Sea Glass // The Anthropocene
when trash turns beautiful
In the sea glass hunting community, certain colors are more coveted––the reds, oranges, purples, and blues. The clear pieces often come from white wine and hard liquor bottles, nips, mason jars, vases, seltzer bottles. The browns come from beer bottles, Bud Lights, Budweisers, oil dropper bottles, Coca Cola bottles, products of German and local breweries. Purple sea glass doesn’t originate from purple glass, but from the manganese that, before World War I, was often added to glass to give it more clarity and remove the green or aqua caused by the iron found in batch sand. The greens are aplenty, reminiscent of Heinekens and lemon-lime flavored sodas like 7-Up, Sprite, and Mountain Dew. Red sea glass nearly all originates from a number of limited runs of Schlitz beer sold in red bottles in the 1940s, ‘50s, and 60s. The oldest pieces of glass are black––relics of the 19th century shipping trade when iron slag was added to glass in order to strengthen hand-blown glass bottles set to cross the Atlantic. One in ten thousand are orange––the weathered down auto warning lights and vintage Avon glassware. And where do the blues come from? Milk of Magnesia, Noxzema jars, Vicks VapoRub, ink bottles, castor oil bottles, Bromo Seltzer, and poison bottles (Jonna).
The pieces are left behind from nights drinking on the beach, summer days of festivities, of loneliness, fun, addiction, splendor. And when the sea is kneading itself into the floor, trash turns beautiful. The tumbling constitutes a value. Colored glass makes us get on a plane, eye the water. It turns our cupped hands into treasure chests. Maggie Nelson feels it too, feels the glassy blue: “Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire” (34).
With the proliferation of plastic products, sea glass is getting rarer and rarer. Coalitions of sea glass hunters are traveling to Spain and England to find the few batches left. And as the glass gets scarcer, prices rise—treasures like the Shard of the Year, chosen at the annual North American Sea Glass Festival, can be worth hundreds of dollars—and there's now also a market for faux sea glass and pieces that have been mechanically tumbled or chemically treated (“Sea Glass Collecting”). If glass becomes precious by its mortality, there’s much less romance in the legacy of ocean plastic, of which there is no end in sight.
Sea glass is a reminder of the Anthropocene in the ways that material waste collides with environmental forces to form an object in which humans find aesthetic and sensual value. It is a reminder of years and years of earthly processes and its impact on products of human consumption. In sea glass, we see the object’s tendency to bend and adapt, and we see the Earth’s consistently wild and rampant ways of moving. In “The Ethics of Earth Art,” Boetzkes says: “While it would seem that in the context of ecological crisis, we need to ‘get back to nature,’ the paradigm of recessive ethics suggests the opposite—that we should withdraw from it. This is not to say that we should no longer see ourselves as embedded in the ecosystems we inhabit (to the contrary), but rather to say that we should step out of our characterizations of nature, our idyllic images, and our desires for homeostasis and open a space for that which exists beyond our self-enclosed and self-serving worlds” (63). Sea glass is suggestive of these “idyllic images,” of the ways in which a visual order holds influence in the Anthropocene and defines an environmental epoch through the lens of one object. The romanticization of sea glass, of the magical properties imbued by its colors and the entanglement of thing with world, shows too neatly the “self-serving” human eye and its proclivity to tidying and beautifying.
How can such beauty be implicated in the Anthropocene? In “Toxic Sublime: Imagining Contaminated Landscapes,” it says: “a visual orientation to the world is now ‘a fundamental fact of social existence’’’ (Knowles and Sweetman qtd Peeples 374). The visual transformation of sea glass from waste to precious object is made possible only by the Earth’s weathering, the ocean taking a front seat in the creation of beauty. The beginning and end of (sea) glass can also suggest a tidy packaging of neoliberal ethics and reveal the limits of individual responsibility: that glass forms beautiful beach objects and plastic forms ugly waste, causes species death, and increases environmental degradation––and that goodness (beauty) can be boxed in to the timelines of recyclable trends.
Glass was crucial to trade systems of classical civilizations, to the Scientific Revolution, and to industrial production. In “Climate and Capital,” Chakrabarty says that, “to say that the history and logic of a particular human institution has gotten caught up in the much larger processes of the earth systems and evolutionary history (stressing the lives of several species including ourselves) is not to say that human history is the driver of these large-scale processes” (21). Human history is not the driver of that which forms sea glass, but the history of sea glass is one with the history of humans, of glass workers especially.
And these workers have endured much to create the things of beauty that wash up in our shores. Over time, heat exposure from hot furnaces and overall warm studios can damage a glass blower’s lungs and airways. Exposure to toxic chemicals such as lead, airborne arsenic trioxide, selenium, and silica flour lead to higher rates of cancers (“Meeting…” 5). Glass workers carry the legacy of time spent in the studios and factories in their bodies––just as beach glass carries in it the imprint of time spent tumbling under waves.
The land, water, and air of the area become a part of the object, its history a part of its form. In Donna Haraway’s definition of the Chthulucene, she emphasizes “the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake” (Haraway, 160). With sea glass, it’s the working of the natural and beneficently eroding world that we’re after. Glass takes decades to turn beautiful and 1 million years to decompose. You can see in its very being the passage of time through waterways, can trace the “ongoingness” of the moon’s tide. And when you think there is nothing left to trace, the water gives way to continued looking––“as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass” (Carson 52).
