Benjamin Braddock is a young man of about 21 who has just graduated college. His parents and elders, ostensibly successful members of the American upper-middle class, are anxious to see him do well in life, so they pepper him with encouragements and career suggestions. In a swimming pool (symbolizing haute bourgeois comforts), a middle-aged neighbor man says:
The Graduate, 1967
We laughed hard when first witnessing this preposterous yet prescient exchange between the young graduate Benjamin and the older, wiser McGuire. Who would have guessed that over 50 years later Mr. McGuire was right, that plastics were to become simultaneously the miracle of modern life as well as a looming impediment to human survival? Land, sea and air carry billions of tons of plastic in all forms, benign and toxic, from macro objects such as jungle gyms and boats, to pieces and fragments filling the guts of sea creatures, to micro particles in the sea salt we sprinkle on food.
However, the global proliferation of plastic is only one tip of the proverbial iceberg, one element in a complex of forces impacting coastal environments around the world. To attempt cataloguing the individual components of this burgeoning environmental catastrophe is a fool’s errand; discouraging, and with no apparent solution. Yet, in the face of disaster, ridiculous odds, against all hope, human beings – sometimes in small, like-minded groups – have come up with unlikely, counter-intuitive or blatantly obvious solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems.