In intervals between the winter gales, I go out with one of the plastic bags we used to get for our recycling. That was until the Council gave up collections on our isle, so now we have many, many bags (plastic, of course), which need to be themselves recycled.
This bag is a blue one, formerly for metal. I’ve repurposed it to hold some of the bottles which blow in off the sea. We don’t have much beach rubbish here, strictly speaking – anything up to industrial sized buoys gets blown up the rock and stone of the storm beach and into the fields and ditches. From our house we look out on those boggy fields, scattered with debris like unwanted glitter, or the aftermath of last night’s party.
Lifting my gaze a little, out to the west, there’s just sea between us and the Torngat Mountains in Labrador. Just sea! As if it were an absence of something. Sometimes the wind seems to have used all two thousand miles as its run up before hurling itself at the shore, bringing the sea onto the land. When the foam from the breakers looks like snow across the fields, and afterwards I discover great slabs of rock flipped over, fresh un-weathered side now facing the sky, I remember that the North Atlantic is a powerhouse, not an empty space, and a lot more powerful than I am.
So, before it comes back, I go out collecting, blue plastic bag stuffed in one coat pocket, gardening gloves in the other. One of the old stone field walls runs perpendicular to the coast, just where the cliffs slide down into the storm beach. Into it fly the sea’s rejects, the occasional shoe or random unidentifiable fragment, but mostly plastic bottles. It’s as if they’d been spat out in disgust, and often with great force. Some I have to dig out of the gaps between the stones, where they seem to be pretending that they’ve become part of its structure. Others have sunk up to the neck in the liquid earth where the winter’s lochans will soon form. There always seem to be more, and not just newcomers: it’s as if the land was recycling too, bringing back to the surface, to my notice, more and more of the refuse it had been storing until someone came to collect.
The blue plastic bag is full now and spattered with mud. The shore still has its store of refuse – buoys of all sizes, rope, crates – to mention only the plastic. There’s plenty of wood too, which can stay, and the metal from the odd creel. There are old natural fibre ropes that have become part of the storm beach, immovable now. They’re welcome to remain, to recycle themselves back into the ground over the years and centuries. All of these can have a conversation with the place they’ve landed in, can give something to this place which bears the marks of centuries of human living. They’re another layer, like the chambered cairn on the hill above, or the crumbling broch a mile along the coast, or the fields themselves.
But the plastic’s different. I guess in time some of our local bacteria will get a taste for it, but that time’s a long way off. Right now, it occupies the fields like an unwelcome guest. It draws the eye toward itself, whether it’s a plastic bottle catching the sun, or an incongruous flash of crude colour among our greys and greens. Having been thrown out by the sea, it squats down on our shore and goes nowhere. It needs to be moved along. And here I am, with my blue bag. The bigger stuff – well, there’s a plan for that too, eventually. Last year some visiting volunteers and a few locals spent a long day gathering a decade worth of rubbish, which sits there still in mounds along the shore. Finding a time to haul it away when there were no cattle in the field, and the ground was dry enough, and the tractor driver was free – well, maybe this summer. I hope the piles won’t be totally redistributed over the winter.
Back at home, looking out again, down over the fields to the shore, across the Westray Firth to Rousay and westwards to the Atlantic horizon, I wonder what difference, really, have I made? I’m a very small part of something incomparably bigger. It’s as if one of the bacteria doing its business in my gut started to wonder about its place in the cosmic scheme of things.
For me, one of the reasons for living where we do is to be confronted with the reality human beings mostly spend much time and effort denying – that we are not all-powerful, that the world is not under our control. When it blows a proper hoolie, and the flights and ferries are cancelled, social events are off and everyone hunkers down at home, you’re reminded that you’re not the boss on this planet. It may be inconvenient, but I think it’s good for the soul – for mine, anyway.
When I collect the plastic from the fields (I haven’t told you about how much gets in the drainage ditches, and what fun that is), I’m helping with the sea’s work. It’s thrown the rubbish back where the humans that caused it can tidy up their mess. I think that’s good for my soul, too, not to feel too righteous about the little I can do, but to think of it more as an act of penance on behalf of our wasteful species.
So, when Earth Day adopts the slogan “our power, our planet”, it’s the “our” I worry about. The planet does not belong to us; we belong to it. A large part of the reason we are facing a climate crisis is that we, as a species, have done what any species would do given the chance. We’ve used the resources available to us at the moment without giving thought to future consequences. The difference is that we have the capacity to reflect, to plan, to look ahead, and our great failure is that we have not allowed those capacities to overrule immediate need (which is understandable), or immediate greed, which is – I was going to say unforgivable, but that’s wrong – most deeply in need of forgiveness.
Yes, we must change and change radically. If we continue to think of ourselves as the controllers of the planet to which we belong – and which does not belong to us – we’ve not been radical enough. We’re not controllers, we’re caretakers; or if you want a word that means the same thing but sounds more dignified, how about curators?
I’ll go out again when the weather is not too bad, with another ex-recycling bag, and I’ll do a bit more of what caretakers do, clean up the mess. Maybe over time I’ll be able to create a little beauty too.
Cover photo credit: Polly Pullar
Jonathan Clark
Used to do lots of things, not always very well. Now trying to do fewer things, better. Westray, Orkney.