One person’s trash
is another’s cause
DEEP
DIVE
GO BENEATH THE
SURFACE WITH
PAUL HAEDER
I first met him near Devil’s
Punchbowl, screening beach debris
— microplastics — during one of his
weekly Otter Rock shore cleanups. On
this day, 12 volunteers were genuflecting
and prostrating themselves using shovels
and screens to tease out the white and
bright-colored particles of modern man’s
disposability from sand and organic
detritus.
That was his role with the non-
profit, Surfrider, when he used to be the
Newport chapter’s chair.
Scott Rosin’s now on a different
mission — getting all of Lincoln
County’s plastic out of the waste stream
and pollution vectors and into our road-
surfacing materials.
We’ve met a few times since, in
addition to me being recruited by him
to be a captain for one of the cleanups
sponsored by SOLVE and Surfrider.
During our first farewell handshake,
he handed me a 2018 book of his poetry,
“Tell ‘em We’re Surfing — The Surf
Poetry Collection.”
The 71-year-old Rosin has been
hanging ten and riding waves since
age 12 while growing up in Torrance,
California, and he has seen the Oregon
Coast horizon from the tops of Doug
firs as a tree man for almost a half
century.
He has felled tens of thousands of
trees.
Having migrated from his birthplace
in Redondo Beach to the Oregon Coast
Range, he’s now in yet another evolution
as co-founder of a recycling non-
profit, Plastic Up-Cycling (converting
discarded plastic into useful durable
products).
He’s in both a personal (two years,
met her on OK Cupid) and professional
partnership (she helped write the grant
and spearhead Plastic Up-Cycling —
founded Sept. 2019) with Katharine
Valentino.
For this Deep Dive, Scott submits to
unadulterated stealth probing into both
his personal narrative decades before
co-leading Plastic Up-Cycling with his
partner Katharine, and now as a crusader
for mitigating the disgusting plastic
waste in our landfills, on the land and in
oceans.
An alternative headline might read,
“The Little Dutch Boy (Old Jewish-
Scots-Irish Man) Puts Ten Fingers in
the Bursting Dike!”
“Approximately eight billion tons
of plastic are in our oceans now, along
with unknowable megatons in our
landfills and scattered throughout our
environment,” he said. “Today, plastic
is found in almost everything we eat.
Even more disturbing, the stuff floats in
the air. We’re all breathing it. There is
growing evidence that toxins associated
with plastic are responsible for human
health problems such as cancers and
brain, reproductive and cardiovascular
damage.”
It’s the Ocean, Stupid — not the
economy
Scott and I swap stories about each
of our own crusades fighting rampant
despoilment of ecosystems and human
settlements — societies that were once
much more reigned-in, tamer consumer-
wise and less impacting with much
smaller ecological footprints.
Life on the planet today — with 7.5
billion people, many of whom want
unregulated, unmitigated, unlimited
consumerism — is a discombobulated
shadow of its old self: increased traffic
gridlock, regular water pollution
warnings, stagnant air advisories,
housing costs, chemical and pesticide
contamination, water restriction and
more. Welcome to the party!
We’re talking about the little town
of Newport, not just Shanghai or San
Francisco.
While Scott has proverbially risen
from the ashes a few times in his life,
his credo for decades has been “clean air,
clean water and clean soil.” He believes
regulations like the clean air and water
acts should be expanded, strengthened
and policed more vigorously.
This inevitably puts him at odds
with some of his neighbors, who are
vehemently out of touch with how a
democracy works: we need collective
rules, regs, laws, permits “to ensure
health, safety and welfare for humans
and non-humans alike.”
Corporations have a history of not
being good neighbors.
From sick bed to fast track
Scott’s life changed when he was
young, aged 11, sick and bed-ridden for
months. Another time of significant
emotion catalyst occurred when his
mother divorced her physically and
emotionally abusive aerospace engineer
husband.
Juxtapositions count: After more
than half a century of manual labor,
some might think it unusual Scott Rosin
spent time at El Camino
Community College and then
San Fernando Valley State
working on an English degree.
“I’ve been writing poetry
and short stories since I was a
kid.”
Maybe that love of surfing,
coupled with love of rhetorical
and philosophical grounding
enhanced his ability to see the
big picture(s).
And a drive to get involved.
The systems that are
interconnected to the
gargantuan plastic pollution
problem include the rise
of fossil fuel extraction/
production/use; the infusion
of natural gas into the plastics
industry; the marketing of a
throwaway society; and the
insistence on single-use plastic
bags and packaging to fuel
capitalism.
However, this concept
of “better living through
chemistry” (DuPont’s
marketing campaign starting
in 1935) has created more
than an unsightly mess of
waste covering the globe (even a single-
use plastic bag was photographed by an
ROV — remote operated vehicle — at
the bottom of the Mariana Trench at a
depth of 36,000 feet).
More concerning to Scott, Katharine
and legions of people like me is the
death of phytoplankton tied directly to
microplastics suffocating them. (Phyto)
plankton serves as the lungs of the ocean
— releasing oxygen in the process of
photosynthesis, which facilitates ocean
health. It provides the mechanism
wherein sunlight gets converted into
food stuffs. It serves as the basic building
block and food for all other marine
creatures.
Easily, half of the world’s oxygen
comes from plankton. “The remainder is
from trees and plants on land, which are
also severely stressed by global climate
change, massive fires and logging.”
•••
Read on as Deep Dive continues at
www.oregoncoasttoday.com.
Paul Haeder is a writer living and
working in Lincoln County. He has
two books coming out, one a short story
collection, “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing
from Vietnam,” and a non-f iction book,
“No More Messing Around: The Good, Bad
and Ugly of America’s Education System.”
oregoncoastTODAY.com • facebook.com/oregoncoasttoday • May 8, 2020 • 7