As Gavin Andrus takes a seat at the helm of a green John Deere tractor, it’s still dark out at the Santa Monica Pier. The stationary Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the city sky, and unseen waves crash against the pilings and lap against the sandy shore. The rhythmic onslaught brings with it the flotsam and jetsam of modern society: plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts, straws. Some of this refuse may have been expelled from the city storm drains. Some of it may have been cast off by thoughtless beachgoers the day before. And some of it may have been borne on the currents, washing in from Mexico or Japan or who knows where.
For the next five hours or so, Andrus’s job is to clean up as much of it as possible before the crowds arrive. He has the south side of the pier. Two other tractors will take care of the north. “Grandma needs a new facelift every day,” he tells me when I hop in the cab with him a little after sunrise. Behind him, the rake attached to the tractor kicks up a kaleidoscope of colored plastic and broken glass, churning in a vortex of liquified sand.
Andrus is a California boy in his mid-50s with the kind of bemused how-could-I-get-so-lucky-to-spend-my-whole-life-on-the-beach attitude that makes people living in colder climes curse. “I’m not the kind of person to sit behind a desk,” he says, gazing at the breaking waves from inside his glass-walled cab as he tunes in to the morning radio. Lest you think his job sounds a little too copacetic, consider that the sealed cab is necessary to protect him from the fine particles stirred up outside. Breathing those in day in and day out can cause silicosis, the lung disease known as potter’s rot or gravedigger’s disease. How about beach-groomer’s lung? Andrus doesn’t want that. “It’s terrifying,” he says.
The other great occupational hazard Andrus faces is running over a person at this wee hour. Off to his left, near a lifeguard station, a homeless man is cocooned in a sleeping bag—far from the only one he’ll see this morning. “Obstacles,” Andrus says. When it’s still dark and foggy, people can come out of nowhere drunk or tired or just not paying attention. “You’ve really got to be on your game down here.”
With each pass of his section of the 5.6-kilometer-long beach, he makes a loop away from the shoreline and flicks a lever, depositing garbage—a single, sad sandal on this pass—in a growing windrow, the speed bump of debris he leaves behind for a specialized vehicle to vacuum up and filter. “Everything shows up in a windrow,” he says. “You name it. From condoms to toys to money. Occasionally, jewelry.”
He jokes about painting baby diapers on the front of the tractor, like a Second World War fighter pilot memorializing the enemies he’s shot down. He would soon run out of canvas though—gathering a dozen or more nappies on a summer day is not unrealistic. Sticking out of the vents on his dashboard are two rubber killer whales retrieved from a windrow. Not that he’s a scavenger. Andrus just notices things sometimes. He circles around to make another pass along the beach as the morning’s first yoga class convenes for sun salutations.
Santa Monica State Beach, considered by some as the birthplace of beach volleyball, ranks among the busiest in California. As many as 50,000 people flock to this stretch of coastline on a typical summer day, and, at its widest, the beach could potentially accommodate more than 30 volleyball courts. Visiting a freshly raked urban beach like this, few people realize that it can amass over 10,000 kilograms of trash during a busy summer week. After the Memorial Day holiday in May 2015, cleaning crews gathered 39,862 kilograms. That’s the equivalent of 800 North Pacific giant octopuses. If Andrus and his coworkers failed to show up for a month, the beach would start looking like a dump.
While the US $3.3-million the city spends each year maintaining its beaches is undoubtedly good for keeping the tourist dollars rolling in and protecting some of the local marine life, there are some unfortunate side effects to all this cleanliness. Out of sight means out of mind, and when a city sweeps its pollution away, urbanites lose their biggest and best indicator of how much trash is in our oceans and befouling remote shores they rarely visit. “If they don’t see it, they don’t think it’s a problem,” says Heike Lotze, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has studied the perception of marine threats around the world. And grooming itself has some unintended environmental consequences. When sweepers flatten the contours of the beach and strip the shoreline of the wrack—the rotting mess of kelp and seagrass that washes up—they turn a living beach into a sterile sandbox. When the beach hoppers and kelp flies vanish, so too do the shorebirds, including plovers and killdeer. (...)
While keeping our oceans and beaches clean of garbage is undeniably good for the environment, figuring out the best way to achieve that is complicated. Over 150 kilometers of Southern California beaches are regularly groomed, sometimes twice a day, and biologists and conservationists have begun to see the downside to tidiness.
