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Cleaning the World
On Monday evening, listening to the radio while I ironed my clothes for the week ahead, I learned that beach-combing scientists on the other end of the island where I live found plastic inside 95% of the dead seabirds found on the strand at Cromarty.
Plastic from crisp packets, and cigarettes, and food wrappers, and balloons … they made a plea about balloons. Don’t release them, they said. They look pretty when they fly away but they’ll land at sea and that whisper-thin string is enough to kill a fulmar.
It got me thinking about all the little bits of plastic we discard every day. About the gulls that live on rubbish tips – the ones I see when I catch the train into Manchester, whirling and diving and hoping – if gulls do hope – that something worth scavenging will come in on today’s collection.
And seeing this picture taken on that same Monday put me in mind of the people I’d seen on television programmes – people who eked out a living by scavenging like gulls on the things we discard on a daily basis. I thought about the women and men I’d seen on my travels half way across the world and closer to home, scratching a living by breaking up stones at the side of the road, or claiming scrap metal before the refuse van arrives. The stuff that we refuse to deal with and simply discard.
I thought about how the world is so big, and yet so small. How the world is so many things to so many people. How people discard on a daily basis. Of the first, second and third place in the pecking order of this world and I felt sad.
But I looked again at this photo – at this figure collecting these globes. I thought about the beautiful act we can all take part in. How all of us, in whatever way we will, can play our part in cleaning the world.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Debra Broughton and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
