Standing on the beach at the Schel Chelb Estuary, three days after the winter solstice in 2012, I saw the sky broken, the late sunrise cracking the clouds, the water below like battered metal reflecting light. Shorelines of Puget Sound appeared as ripped paper, black and gray silhouettes, layers of forested hills and mountain ranges, from Seattle and the Cascades in the east to Bremerton and the Olympics in the west. Sea lions barked in the distance and garbage trucks rattled around the south side of Bainbridge Island.

In this saltwater bay of Puget Sound, a mix of Pacific Ocean and freshwater rivers, extreme high tides occur during the winter months when the earth is at the perihelion, that is, closest to the sun and moon. These “king tides,” combined with low atmospheric pressure, had risen to a record 14.51 feet days earlier on December 17. As a volunteer beach naturalist, I had received an email asking me to make observations, so I had driven near these flooded edges of the island while my daughter took photos.

Photo by Julie Jeanell Leung

As a girl, each summer I walked on beaches and filled my pockets with polished shells and stones: presents the ocean left for me each morning. But as an adult, I was gathering pieces of trash. I tried to imagine the stories that brought the garbage into the water. Who needed the danger tape, yellow balloon, or plastic bags? On my porch at home, I dumped out the debris and counted the pieces, writing a list with each piece on it.

Collages created by the author’s fellow school families from found plastics. Photos by Rebecca Rockefeller

This “sad,” “gross,” “frightening” debris once promised a new tomorrow, the reward for our victorious and scientific nation after World War II. In the 1945 short film, The Kingdom of Plastics, the narrator proclaimed “plastics take their rightful place in a world of peace.” The opening scene explained the title: Children played a game, guessing whether a hidden object was “animal, vegetable, or mineral.” A plastic thimble stumped them all before the father declared it must belong to “the fourth kingdom: the kingdom of plastics.” The film celebrated the future of “wondrously fine” wrinkle-free fabrics and “shoes more glamorous than Cinderella’s,” promising that plastic “will change the appearance of the everyday world.”

Plastics changed my 1970s childhood. I chewed on a blue plastic Bambi toy. My siblings and I played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on a plastic keyboard and on a toy turntable with plastic records. In the kitchen, Mom mixed powdered milk in a purple Tupperware pitcher and we drank from plastic cups. Plastic toothbrushes cleaned our teeth. Adulthood demanded more plastic privileges and necessities. Razors. Tampons. Nail polish. Nylons. Contacts. Birth control pills. As I worked on this project with my daughter, my dependence on disposable plastics was evident. How would I live or be alive without plastic?

In the days when I tracked our garbage, I developed headaches. My neck and back muscles tensed. I constantly discovered more unexpected plastic: a ring on the rice milk box, plastic on the frozen juice can, and wrapping on the organic bananas. On the beach when I twisted and stretched to examine details in tide pools, I felt exhilarated. But after turning and twisting to see plastic in my kitchen, I felt exhausted.

Grocery shopping had become a constant series of challenges to navigate, an intricate roller coaster of compromises. Wax paper replaced plastic bags in lunches, and each member of our family carried a stainless-steel water bottle. But I often had to decide whether packaging, product, or price was my priority. For example, in the produce aisle, I chose the only mandarin oranges that were not in a plastic container, but they often cost one dollar more per pound and were not organic. When I needed V8 juice for a recipe, I decided that cans were a better choice than a polymer bottle, but at home I realized that the six-pack had been wrapped in plastic. Despite my desire and care, plastic had continued to come home with me from the grocery store after every shopping trip.

In her book, Beth Terry shared recipes for homemade ketchup and complexion powders to help readers avoid purchasing plastic. She suggested sending produce stickers to mosaic artists so that even the tiny labels on fruit could be recycled. While I admired her devotion, I didn’t have time to mix my own condiments or complexion powder, or mail envelopes of produce stickers.

Examining my trash, I again observed my dependence on plastic, evidence of my own character. I had been impulsive. I had wanted orange juice and chocolate and prepared hummus. Contact lenses and tinted moisturizer documented my vanity. I had wanted comfort and convenience. I had wanted to buy appearance, ease, and time.

Photo by Julie Jeanell Leung

Through our actions, our emphasis on ease, and our misplaced priorities, we have revealed our belief that this planet is a receptacle for our waste. We have also discarded the health and lives of other creatures on this world, not to mention the lives yet to be born.

Microplastics and plastic fibers have been found in drinking water, in beer, and even inside lanternfish. A Canadian fisherman discovered chunks of garbage ripping through the digestive tract of a steelhead trout. Jellyfish have incorporated debris, their transparent bodies pulsing with garbage. When seabirds have died, piles of plastic remained after bones and feathers had decayed, marking their graves. Toxic chemicals from plastics have entered into our cells, measured even in breast milk. The Kingdom of Animals and the Kingdom of Plastics are merging.

And yet at times I confess I don’t care. I forget or rather, I don’t want to remember. In the stores, I purchase items without considering the waste: brownies that don’t need to be baked, yogurt cups that will be easy to eat. Online I buy products that arrive nested in bubble wrap packaging that ends up in my trashcan. I can’t think beyond the limits of my life or my family in order to make different choices. And sometimes I have few choices to make. Yet in a rush to save my own time, I’ve shortened the time of other lives. I have chosen to ignore my own choices. Consuming involves buying into this fantasy and forgetting the limits of our planet, a self-centered view evident in this modern age. We must return to a view of life that values sustaining relationships with the objects we own and sustaining relationships with the environment and its creatures, both present and future, within this world that we have polluted.

From the estuary that December morning, I brought home about 90 pieces of marine debris.

Beer cans (4)
Yellow balloon and ribbon
Styrofoam chunks
Blue plastic bucket remnant
Red “DANGER” ribbon (2 pieces, 3 feet total).
Purple glow stick
Plastic bags (9)
Green plastic soda bottle with yellow cap
Plastic liquor bottle
Rope (2 pieces)
Foam glider wing
Firework remnants (11)
Food wrappers (9)
Red plastic cigarette lighter
Styrofoam cup

The cans and bottles I placed in recycling, but the glow stick, shards, and other random items could only go in the trash. I carried the pieces into the cans and swept sand from the porch.
As I warmed my hands in the kitchen, my youngest daughter, Elisabeth, ten years old, rolled cookie dough, cutting out stars, trees, and moons. She sang a song about a wonderful world.
Polluted world. Wonderful world. Washing my hands, listening to my daughter’s song, I knew I must live in the duality, the ambiguity, this multicolored truth. The terror and beauty of Earth. The benefits and toxicities of plastics. The mix and mess of humanity, a mess that also exists inside me. I must teach my children to look beyond appearances, into the depths, past the postcard prettiness into the tiny details. I must teach them to consider how actions reflect and spread like the sunrise, even when choosing a drink of water.

Julie Jeanell Leung received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Bellingham Review, Blue Lyra Review, and Grist: The Journal for Writers. Her essays have been selected as a Finalist for Best of the Net and as a winner of the Living Earth Nonfiction Prize. Currently, she works as an Academic Instructor at Western Washington University’s SEA Discovery Center, teaching marine science. She is also the General Manager for Wild Society, a wilderness education nonprofit, connecting human hearts with the natural world. A beach naturalist and citizen scientist, Julie lives with her family on Bainbridge Island where she counts sea stars on the rocky shores.

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