You could call it the beach hygiene hypothesis. Just as humans may develop allergies from growing up germ-free, beaches are suffering from being too clean. Swept flat each day, the beach can become a biological desert, devoid of the rare plant and animal species that make the coastlines so special. Over two tonnes of decaying kelp get deposited on a kilometer of beach each day, a valuable resource for wildlife that is robbed by city cleanup crews on a daily basis.
Jenifer Dugan, a biologist with the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that beach hoppers, 14-legged “garbage” cleaners that thrive on wrack, have been disappearing from the coastline. “What habitat is disturbed as much as those beaches in Santa Monica?” she asks. “No agricultural practice disturbs the fields twice a day.”
On ungroomed beaches and other areas with little human impact, beach hoppers’ population can reach 100,000 individuals for every meter of beach. And on each meter of beach, they’ll devour 20 kilograms of wrack each month. “The kelp gets vaporized!” says Dugan, who has watched it happen. But when the beach hoppers, isopods, and other invertebrates that subsist on the wrack disappear, shorebirds also go hungry. That’s why barren beaches in California lose birds like killdeer and the endangered western snowy plover. Grooming can also destroy the eggs of the grunion, an unusual fish that lays its eggs in the sand at high tide.
What this research is telling us is that we need to accept that healthy beaches can sometimes be a little messy. Sure, most people going to the beach just want a clean place to lay out their towel, but they may not even realize what they’re missing. “There’s a whole ecosystem that would survive here without beach grooming,” says Karina Johnston, the director of watershed programs at the Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to protect the Santa Monica Bay.
On a cloudy May morning, she’s come out to one particular stretch of beach to show me what an ungroomed beach looks like in an urban environment, and the answer is, in part, flowers. Hundreds of canary-yellow flowers—the blooms of beach evening primrose—dot the rippling contours of the low dunes here. It’s the site of a pilot rewilding project that Johnston has been shepherding for the past two years.
In December 2016, the Bay Foundation, in partnership with the City of Santa Monica, erected a wooden sand fence on this section of the beach—a little larger than a stadium-sized soccer field—to keep the groomers out and encourage the formation of dune hummocks. Next, the organization seeded the sand with native plants, including primrose and sand verbena. These plants had been largely extirpated from the Los Angeles region until this project began. Remarkably, within four months of planting those seeds and putting up the fences, Los Angeles County also got its first western snowy plover nest in more than 70 years.
by Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Kyle Grillot
For the next five hours or so, Andrus’s job is to clean up as much of it as possible before the crowds arrive. He has the south side of the pier. Two other tractors will take care of the north. “Grandma needs a new facelift every day,” he tells me when I hop in the cab with him a little after sunrise. Behind him, the rake attached to the tractor kicks up a kaleidoscope of colored plastic and broken glass, churning in a vortex of liquified sand.
Andrus is a California boy in his mid-50s with the kind of bemused how-could-I-get-so-lucky-to-spend-my-whole-life-on-the-beach attitude that makes people living in colder climes curse. “I’m not the kind of person to sit behind a desk,” he says, gazing at the breaking waves from inside his glass-walled cab as he tunes in to the morning radio. Lest you think his job sounds a little too copacetic, consider that the sealed cab is necessary to protect him from the fine particles stirred up outside. Breathing those in day in and day out can cause silicosis, the lung disease known as potter’s rot or gravedigger’s disease. How about beach-groomer’s lung? Andrus doesn’t want that. “It’s terrifying,” he says.The other great occupational hazard Andrus faces is running over a person at this wee hour. Off to his left, near a lifeguard station, a homeless man is cocooned in a sleeping bag—far from the only one he’ll see this morning. “Obstacles,” Andrus says. When it’s still dark and foggy, people can come out of nowhere drunk or tired or just not paying attention. “You’ve really got to be on your game down here.”
With each pass of his section of the 5.6-kilometer-long beach, he makes a loop away from the shoreline and flicks a lever, depositing garbage—a single, sad sandal on this pass—in a growing windrow, the speed bump of debris he leaves behind for a specialized vehicle to vacuum up and filter. “Everything shows up in a windrow,” he says. “You name it. From condoms to toys to money. Occasionally, jewelry.”
