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a trashy extension

AquamarineAura's picture

Just a quick extention of thoughts I had during class. I didnt feel they fit in at the moment but I really want to mention them.

discussion was focused for a while of the pile of trash from Caleb's site sit space..... we were focused on that single pile, but I kept being reminded of other trash collections I've seen. I live in southern california so I have been to the coast pretty often and seen bits and pieces of trash washed up on the shore (I've found everything from golf balls to silver serving spoons to styrofoam cups) as well as collected in the corner of harbors and along jettys.

I have also had the chance to see the "pretty side" of these trash collections, though. I have always been fascinated by the sea glass that I can find on my beaches (which is pretty rare, and often ends up with me grabbing half-done pieces out of the harbor corners so that I can tumble them on my own at home later for jewelry making) Sea glass is a way in which nature has recycled something that is purely human made trash, and turned it into something more valuable. The biggest example of this is Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California. The area of NorCal used to have a large city dump right on the beach and though they stopped using it long ago, the glass has been permanently changed because the large amounts of glass originally left there have been turned into glass pebbles that actually compose most of the beach sand now. It's an interesting space that the town has been able to capitalize on a bit for tourists. It shows that we are permanently destroying our natural spaces with our human trash, but also giving them more value. Quite an odd conundrum.

I'm going to include two pictures below.... make of them what you will.

The first is my own snapshot when I was at Glass Beach (it was a cloudy day, but I spent hours sitting on the beach and sorting through all the glass) and the second is one of the first images from google image search. They seem to be different places entirely! I guess it depends on how you look at it.