Exploits of an Eco-Canoeist - man tries to save Florida Everglades - Brief Article

Animals, May, 1999 by Sy Montgomery

Stephen Nordlinger's campaigns for a cleaner Everglades.

For months, the rangers at Jay Blanchard Park in Orlando, Florida, puzzled over a mystery. Muddy garbage was piling up inside park trash cans, obviously stuff pulled from the water. And the beleaguered Little Econ River, flowing through this busy urban park, was getting cleaner.

"We couldn't figure out where in the world it was coming from," says head park ranger Dale Hatch. "But we were sure glad that whoever it was, was doing it."

All over the state, from the Florida Keys to the Everglades to the lakes and rivers of the biggest cities, trash transferred from waterways to garbage cans testifies that the Eco-Canoeist has been through again.

For a dozen years, in a canoe plastered with bumper stickers--touting the Marines; advising, "Love makes a family"; and warning, "A good planet is hard to find"--a lone canoeist, working as a volunteer, has been leaving Florida's waterways cleaner in his wake. Though his identity was a mystery at first, this once solitary missionary, with a small but dedicated corps of volunteers, is today turning the collection of river trash into a sort of sport, combining skill and smarts with some of the best wildlife viewing in Florida.

Hatch was surprised when he finally spotted the Eco-Canoeist in action. Paddling toward him in a small canoe piled high with trash was a person he recognized. On the park's soccer field, he'd seen this muscular, six-foot man dressed in fatigues, practicing his martial-arts techniques. Hatch had greeted him briefly and thought, "Uh oh."

Like Clark Kent, Stephen Nordlinger has an alter ego: the Eco-Canoeist. But unlike Superman, Nordlinger is a real-life hero whose exploits are intended to motivate others to equally heroic acts.

Nordlinger, 34, came to Florida a dozen years ago, fresh out of the Marines. "It offended me that this beautiful environment that deserves to be protected is being stomped on by litter and trash--fishing lines, beer bottles, toilets," he says.

And so he began what most people would consider a task too quixotic to imagine: he decided to try to clean up, bit by bit and usually alone, as much as he could of the state's millions of miles of rivers, lakes, swamps, canals, and ocean. The work requires skill, endurance, and a sense of adventure. Sodden river garbage is heavy and unwieldy--and somehow you have to lift it up and get it into your canoe without capsizing. "You're balancing yourself, watching out for motorboats, watching for trash, watching for alligators--all at the same time," explains Nordlinger. "When I get fires and refrigerators, it's a constant balancing act."

The garbage may be booby-trapped, too. Fire ants will take up residence in floating trash. Some garbage is barbed with fishing hooks and brittle rust. A discarded fishing line can slice through flesh. This trash isn't just ugly; it's dangerous for both people and wildlife.

"I see the birds tortured by fishing lures, and turtles eating the Styrofoam, and manatees caught in ropes," says Nordlinger. "Every rope I pick up is a rope that won't get tied around another animal. Every fishing lure I see is one that won't get swallowed by a pelican. Pulling a lure out of a tree is like pulling it out of the mouth of a bird--before it gets in the bird."

Traveling slowly and working carefully from his canoe, Nordlinger's found his eco-cleanups offer unparalleled views of wildlife. Dolphins, manatees, river otters, and even sea turtles have popped up right in front of him. "This is a little bit mystical," Nordlinger says, "but I think the wildlife are actually giving me a message: it's as if they're saying, `We need you to be out there helping us.'"

Every chance he got, when he wasn't working at his job as residential advisor at a mental health center or teaching martial-arts classes, Nordlinger took to his canoe. By conservative estimates, he has single-handedly removed 240 tons of garbage from Florida's waters.

But it was on a trip to the Amazon--a trip he took to mull over his life and his destiny--that he came to a turning point. "I realized that it's not what I'm doing that's wrong; it's how I'm going about it," he recalls. "I'm doing it in secret. I'm having these wonderful experiences with the birds and the alligators, the birds and the plants and the fish. But no one knows about it. I'm not motivating anyone else to do it."

That's how The Eco-Canoeist's Journal was born. Part diary, part natural history, part instructional guide, The Eco-Canoeist's Journal is a hand-lettered, hand-illustrated record of Nordlinger's trash-collecting adventures--now in four volumes. The exploits depicted are worthy of a comic-book superhero: encounters with manatees, sharks, and dolphins; struggling to hoist a mud-filled tire onto a tiny canoe; rescuing a heron choking on discarded fishing line.

After photocopying and stapling each copy, the author began knocking on doors of bookstores around the state to see if shopkeepers would carry them. Many refused. The owner of a tony Key Largo dive shop told Nordlinger that his customers didn't want to read about trash; it was too depressing. But others snapped up the Journals. From a dozen or so stores across the state, the books eventually found their way into the Orange County school system, where they're used in environmental-education classes. County public attorney Steve DeRocher was so impressed with the books he sent one to every county commissioner. At the Eco-Store in College Park, owner Beth Hollenbeck not only decided to sell the journals; she also joined the cleanups herself.