Renée Ater

Dedicated to Xavier Cortada, whose activist, science-based artwork has taught me that art, the environment, and community participation and action are inextricably linked.

Earth Day
April 22, 2020

This winter, I watched a television show that featured a University of Florida (UF) professor discussing microplastics in the Florida Keys. Her laboratory was the beautiful beach and rocky shore. With every sift of her mesh sieve, the researcher captured microplastics from what looked like pristine sand. Her act of straining the sand to reveal multi-colored bits of plastics made me think hard about the visible and invisible plastic on the beach near me.

I had never considered microplastics in relation to that beach that I have visited for the past sixteen years: Pass-a-Grille Beach, the southernmost end of St. Pete Beach, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. In January and February, it can be soothingly quiet. You can hear the dry brush of the palms and the squeaking and squawking of the nanday parakeets. The sun is warm, not too hot, so it gently knocks off the chill. The “sugar sand” seems clean and bright.

This beauty relaxes and lulls you.

What I discovered is that the beauty and quiet reserve of this place also hides the true impact of our human presence on it: our use of plastic and other disposable goods. So instead of searching for seashells along the shore, I decided to hunt for plastic.

From February 3 - February 23, 2020, I began to look for plastic, microplastic, discarded metal, and pieces of rubber and foam in the wrack. The wrack zone or wrack line marks the high tide line. It is the line of debris washed ashore during high tide. Here, I have noticed that natural debris includes sea grass, mangrove propagules, feathers, dead fish and crustaceans, shells, pieces of crabbing and fishing gear, and pieces of wood and tree branches. The wrack serves an important function: it provides food for sea birds; it adds structure to the beach landscape by blocking light and retaining moisture for insects and small creatures; and it helps building up and anchoring the dunes. (See C. H. Ward, ed., Habitats and Biota of the Gulf of Mexico: Before the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, vol. 1, 2017).

In Pass-a-Grille Beach, I discovered that the wrack is more than tossed sea grass on the beach: it contains a large amount of hidden plastic and garbage.

In the mornings and late afternoons, I explored the wrack with a found bamboo stick and metal bowl. Human detritus was surprisingly easy to find: sometimes lying in plain sight, other times hidden under layers of drying sea grass.

In a two-block area of the beach, I collected a range of objects and trash from the wrack. As this collection started to grow exponentially over the twenty-three days, I washed and sorted it. I found water bottle tops and straws, cigarette lighters and cigarette butts, rope and plastic-coated wire, beer cans and umbrella bumpers, cellphone wrappers and plastic lids, and children’s beach toys and the remains of rubber tires. I was surprised to see the volume of our remains, forlorn objects no longer useful, some it ground down into color bits of microplastic,

Only by accident, I saw myself in these disposable objects. I took the below picture to capture the thin red piece of plastic, to give it context within the wrack. Only later did I notice my shadow, the outline of my body a part of the beach, the wrack, and the degraded plastic remains.

Plastic Wars, Frontline, PBS, March 31, 2020: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/.

Florida Microplastic Awareness Project, Florida Sea Grant Program, University of Florida, http://flseagrant.ifas.ufl.edu/microplastics/.