Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on interdisciplinary research with seabird marine-biologists, this paper explores how the shore, and that which washes up on the sand, both ground and make visible issues of marine plastic.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores how the shore, and those who live and work among it, make visible and ground geosocial transformations relating to marine plastic that washes up upon the sand. This paper draws on interdisciplinary fieldwork with marine biologists studying shore-strewn seabirds on Lord Howe Island whose death is the result of marine plastic ingestion. In doing so, it explores how a granular attention to the shore makes transparent the opaque, yet large-scale, geosocial movements and necropolitics of plastic in the ocean. Contending with the concept of porosity, I explore how plastic moves between shores – permeating national boundaries, seabirds’ stomachs and the consciousnesses of scientists and shore-line citizens. I work with the scientists’ concept of these seabirds, in their death, being ‘sentinels’ of the larger environmental crisis of marine plastic pollution. Extrapolating on this, I engage with the idea of the ‘Plastiocene’ (Wilson, Symons & Lundmark 2019) to unpack the material and more-than-human entanglements visible on the shore when plastic is present, but also to undo broader ideas about the Anthropocene. I consider elemental agencies of tides, waves, and ocean currents that might deposit plastic among the sand, and how the absence of seabirds from shorelines, as a result of their deaths, can reshape island ecologies. Throughout this paper, in discussing this interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and marine biology, I gesture toward the ways in which such collaborations might contribute necessary theories for making liveable shores for both humans and non-humans.