California activists will sweat for the sea in Junk Ride 2009

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With dismay over ocean trash in their hearts and bicycles under their bottoms, two clean-sea activists are about to embark on a 2,000-mile journey down the West Coast to spotlight the effects of junk on our blue planet.

Anna Cummins and Dr. Marcus Eriksen — a pair of Santa Monica residents who have helped focus attention on the “plastic soup” of refuse that fouls the world’s oceans — will head out April 4 from Vancouver and pedal down the coast to Tijuana. They’ll hit 15 cities in 10 weeks for “Junk Ride 2009,” delivering talks to policymakers and the public as they go.

“In 10 years, the amount of trash floating out to sea has doubled,” said Eriksen, research director at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a Long Beach nonprofit. “We’ve got to find a better way soon. We’re already finding plastic waste in the food we eat.”

They’ll have some show-and-tell props to illustrate the point.

Eriksen sailed through the worst of it in the Pacific last summer aboard a raft constructed of 15,000 plastic bottles, and during their bike ride they will hand out 100 jars of debris-filled ocean water he collected.

They also will display photos of the ocean carnage trash can cause, including a dead sea turtle trapped in a plastic lawn chair and an albatross carcass bulging with tooth brushes and bottle tops.

It’s not a pretty picture, they say, but neither is the state of the sea.

-- Eric Bailey