up the coast from where we live and every year marine biologists from the Vancouver Aquarium come over to help rescue the animals from their entanglements.

The thing about all this plastic we use and throw away is that it will never degrade, it’s to be found on land everywhere and a lot of it ends up in the oceans. Even at the deepest part of the ocean, 36,000 feet deep in the Mariana Trench, researchers have found images of plastic bags among other trash. Meanwhile China announced earlier this year that they will no longer accept recycled plastic waste from the rest of the world which has caused some countries to get in to a tizzy, as they scramble to figure out what to do with it all. No more shipping your garbage out of sight out of mind to some faraway country, pretending the problem is not a global one. Previously “recycled” plastic is now piling up and, without a place to put it, is ending up once again in landfills.

A woman sits with her baby in a sea of plastic in Laizhou, China, where she works on ripping the labels off the bottles. Photo: Peter Ford/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images

But even that recycling blue box is not good enough when trying to get a handle on all that plastic waste. A guy in England last year collected every piece of plastic he used for an entire year and created an installation displaying it all. An impressive and sobering visual of our “normal” plastic consumption. But here’s the thing. Of the 4,490 separate plastic items he collected, only 56 were actually totally recyclable. (See treehugger.com/plastic/what-years-worth-plastic-looks for the story). Often as individuals we may think we’re doing something good by recycling plastic but the fact is a lot of it never gets recycled. The only answer is to not use it in the first place, and given the overpackaging that prevails in our society, that is not easy to do.

Daniel Webb’s year’s collection of his plastic use. Photo: Ollie Harrop

This dead albatross chick was found with plastics in its stomach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Photo: Dan Clark,, USFWS/AP

Closer to home, the city of Vancouver throws 2 million plastic bags away into the trash every week and is intending to ban plastic straws, which has the bubble tea shops protesting the move. Other municipalities all over are starting to ban single use plastics, or at least starting to talk about it. The city of Victoria recently announced a plastic bag ban to start July 1, but that is being challenged in court by – yes – the Canadian Plastic Bag Association. Of course it is. The scope of the problem can be overwhelming and it’s easy to feel small and powerless, but in the end, it’s choices that got us here and choices are all we, as individuals, have. I’m trying to be consistent in remembering to bring reusable bags into the stores when I’m shopping which I guess is the very least I can do. Just say no to plastic bags. Anything to feel good for a couple of seconds that serves as distraction from obsessing over how the oceans and indeed this Earth are going to hell.

My perch at the place we stay at in Ucuelet on the west coast

Right. Just what the ocean needs. More human trash.

Thirty-seven years ago I got up in the middle of the night and sat on the rug in my bedroom with roommate Kelly watching Charles and Diana and that dress get married.

Today my galpal Annette and I watched their Number 2 son do the same.

This time there were two differences. First, we cheated and watched it recorded at a more reasonable hour. Second, we wore hats!

“So, how’s the new car?” I’m asked.

“Well I’m sure I’ll get used to it”.

Hardly the happy, excited, new toy acquisition response one would think on this rare occasion. It’s been going on 7 years since the last new car.

Oh no, the emotions surrounding this new car are mixed, to say the least.

When we first came back here after Asia we bought a Volkswagen Golf Diesel Station Wagon. A real car (as opposed to the ubiquitous SUV), perfect size, awesome cargo space, drove great, very fuel efficient.

Ads running at the time promoted the “clean diesel” of the cars and the great fuel efficiency. Believing it was better for the environment we even paid extra for the diesel model.

Then in September 2015 came the news that all those diesel cars, over 600,000 of them in North America, were bogus. They were very far from clean. What eventually was revealed was a tale of fraud and toxic corporate culture of epic proportions. They sold these cars knowing full well that were spewing out nitrogen oxide, the nasty stuff that harms human health, 40 times higher than allowable limits. For over 6 years they got away with it.

Here’s what happened.

Back in the mid 2000’s Volkswagen was keen to increase its market share in the U.S. in a big way and they wanted to do it with their diesel cars. There was just one problem with that strategy. No one had yet discovered a way to create a diesel system that could reduce NOx emissions to comply with regulations in a way that was anywhere near easy and cost efficient.

So they cheated. They installed a “defeat device” which is a software that recognizes when the car is being tested in the lab and reduces NOx emissions temporarily to yield results within legal limits. Once it’s back on the road, it goes back to its normal and releases the stuff out through the tailpipe.

In 2013 an independent lab started testing the VW diesel cars, not because fraud was suspected, but in an attempt to discover how VW had succeeded where others had not. They very quickly discovered that emissions results in the lab could not be replicated when the cars were driven on the road. The California Air Resources Board soon became involved and did their own tests with similar results.

For 15 months the Board was in intensive communication with the company as they tried to figure out what was causing the discrepancies while VW continued to stall for time. Instead of coming clean (ha) VW continued its fraud with more lies, stalling and misdirection all the while continuing to sell these vehicles to an unsuspecting public. Eventually in September 2015 they admitted what they had done. Even then this was only after the US authorities threatened them by stating they would not certify for sale any of their model 2016 cars, gas included.

Nitrogen oxide, the nasty stuff that in these cars were spewing 40 times the allowable emissions in North America, creates smog, factors in acid rain and causes health problems in humans including asthma in children. Volkswagen admitted that their massive deception was a financial decision, an “intentional, premeditated cost benefit analysis to cheat”. The wanted to be Number One no matter what.

Ultimately VW was forced to pay $25 billion in penalties including buying back all the affected vehicles from owners. So far 6 people have pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the U.S. The Chair of VW in Germany resigned but to date has faced no charges. Hundreds of thousands of internal documents showed very clearly that he definitely knew of, and sanctioned this fraud although right up to the day before his resignation he was denying all knowledge and vowing that “he was investigating how this could have happened”.

That’s it in a nutshell. The company also at various times during the attempted cover up offered to recall the vehicles to fix them – a “fix” which involved not reducing the toxic emissions, but to install a different kind of cheat device; they lied to the US Congressional investigation, stating that the problem was a result of a couple of rogue engineers; and they secretly formed with Mercedes and BMW a bogus “non-profit organization” to prove that their diesel was safe by pumping tailpipe gases into chimpanzee cages for hours (while running cartoons to distract the primates), testing their bogus lab results against an old dirty diesel engine to “prove” their cars were clean and harmless.

Volkswagen TDI Graveyard, one of 37 sites across North America. What will happen to these 600,000 diesel cars VW was forced to buy back?

So our perfect little car that turned out to be a fraud has been bought back and on its way to who knows where. For me the company’s actions were so egregious I was unable to consider another (gas) VW station wagon. Searching for a replacement was depressing. For some reason station wagons, a preferred choice, are no longer popular in North America and few manufacturers are making them. The new car is a distant second choice.

Time to move on and think less about what the new car is and more about where it will take us. A road trip was in order and off we went for a few days in March to Tofino/Ucuelet on the west coast of the island – a great antidote to winter cabin fever and this huge disappointment.

One last word before I “move on”:

Bastards.

Netflix is currently screening a documentary series Dirty Money. The first episode, Hard NOx, tells the story of this Volkswagen fraud – compelling viewing. The story does not end with North American penalties and buy backs. Six jailed executives do not change an entrenched corporate culture. Trouble still brews in Europe under a different regulatory system.