4     In Alaska, where the animals first made landfall, Hohn travels with Chris Pallister, a lawyer recently separated from his wife, and down on his luck, who has made it his mission to clean up a remote outpost called Gore Point. Situated on the windward shore of an isthmus, Gore Point is "one of the wildest places left on the American coastline and one of the last places on the planet you'd expect to have a garbage problem". But it has become "a kind of postmodern midden heap", with thousands of tons of ocean-borne trash reaching a hundred yards back into the trees. Here, 15 years after the spill, Hohn finds his first plastic animal. It's a beaver, once a "lurid, maraschino red" like a "mammalian interloper from somebody's acid trip", bleached by the waves to a pale ghost of its former self.

5     Hohn avoids romantic ideas about nature, so the incongruity of his find inspires greater awe than the wilderness around him. He says more than once that the scenery of Alaska, Hawaii or the Arctic is no more impressive first-hand than when mediated by painting, photography or literature. Nature writers' hyperbole led him "to expect too much". The trash heap, on the other hand, "sounded like a kind of wonder, akin to the Mammoth Caves or Stonehenge or the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, except that the Gore Point midden heap was the collaborative work of both nature and man, an unforeseen marvel that the ocean had wrought with the raw material we'd provided it", and which will soon be added to when the Alaskan coast is visited by massive quantities of debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Because it's a marvel, some beachcombers object to the clean-up, and point out that the operation's corporate sponsors include BP and cruise companies. Hohn agrees: he worries that a focus on nature's purity enables what could be called greenwashing and that the Sisyphean task of bagging trash replaces more meaningful action. He sends his plastic beaver for chemical analysis and learns that it would take centuries to biodegrade and that toxins cling to the plastic, a process known as adsorption. The beaver was coated in 12 different polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, carcinogens banned in the United States since 1979. "Some stories," Hohn writes, "only a mass spectrometer can tell."

13      Moby Dick and Moby Duck both dwell on the Pacific Ocean and the problem of its abundance. Moby Dick reconfigured the Pacific as an American West that would never be won, where "the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago". Moby Duck tries to rescue the Pacific from its usual role as a metaphor for all there is on Earth that man will never be able to pave over. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon wrote of "some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth". Hohn flips the notion: the edges will be cleaned up, and the ugliness concentrated in the garbage patches of the oceanic gyres. He focuses on the plastic duck, buoyant as Queequeg's coffin in the immensity, not to emphasise the smallness of humans and their petty endeavours, but so that one might try to think of the Pacific as no more inviolate than a bathtub.

14      Hohn never suggests that plastic pollution is the worst threat facing the oceans: "that honour goes to global warming, or ocean acidification, or overfishing or agricultural runoff". But plastic pollution could be curtailed. Nobody can deny that we produce plastic for purposes that don't require it, from cradles that keep our fruit from bruising to tampon applicators that could just as well be cardboard. "As numerous conservationists have told me, compared with other environmental problems this one should be easy to solve," Hohn writes. "And yet we show no sign of solving it."