It was the birds that finally made me break down and weep. The Hawaiian island of Midway is the main breeding ground for the Laysan albatross, as beautiful a seabird as you will ever see. But standing on a Midway beach, I was surrounded by thousands of dead and dying albatross chicks. I could not move without standing on dead birds. I was filming a Natural World documentary for the BBC about the environmental crisis facing the region's marine wildlife. But this was beyond a crisis - this was an apocalypse.
Adult albatrosses fly out over the sea for thousands of miles looking for brightly coloured squid to feed on. However, today there is so much colourful plastic in the water that they pick this up instead. They fly back and feed their chicks with it. It fills up the chicks' stomachs so they die.
Two years ago I thought I was environmentally aware. I was born on a South Devon farm where my father instilled in me the importance of thinking green. And I work as a camerawoman for the BBC Natural History Unit. But I was just sleepwalking then. I had no idea how desperate our situation really is.
My wake-up call started 18 months ago on the island chain of Hawaii at the start of my wildlife documentary. We had heard that in the North Pacific the ocean currents move in a huge circular motion, sucking in all the rubbish from the continents into the centre, where Hawaii is. We had learned that 80 per cent of all marine litter comes from land and that 90 per cent of it is plastic, but what we didn't know was the scale of the problem. Our ignorance became clear when we interviewed researcher Charles Moore.
Charlie said: "Guys, let me take you to the dirtiest beach in the world."
Kamilo beach was five miles long but wasn't the golden sand you would expect of a Hawaiian beach. It was multi-coloured as far as the eye could see. Cups, keyboards, DVDs, plates, combs, knives, forks, toys, TVs, drink bottles, sandwich wrappers, lipsticks, hair brushes, pens, shoes, plugs, clocks - every plastic item you would find in a typical house was on that beach.
"Welcome to consumer throwaway living," said Charlie. He pointed to the sand - it wasn't sand, it was tiny fragments of plastic, small enough to be eaten by animals at the bottom of the food chain. This plastic carries dangerous toxins that ascend the food chain right up to the top. Guess where we are in that food chain.
7
Charlie's last words to us that day haunted me. "Plastic lasts for at least 400 years and each year it's getting worse." Four centuries to clear up the mess - and that's if we start today. Over the following months we watched a whale rescue team untangling a whale from plastic ropes; I came across an old turtle and her throat was full of plastic packaging; we talked to seal scientists who told us they regularly have to rescue animals from plastic; dolphins were using a plastic bag as a football, unaware of the danger; and on Midway, the albatrosses moved me to tears. I knew I had to do something, anything.
Back home in South Devon, I wondered how on earth I was going to get people to understand what we are doing to the planet.
By March this year our documentary was finished and I lent a copy to a friend, Adam, who runs a delicatessen in my home town of Modbury. The next evening he told me he wanted to stop using plastic bags in his shop. I lent the film to another friend, Sue, who owns an art gallery. Her response was the same. Suddenly the penny dropped - two traders, same reaction. Why not get all the town's traders to watch the film? Sue offered her gallery as a venue and so the Modbury campaign began.
Of the town's 43 traders, 37 turned up and after the film I told them the facts and figures about marine plastic. I told them how bits of plastic act like sponges for many of the nasty chemicals we have been pouring into the oceans. These chemicals move up the food chain and end up in us. Many of these chemicals cause cancer. When I had finished, the room was silent. Everyone looked shocked. Simon, our local butcher, whispered to me to take a vote on the proposed bag ban. Every hand went up.
Over the following month, half the world's press seemed to descend on our town. Modbury wasn't just the first town in Britain to ban plastic bags, it was the first town in Europe to do so. Other towns followed our lead. Then e-mails came in from Sweden, from America, from China. They all wanted to ban plastic bags. Six months on and in Modbury our ban has been a huge success. Trade has not suffered and the traders have saved half a million bags. They now sell reusable cotton bags and biodegradable bags.
I'm thrilled with the campaign, but walking on my local beaches provides a nasty reality check. There is throwaway plastic still littering the sand.
Water covers seven-tenths of the Earth. The oceans are the lungs of the world, providing far more oxygen than all the rainforests. We are polluting them at a terrifying rate and politicians are doing practically nothing about it.
It takes nature 300 million years to form oil. We use much of the plastic made from that oil for just a few moments before discarding it. It then takes another 400 to 1,000 years for that plastic to degrade. Is that not madness? What a waste of our planet.