Today is the tenth day of my photography challenge – Adventures in Photography

It is also a very wet and miserable day with torrential rain and strong winds forecast until tomorrow. As a result I have decided that todays images will be less about beauty in the landscape and focus instead on telling a story about an environment that I love and one that I walk to every morning.

This is a small creek on the River Ore that I have come to know really well. It is just along the coast from Shingle Street and is one of my favourite parts of the Suffolk Coast. I have talked about it in  my Grounded book and have photographed it often. From the mouth of the creek you can see all the way to Orford in one direction and out to sea over the end of Orfordness spit in the other. It is a quiet place where I love to sit and watch the wildlife. Today it looked bleak and cold, but I still feel it has a certain charm.

I often walk the beach from the creek, along the river to rejoin the coast path at Simpson’s Saltings. In the winter the rubbish that gets washed up on this beach is depressing. So I felt that I should use my blog to show some of the things I found on my morning walk. There was too much for my 10 images so I have been selective, but feel that a list will really help bring home the problem.

Today I found:

Nylon cord, rope, bottle tops, party balloons and balloon strings with their plastic plugs, a creel pot and floats, numerous plastic bottles, drinks cans and bottles, plastic cartons, a packet of pills with the pills still intact, a face mask, a glove, a toy spade, a knife handle, glass bottles, a DVD case and a plastic funnel. I also found numerous dead birds including guillemots, a razorbill, a gannet and more than ten woodcock.

For a small piece of beach this is so sad. Most of the rubbish has come in on the high tides and been washed ashore by the winter storms on easterly winds, but if this is a sample from a small beach imagine what is actually out there in the vastness of the oceans. In the past I have bagged up my findings – huge sacks of rubbish removed only to be replaced by more on the next tide. The beach here is not generally full of litter, winter is always much worse, summer is usually different but the fact that we can’t see it doesn’t mean that the problem has gone away. Man made pollution of our oceans is a huge issue. Without healthy marine ecosystems life on this beautiful planet will be so much harder, if not impossible. We ignore the evidence at our peril.