Garbage Turtle

I grew up in a rural area in Florida by the water. My family owned a shrimping business for as long as I have known. Over time I learned how my family, as well as many shrimping businesses, drag a net across the floor of the sea to harvest the shrimp. For years this has been harming and killing reefs them. In module 5 of our class we learned about mourning sculptors, “Remembrance Day for Lost Species,” where mourners hold a precession for the great Auk and other actions led by climate activist Tim DeChristopher.  This gave me the idea to do my own mourning sculpture to mourn the destruction my family has personally caused by continuing to do this business without trying to find better and more eco friendly ways. For my mourning sculptor I choose to represent a leatherback turtle. When researching what marine animal I wanted to create, I choose an endangered marine species specific to Florida, since that is where it all started for me. I researched NOAA Fisheries and learned that the leatherback turtle has nesting areas in Florida, which I didn’t know beforehand. Since finding out they have nesting areas in Florida I choose to have my sculpture to be a baby leatherback ‘hatching’. The ‘egg’ is a one of the many gotcha ball’s I got in Japan that look very similarly to a egg.

My sculpture is created of trash and recycling I have accumulated from my 2 week trip in Japan as well as some trash and recycling from my job as a pastry chef. My main purpose behind this sculpture was to bring awareness to the amount of trash, be it recycling or regular trash, ends up in the water from various things, either commercial fishing and shrimping or landfills. As stated in a VPM News series only about 82% to 85% of recycling actually gets recycled.

My audience, if I were to every publish this, would be everyone to try and create a similar aspect to outreach like the Okjokull glacier. We learned about the Okjokull glacier in Iceland and how it was the first glacier to be lost to climate change. They held a funeral service with speeches, poems, a death certificate, and a memorial plaque.

In an article by Dahr Jamail, “In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve”, “Only by sharing an intimacy with the natural world can we begin to know, love, and care for her. Ecological grief can affect people differently (anger, fear, depression, etc.) Many tend to face it alone in private settings but if we continue to only grief in private we will pupariate the feeling of shame if we bring it into society. In an article by Marzia Varutti, Calming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction?, if we express our grief in public settings and share it with others, it becomes visible as a societal legitimate response to a common, planetary problem.” By bringing it into the open we also acknowledge the loss and can reflect on how to live with in in hopes of stopping it from happening again.  Documenting and creating memorials gives people the “social acceptance and legitimacy” to grief and process your feelings better (Craps p.69).

November 30th marks a special day for extinct species. All over the world November 30th is Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Many have funerals and ceremonies to mourn specific lost species or all of them, depending where In 2018, ONCA created mourning rites (circular ceremony and a funeral procession) for Steller’s sea cow, which went extinct in 1768 (de Massol de Rebetz). Events like this are easy way for younger generations learn that mourning lost and extinct species isn’t something that needs to be hidden. In an article by Lilian Barraclough and Melanie Zurba, “Spaces and programs that provide youth with an opportunity to contribute to the stewardship of land in their communities are examples of appropriate spaces that aid in alleviating feelings of helplessness associated with climate grief.” Making it almost vital, especially with youth having higher suicide and depression rates. Grieving also helps many learn about themselves as well as the world around them. In an article by Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, ; Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction, “In the words of philosopher and counselor Thomas Attig, grieving is a process of ‘relearning the world’”.

 Works Cited:

Varutti, M. Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction?. Ambio 53, 552–564 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01962-w

Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose; Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction. Australian Zoologist 1 June 2017; 38 (3): 375–378. doi: https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2014.048

de Massol de Rebetz, C. (2020). Remembrance Day for Lost Species: Remembering and mourning extinction in the Anthropocene. Memory Studies, 13(5), 875-888. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020944605 (Original work published 2020)

Craps, Stef. (PDF) Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene, 2023, www.researchgate.net/publication/368833324_Ecological_Mourning_Living_with_Loss_in_the_Anthropocene.

Barraclough, Lilian, and Melanie Zurba. “Building Community: Vocabularies and Rituals Used to Define and Process Climate Grief by Politically Active Youth in Mi’kma’ki.” Zenodo, Zenodo, 11 July 2024, zenodo.org/records/8320445.

“Iceland’s Glacier Funeral Helped Activists Manage Their Climate Grief.” Bustle, 19 Aug. 2019, www.bustle.com/p/icelands-glacier-funeral-helped-activists-manage-their-climate-grief-18667800.

Jamail, Dahr, et al. “In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve.” Truthout, Truthout, 20 Jan. 2019, truthout.org/articles/in-facing-mass-extinction-we-dont-need-hope-we-need-to-grieve/.

VPM |                      By                    Ian M. Stewart. “Curious Commonwealth Asks: How Much of My Recycling Actually Gets Recycled?” VPM, VPM, 11 Sept. 2024, www.vpm.org/news/2023-10-11/curious-commonwealth-what-gets-reduce-reuse-recycle-bin-how.