Debris Ecology
Walking the coast in an age of plastic
Sunday, 1 February, 2026
Gwendrez Plage
The gloomy weather continues to stifle my home-based creative practice. Laundry, sneakers, hanging jackets, untidy wood stacks, toys and papers spill across every surface. The birds signal a break in the rain. First a flutter of chirps, then—when I open the door—song erupts during a brief pause in what has now been months of constant rainfall.
There is no time to waste when a patch of blue sky teases the end of winter. It is only a tease, of course, but enough to propel the dog and me out of the house on foot, direction: plage. I need to raise my heart rate after days of hunching over my laptop, finalising reporting for the European Union on our association’s citizen science pilot, just wrapped.
And then it happens again: my athletic walk hijacked by washed-up plastic.
A cluster of discarded fishing nets sits just above the shoreline, likely gathered by concerned beachgoers. I pull my phone from my pocket to document the pollution and notice, once again, organisms clinging to the debris. Gooseneck barnacles (identified for me on a recent walk by friend and collaborator Dr. Corina Ciocan, when I filmed a cluster glued inside a washed-up rubber boot) are considered a delicacy in many parts of the world, fetching anywhere from 20 to 500€ per kilogram depending on where they are harvested. Their price reflects the difficulty of collection; the most prized specimens grow in places that are particularly dangerous to reach. Almost wiped out in the 1970s, they are now subject to strict catch limits. And yet this winter I have found handfuls of them hitching rides on an array of plastic marine debris.
I look down at the rocky beach revealed by the low tide and can’t un-see the sheer volume of plastic scattered across the shore. I abandon the 45-minute coastal loop I had planned and bend down to start collecting. Once I begin, it is hard to know when to stop, though there is never a moment when I feel I have made a meaningful dent.
The more I pick up, the more I see.
Today it is an overwhelming quantity of discarded fishing plastics—the same twine we have been finding as micro-particulates in the gills of oysters and mussels with college students working in the nearby Goyen River.
Over a decade ago, in a documentary I made in Peru, I narrated a line that said fishermen are the eyes and ears of our oceans.
Today, Fishing, as an industry, has transformed commercial fishermen (and women) into polluters of those same oceans.
After nearly an hour of collecting plastic, my back aches and I am fuming at the inability of global leaders to agree on last year’s treaty to end plastic pollution. Plastic pollution has more than doubled in the past two decades and shows no sign of slowing. The planet is choking on man-made waste while plastic production continues to proliferate. It is infuriating.
Back home, I collate short, vertically aligned videos into an Instagram reel to share with my followers. There is now an entire creative ecosystem devoted to plastic pollution, as artists and communicators try to engage the public and pressure policymakers. A growing body of research explores how to communicate plastic issues more effectively, and yet we remain nowhere near curbing production or use. I find myself wondering how our creative energies might otherwise be spent if plastic pollution were not a defining condition of life on Earth.
I walk for pleasure, exercise, and education. My curiosity about the living world draws me to these coastal spaces. It troubles me that I can now identify more polluting materials than birds, plants, shellfish, or algae. I don’t find beach cleans pleasurable; they make me angry and depressed.
Perhaps it is useful to feel that fire. We can no longer escape the reality of plastic pollution, and being pissed about it may be a necessary starting point for active campaigning. Still, I worry about the children—about their outdoor spaces filling with plastic, about the baseline of acceptance they are developing. Why should they be expected to clean up generations of industrial pollution? It echoes the logic of those who suggest oysters and mussels, with their remarkable filtering capacities, should serve as aquatic pollution vacuums. Where are the ethics in that?
I want my kids to learn how the ocean works through play, immersion, and encounters with biodiversity—not through beach cleans and plastic pollution analysis, as I’ve been doing with those local college students in the Goyen River.
If we don’t understand how the ocean works, how can we ever fulfill our roles as custodians? And if we don’t love the ocean as kin, how can we understand it at all? So, how do we remember how to kin?
“…it is now evident that our own species must undergo a sea change if anything of beauty is to survive. If we wish to bring humankind into a new reciprocity with the rest of the biosphere, then we will need to release ourselves from the tyranny of outmoded concepts and remember ourselves as a part of this breathing planet.”
(David Abram, Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking Between the Body and the Breathing Earth, in PLANET: Vol. 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Center for Humans and Nature).
Other Updates
To add salt to the wound, we have been navigating a plywood crisis in the boat yard…
The full video and detailed post explaining where we go from here is up now on the Floating Stories Lab Substack, for paying subscribers and members.