The Gulf of Imagination

Along the Texas Gulf Coast is a story etched in sand, salt, wave, and sound. Walking the coastline, the plot unfolds in salt marshes and dunes, switchgrass and live oak. It’s in the laugh of gulls and the charm of herons. It drips from Spanish moss and comes in and out on brackish tides. 

An ancient story, it tells of life sustained for 200 million years. It inspires a vision of ourselves as part of this place. It says, “We are intertwined, you and me. Let’s keep it that way.”

Life depends on the Gulf

The Gulf of Mexico is a sanctuary for an astonishing array of wildlife. Its waters and shores are home to over 395 bird species, including brown pelicans, ospreys, and roseate spoonbills with their flamboyant pink feathers. Migratory birds like black skimmers and least terns rely on its beaches to rest and nest. Beneath the waves, dolphins play, sea turtles swim, and schools of fish dart through coral reefs and seagrass beds. Even a whale or two has been known to make a visit.

The Gulf’s wetlands and marshes provide shelter and food for countless creatures, from alligators to Gulf Coast toads. They act as nurseries for fish and crustaceans that eventually make their way into deeper waters. 

These places have long been a source of sustenance for human and nonhuman animals alike. For flora and fauna that has grown up together, a family.

The runoff

And yet. Each year cleanup efforts pull thousands of pounds of trash from the Gulf, 95 percent of which is plastic.

In fact, in 2015, scientists found “18 plastic particles per cubic meter” in the Gulf, “among the highest readings in the world—as high, in fact, as in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

In Texas specifically, according to many sources, the coastline piles up with five to ten times more trash than on other Gulf Coast areas. Fish and other animals mistake the plastic for food, killing the animals or ending up inside the humans who catch and eat them.

And then there are the dead zones—areas where industrial waste, fertilizers and pesticides runoff into the waters creating areas where oxygen levels are too low to support life. 

That’s right. There is a dead zone in our waters, and it’s growing larger by the year, the result of a family divided. The result of seeing ourselves as separate.

Dead zones of the imagination

For some many of us, we already know about the simplest individual ways we can fight back the dead zones. We carry reusable bags, refillable bottles, and our own set of utensils. We participate in beach cleanups and donate to organizations working to restore wetlands and protect endangered species like sea turtles and migratory birds. 

And yet the trash still piles up. The real gulf here seems to be the one between our vision of clean water and air, and the reality that we live in. Because the truth is that so much of what pollutes the planet and its waters lives upstream from any one individual. It’s in the large and overwhelming systems that feed and fuel us in the modern world. 

To the extent that our individual bag carrying and composting is but a drop in the water compared to the systems that allow us to drive to the beach and eat Gulf shrimp in the first place, I wonder if what we have is a “dead zone of the imagination,” a phrase coined by the late, great David Graeber. That is, areas of our lives where we can’t quite imagine how systems could be substantively different than they are.  

 The good news is, where imagination is part of the problem, it can also form part of the solution.

Imagine a world

Standing on a Gulf beach at sunset, watching birds dive into the waves to fish and hunting shells in the sand, it’s easy to imagine a world that works on a different clock and scale. 

Every hike in a forest, or paddle through marshlands is an object lesson in the ways that life sustains itself over centuries.  In spending time in and with nature, we can imagine the world transformed. We can imagine the runoff reversed, with the forests sending lushness into the cities and the waves washing fresh air ashore. 

We can imagine riches accumulating in time and community rather than in consumer goods. 

We can teach our children to imagine the interconnectedness of the land and sea—the way rivers from thousands of miles inland feed into gulfs and oceans—and spark in them a stewardship they can connect to their own actions.

We can continue the efforts we already make, while imagining a day that they aren’t considered efforts at all, but embedded into our way of life. 

We can imagine ourselves animals, too. Because that’s what we are, a shared and connected lifeform in a family nourished by water.