By Richelle Boyd
In a conference room at UC Santa Barbara, students of all levels sit together looking over documents. They range from chapters of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring, to an Environmental Protection Agency’s press release about DDT pesticide dumping in 1972.
Each item mentions ocean toxicity and the effects of harmful chemicals such as DDT being dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The students set about to create spontaneous poetic writing from the words in those documents.
Damage to sea life and the ocean floor has been building off the coast of California since the early 1970s when chemical companies took barrels of pesticides out to the Pacific and dumped them there. The long-term effect of those actions on our world today was the main focus of “Toxic Seas,” a Create-in event hosted earlier this month by UCSB’s Literature and the Environment Research Center, an initiative of the English Department.
English professor Melody Jue, right, and research assistant Surojit Kayal present articles about DDT pesticides at the beginning of a "Toxic Seas" workshop event earlier this month.
Associate professor Melody Jue directs the Center and she was joined by research assistants Surojit Kayal and Maile Young for the workshop session that tackled ocean dumping through a creative humanities lens, including poetry.
“We’re thinking that one way, as humanities scholars, to begin addressing this is to think about what needs to be remembered for the future,” Jue said. “And one way we can do that is through poetry.”
The center’s first spring event launched a series that will also include a seaweed walk at UCSB’s Campus Point and a book talk on eco-poetry with University of Hawai’i professor Craig Santos Perez, both taking place on May 26th.
Jue and Kayal supplied students with materials on DDT dumping to create “blackout” poetry, in which the participants took words and lines they wanted to use, while also crossing out things that didn’t work for them.
Students at UCSB use Sharpies on articles and chapters from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book looking into harmful pesticides, to create blackout poetry earlier this month.
Students shared their poetry out loud, some focusing on sea life while others focused on what pesticides can do to the water and ocean floor. “There was once America where all life seemed to live in a shadow of death,” Young read. “No witchcraft, no enemy action, has silenced the life in a stricken world. People had done it themselves. Many have already suffered this tragedy, a stark reality.”
Most of the poems talked about the future of the ocean and the death of essential life there. But, working within the constraints of the texts proved a challenge. “Do you let yourself know where you’re going?” Jue said to the students. “Or what emerges when you don’t know? What are you really marking up?”
The student creations emphasized that toxic substances are not isolated within the ocean, but instead have made their way into the entire ecosystem. Studies of DDT dumping have found that pesticides have over time integrated into the genetic basis of sea and plant life. A 2019 UCSB study off the California coast found that about 5,590 feet (9,000 kilometers) of the ocean floor has DDT on it.
Blackout poetry about ocean toxicity’s effect on animals, by graduate student R. Baker at the “Toxic Seas” Create-in event.
Jue said this was the result of people shooting at the barrels they were dumping, allowing the DDT to freely spread across the ocean floor as the barrels sank faster. “The DDT dumping in the 1980s followed directly on the heels of a broader social movement to get rid of that pesticide,” Jue said. “It was recently rediscovered by some scientists at UCSB and UC San Diego.”
Research assistants Kayal and Young said DDT dumping and similar environmental hazards deserve more attention. There is so little coverage outside of scientific articles and databases, which makes the “create-in” event all the more crucial for those students who attended.
The event featured learning about books like Silent Spring and thinking of ways to raise awareness through mediums like poetry. “This is a way for us to be in dialogue with all kinds of writing around this event,” Jue said to the students. “It can begin to complement or maybe lift it in different kinds of ways.”
Moving forward, Jue hopes there will be more research and effort put into DDT dumping and how it has affected sea life and the ocean floor. “We’re not sure where [these chemicals] would have entered the food chain, and it turns out it's the sea floor where all of these barrels were dumped and the site is football fields worth of just barrels,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve fully mapped the extent of those yet.”
Richelle Boyd is a third-year English major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Digital Journalism.