Tyler Rowe and I camped on Isla Maxima, the small island on the eastern arm of Kingman, last night. We wanted to experience the isolation of an ocean dot made of coral rubble and giant clamshells. The moon rose as the sun set in the opposite corner of the sky. Two large spotted eagle rays hovered over a reef colored with pink coralline algae. A dozen brown boobies glided over the water, up and down, back and forth, as if on an endless aerial rollercoaster.

The monotonous roar of the waves pounding the reef crest triggered a primordial sense in me. I felt transported to an ancient forge where islands were made. Opening my eyes, however, transported me to the present instantly. I saw trash.

In August 2005 we cleaned Isla Maxima. It was heartbreaking to see with our own eyes the long shadow of humans. We filled ten large trash bags with a variety of items alien to the reef, ranging from flip-flops to an Indonesian hair gel container. Ocean currents transport trash from the shores of Asia and America to the central Pacific, and some of it ends up washed at Kingman Reef.

Our return to Kingman exactly two years later provided an excellent opportunity to estimate how much human-created debris can accumulate on a remote atoll thousands of miles away from any large human population.

This unintended experiment yielded 52 plastic water or soda bottles, eight flip-flops/shoes, eight unidentified plastic containers-all bleached except two with Japanese characters-three fluorescent tubes, three lighters, two plastic forks, one deodorant stick, one motor oil container, one intact light bulb, one aluminum pipe three foot long, one plastic funnel, one heavily used toothbrush, one Stanford University baseball cap, plastic tubing, nylon ropes and string, various pieces of foam, and a 15-foot piece of a trawler net. Everything fit in two large industrial trash bags-one for the net, the other for the rest.

The common denominator was plastic. Plastic will be one of our longer-lasting signatures in the planet. It is tough, long-lived, and floats. Even new-generation plastic that degrades with sunlight does not disappear completely, but breaks up into increasingly small pieces.

Plastic generated in Japan and America is trapped in a convergence of ocean currents in the north Pacific, creating an island of plastic the size of Texas that ships lethal parcels to paradises such as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. In that archipelago, albatrosses mistake plastic for fish and squid; their stomachs fill up and they die. My friend Alexandros Frantzis found a 2-year old sperm whale washed ashore in Mikonos, Greece, with its large stomach loaded with sacks and plastic bags; the stomach was as hard as a rock. Off the coast of California, a study conducted by the Algalita Foundation showed that the mass of plastic was twice as great as the mass of plankton, the basis of the open ocean food web. There are many more examples.

There are no truly remote places in the ocean anymore. Small islands have become distant parts of the mainlands, linked by a weak yet present thread. Next time you are given all those plastic bags at the grocery store, or buy cases of water bottles, think about the consequences.

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