(No, I’m not talking about sharks)
Happy Halloween!
It’s the wonderful time between summer and Christmas music and everywhere I go I see glimpses of celebration for the fall holiday. From the bags and bags of candy to the ginormous spiders and ghosts in peoples’ yards, it’s hard to miss.
This year I went to my very first Halloween party. As someone who had never dressed up for Halloween, I felt completely incapable of first deciding what to dress up as and second of how to make it a reality.
So Friday after work I went to the thrift store to look for anything to spark an idea. I was desperate. I did think about going as a teacher (my profession) because being a teacher right now is scary. But as I walked down the dress aisle a spark of inspiration came when I saw a blue and green dress in my size with the store tags still on it. Personally I thought it was a pretty ugly dress
but I had the idea to use it to represent the ocean. Not the beautiful, clean, sunny sky ocean in vacation pictures. But the reality of our oceans around the globe - full of plastic.
So I purchased the dress (at the wonderful price of $118 cheaper than the original tags advertised) and dug through the trash to find plastic to convert the dress to the scary ocean.
Am I making my first ever Halloween costume political?
No.
But if you take it politically then you are part of the problem.
The environment should not be a political problem.
It’s a human problem. We depend on our oceans for so much more than we realize.
Our day to day choices DO make an impact on not just our current world, but the future as well. I do not want to repeat some of the amazing work already completed by others so I want to point you to a bunch of resources that have educated me and opened my eyes to the scary ocean we have today.
Kathryn Kellogg at Going Zero Waste has this wonderful blog post about the plastic pollution in the ocean and what you can do as an individual to reduce your impact on ocean pollution.
Check out this post by the National Ocean Service which gives a brief overview of plastic in the ocean.
This blog post published by The Story of Stuff website gives an overview of plastic bottle pollution specifically and a means of preventing it from ending up in our oceans.
Follow the Intersectional Environmentalist on Instagram. They produce a lot of content on cultural relationships to nature and the injustices of our environmental crisis.
Lastly, I HIGHLY encourage you to take a rabbit trail on YouTube and enter “Ocean plastic pollution” in the search bar and get lost for a few hours watching the countless documentaries, activist vlogs, and Ted Talks on the issue.
Let’s keep the scary part of life in fictional characters that we recreate on Halloween.
Until next time,
A.F.
P.S. I do think sharks are scary, especially if you add some theme music from Jaws in the background… ;)
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