He jokes about painting baby diapers on the front of the tractor, like a Second World War fighter pilot memorializing the enemies he’s shot down. He would soon run out of canvas though—gathering a dozen or more nappies on a summer day is not unrealistic. Sticking out of the vents on his dashboard are two rubber killer whales retrieved from a windrow. Not that he’s a scavenger. Andrus just notices things sometimes. He circles around to make another pass along the beach as the morning’s first yoga class convenes for sun salutations.
Santa Monica State Beach, considered by some as the birthplace of beach volleyball, ranks among the busiest in California. As many as 50,000 people flock to this stretch of coastline on a typical summer day, and, at its widest, the beach could potentially accommodate more than 30 volleyball courts. Visiting a freshly raked urban beach like this, few people realize that it can amass over 10,000 kilograms of trash during a busy summer week. After the Memorial Day holiday in May 2015, cleaning crews gathered 39,862 kilograms. That’s the equivalent of 800 North Pacific giant octopuses. If Andrus and his coworkers failed to show up for a month, the beach would start looking like a dump.
While the US $3.3-million the city spends each year maintaining its beaches is undoubtedly good for keeping the tourist dollars rolling in and protecting some of the local marine life, there are some unfortunate side effects to all this cleanliness. Out of sight means out of mind, and when a city sweeps its pollution away, urbanites lose their biggest and best indicator of how much trash is in our oceans and befouling remote shores they rarely visit. “If they don’t see it, they don’t think it’s a problem,” says Heike Lotze, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has studied the perception of marine threats around the world. And grooming itself has some unintended environmental consequences. When sweepers flatten the contours of the beach and strip the shoreline of the wrack—the rotting mess of kelp and seagrass that washes up—they turn a living beach into a sterile sandbox. When the beach hoppers and kelp flies vanish, so too do the shorebirds, including plovers and killdeer. (...)
While keeping our oceans and beaches clean of garbage is undeniably good for the environment, figuring out the best way to achieve that is complicated. Over 150 kilometers of Southern California beaches are regularly groomed, sometimes twice a day, and biologists and conservationists have begun to see the downside to tidiness.
You could call it the beach hygiene hypothesis. Just as humans may develop allergies from growing up germ-free, beaches are suffering from being too clean. Swept flat each day, the beach can become a biological desert, devoid of the rare plant and animal species that make the coastlines so special. Over two tonnes of decaying kelp get deposited on a kilometer of beach each day, a valuable resource for wildlife that is robbed by city cleanup crews on a daily basis.
Jenifer Dugan, a biologist with the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that beach hoppers, 14-legged “garbage” cleaners that thrive on wrack, have been disappearing from the coastline. “What habitat is disturbed as much as those beaches in Santa Monica?” she asks. “No agricultural practice disturbs the fields twice a day.”
On ungroomed beaches and other areas with little human impact, beach hoppers’ population can reach 100,000 individuals for every meter of beach. And on each meter of beach, they’ll devour 20 kilograms of wrack each month. “The kelp gets vaporized!” says Dugan, who has watched it happen. But when the beach hoppers, isopods, and other invertebrates that subsist on the wrack disappear, shorebirds also go hungry. That’s why barren beaches in California lose birds like killdeer and the endangered western snowy plover. Grooming can also destroy the eggs of the grunion, an unusual fish that lays its eggs in the sand at high tide.
What this research is telling us is that we need to accept that healthy beaches can sometimes be a little messy. Sure, most people going to the beach just want a clean place to lay out their towel, but they may not even realize what they’re missing. “There’s a whole ecosystem that would survive here without beach grooming,” says Karina Johnston, the director of watershed programs at the Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to protect the Santa Monica Bay.
On a cloudy May morning, she’s come out to one particular stretch of beach to show me what an ungroomed beach looks like in an urban environment, and the answer is, in part, flowers. Hundreds of canary-yellow flowers—the blooms of beach evening primrose—dot the rippling contours of the low dunes here. It’s the site of a pilot rewilding project that Johnston has been shepherding for the past two years.
In December 2016, the Bay Foundation, in partnership with the City of Santa Monica, erected a wooden sand fence on this section of the beach—a little larger than a stadium-sized soccer field—to keep the groomers out and encourage the formation of dune hummocks. Next, the organization seeded the sand with native plants, including primrose and sand verbena. These plants had been largely extirpated from the Los Angeles region until this project began. Remarkably, within four months of planting those seeds and putting up the fences, Los Angeles County also got its first western snowy plover nest in more than 70 years.
by Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Kyle Grillot
