Over the years, I have found that the pristine places I grew up in: Indonesia, Fiji and even her home in Hawaii — are now covered in plastic bottles and trash.

The tipping point came in March 2013 when I was in Discovery Channel’s ‘Naked and Afraid,’ which placed me on a desolate island in the Maldives to survive with a male partner for 21 days. Every day, while looking for food I was shocked by the amount of beach trash covering the uninhabited island. There was literally no where to step without coming across a plastic bottle. I was later surprised to learn that villagers from the surrounding islands had spent an entire week cleaning the island for the show, boating away of tons of trash – and it still looked like an “island dump.”

And of course the most pressing issue, as stated by the former President of the Maldives, is the terrible threat of climate change to the sinking country. He stated a few years back, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be underwater in seven years.”

Where will all the people go? Where will all the plastic go?