Map of David de Rothschild’s planned Pacific trip by Emily Cooper for National Geographic Adventure.

When I wrote some practical advice for traveling to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought it was the most far fetched of the disaster destinations I explored. It was certainly the most far flung, as you have to motor a boat for a week just to get there. And it’s the most boring. There’s little life and almost no wind out there. And no, there aren’t mountains of trash to climb around on. Just the open ocean.

Well, according to this National Geographic Adventure article by Paul Kvinta, David de Rothschild will be making the trip in a catamaran custom-built to float on pontoons of plastic water bottles. Since the boat will have no rudder, he’ll steer using jib sails, and I wonder how that will work with the whole no wind thing. After he hits the floating plastic graveyard he’ll move on to Bikini Atoll to check out the former nuclear test site, then he’ll stop at the island of Tuvalu, which risks getting swamped as sea levels rise in response to global warming. The trip will take four months, and you can follow its progress here.

When I talked to Beverly Parsons, a San Diego charter broker who has been in the industry for almost 40 years, about hiring of boat to visit the Eastern Garbage Patch, she thought it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “It would take a really seaworthy person to go there,” she said. “The only kind of people who do that are real adventurers.” In that case, nice job, Kvinta and Adventure, and good luck, de Rothschild.

Breeder hens on Morgan Farm in Oklahoma by Tim Morgan

Alex at Pruned proposes a tour of industrial-scale chicken farms in Maryland. According to the New York Times article that inspired him, the state produces 570 million of the birds a year. Seems their droppings wash out into the Chesapeake Bay, which is becoming increasingly polluted and losing its fisheries. The state has proposed some stricter regulations, which farmers think are a load of crap. They’ll make more work for the farmers and (I’m guessing) make raising chickens more expensive.

Highlights of the trip would include mountains of manure and 500-foot-long coops. I wonder if we could meet any farmers? Or take a cruise on the Bay?

Photo of the Berkeley Pit by Don Ankney

Some people have been asking me how I could call a lake so polluted it kills swans a romantic getaway. And am I serious about visiting these ecodisaster sites, or was the article a joke?

Yes and no. The story was a satire on the style of ecotourism destination roundups, but all of these places are totally worth visiting. Each one is like a historical monument that tells us how we came to be the country we are — the miners of Butte, for example, dug that big hole in the ground so we could make copper electrical wires and light our cities.

Each one is also a great place to go and ‘be with nature’. We tend to think of nature as some other place away from the cities and away from civilization, but, as Jenny Price pointed out in her great Believer piece about finding nature in LA, by doing that we ignore the natural world around us and, crucially, our role in shaping it.

So! My prescription for a romantic Superfund encounter: Stand at the edge of the Berkeley Pit, under the ridge of the continental divide and at the edge of the Deer Lodge National Forest, and look for yourself in its red waters. You might just have one of those ‘the world is so big and I’m so small’ moments that we usually associate with mountain peaks and Niagara Falls and that make us reach for our loved ones.

Speaking of Jenny Price, tours of environmentally damaged areas that are cropping up all over the place and she’s right in the thick of it with trips to the LA River and disputed Malibu beaches over at the LA Urban Rangers. Another travel idea is the Futurefarmers’ Silicon Valley Superfund tour, which you could take on your own with the help of their interactive map (follow the Superfund map link). There are also Global Exchange’s Reality Tours and there’s a Toxic Tourism book about using site visits as an environmental advocacy tool. For more self-guided experiences of our impact on the environment, the database at the Center for Land Use Interpretation is a great resource. In August, they’re doing a bus trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in LA, which was the nation’s largest landfill in 2005! Too bad it’s all booked.

There’s more, too. You can find some gathered at the Temporary Travel Office and advice on visiting Chernobyl, plus links to the dirtiest spots in the world at the pollution tourism blog.

Welcome to the Internet, a convenient place to find my new blog and news about the articles I’ve written. I was on NPR talking about my latest story today — a guide to hot ecodisaster travel destinations in the United States, published by GOOD magazine. It’s a roundup of five super fascinating spots like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the country’s largest body of toxic water, and Centralia, Pennsylvania, a ghost town on top of an underground coal fire that’s been burning for over 40 years. Sounds like a joke, but it’s not. They charge admission to the viewing platform at the Pit, and another of the sites — the Salton Sea in southern California — used to attract more visitors than Yosemite!