Yahoo Movies World Oceans Day: Sailor Emily Penn on why plastic pollution is a women’s issue
Emily Penn — adventurer, plastic pollution pioneer and at 34, the youngest and only female recipient of the Yachtmaster and Seamaster of the Year awards — was in the middle of the South Pacific, surrounded by dolphins, when news of Covid began to crackle through on the radio.
“Ironically,” she says, it was Friday March 13, last year. She and her nine female crewmates were eight legs into a 38,000-mile round-the-world voyage. The stakes of abandoning the expedition were high: their mission had been to spend two years circumnavigating the globe to contribute to world-class scientific studies on ocean plastic. But Covid forced Penn and her crew to abandon those plans — and their 72ft yacht, SV TravelEdge. They set sail for Tahiti, making it onto the last flight off the island with less than 24 hours to spare.
A year on and Swansea-born Penn is characteristically chipper about abandoning an expedition that had been years in the making, even though it is likely to be months before she and her crewmates can return to the high seas. “I think it’s been a bit of a wake-up call to how vulnerable we are as humans,” the Cambridge architecture graduate tells me from her home in Richmond, insisting that the pandemic — though devastating — felt somewhat “serendipitous”. After she spent more than a decade calling for greater attention on the environment and its effect on human health, the world ground to a halt and finally a spotlight was shone on those subjects.
The pandemic also highlighted pre-existing inequalities — including gender — which is at the heart of Penn’s mission. Her two-year voyage, named eXXpedition to represent a pair of female x chromosomes, set sail from Plymouth in October 2019 with a rotating all-female crew of more than 300 women from 30 nations.
“Many of the women onboard were used to sailing with men and getting told what to do,” says Penn, who often meets men shocked to find a female captain. “That opportunity to take the helm of a 70ft boat and surge through the waves in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — it was powerful.” But Penn also had a secondary reason for putting gender at the forefront: an important link between ocean toxins and female health. When plastics make their way into the ocean, they enter the food chain and eventually our bloodstreams — when Penn tested her own blood for the chemicals in these plastics, 29 of the 35 were inside her body.
Many of these chemicals are carcinogens, but many others are endocrine disrupters, meaning they mimic hormones and stop important chemical messages from moving around our bodies. For women, having these chemicals inside us during pregnancy is particularly bad news as they can be passed onto the next generation through childbirth and breastfeeding.
Very little is known about how these chemicals reached Penn’s body. “It could’ve been the pillow I slept on growing up. It could have been the time I spent on small Pacific Islands with lots of burning plastic,” she explains. “If you know a chemical is toxic and then you know that chemical is in your body, for me that was enough to try and do something about it.”
Thousands applied for the 300 places on Penn’s eXXpedition and the chosen crew was a mix of women of all ages and nationalities. Among them were scientists, artists, writers, designers - even a policewoman.
“Women hold much of the purchasing power in households — where most plastic is consumed — yet are so rarely part of the solution planning and creation,” says Penn. “We need more female leaders from all walks of life, to be part of innovation and decisions.”
After 12 years almost entirely on the move, Penn admits she’s enjoyed more time at home — not that her lockdown has been quiet. She was awarded a British Empire Medal in the Queen’s New Year honours, and her biggest new project is an online platform, shift.how, to help the public navigate the many ways to cut their use of plastic, from using reusable period products to borrowing clothes. She’s also hosted virtual expeditions — a way to bring her experiences to the masses.
Penn lists some of the most shocking sights on her real-world expeditions: the toothbrush that floated past in the Pacific; the dead albatross that was “a pile of feathers and plastic”; the dead sea turtle in Hawaii with 78 plastic fragments inside its stomach and gut. But she insists the true impact of the problem must be demonstrated by scale rather than moments.
“You want to be able to do the quick 30-second social media moment that’ll change everyone’s mind,” she says, but it just doesn’t work like that. “When you sail across an ocean, the sun comes up and you look over the side of the boat and you see a piece of plastic.
Ten seconds later, another piece of plastic. Then you put the trawl over the side of the boat and pull up the net and find 500 fragments of plastic in a sample.”
Does she not find that thought of cleaning it all up overwhelming? Quite the opposite. “The fact that the problem is billions of micro-actions is actually quite empowering,” says Penn, comparing those micro-actions to voting.
“Humans have done phenomenal things. We’ve put a man on the moon, we’re now conquering Covid… It’s going to take will and sacrifice and a lot of driven people to make it happen, but in a way, it’s really not that hard.”
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I ask whether projects like eXXpedition being on pause risks delaying the solution. Penn is positive about that, too. Her yacht might be gathering dust in Tahiti and she might be at home for many more months.
“But the problem starts on our doorsteps,” she smiles. “It’s only natural that the solutions can, too.”
To find your role in tackling ocean plastic pollution, visit Penn’s new platform shift.how
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