Today, TA! DA! Today, we made history in UNBOTTLED. It was a special thrill to gaze into the vitrine at the Marin History Museum and see a selection of bottles we have collected from Kehoe Beach: seven of our plastic bottles and our one-and-only glass bottle with a message from the 2000 presidential election Gush v. Bore.
Judith writes:
As a child I aspired to be a paleontologist. Every day after school with friends I would mine the white limestone cliffs in the woods near our house in Dallas. We always hoped to find a dinosaur and spent untold hours excavating a mound where we were certain we would discover a skeleton.
The Natural History Museum of Dallas has an excellent display of fossils and ammonites from the surrounding area. So I would go to look and identify what we were digging up. I would longingly gaze into the specimen vitrines and wish upon wish that someday one of my fossils would be on display with a label attribution that had details about the rarity of the find; the latitude and longitude of the site, notes about the Era, Period, Epoch and yes, across the vast expanse of geological time would be MY name as the collector.
Fast forward some 60 + years, I now find myself to be an artist/archeologist mining the beach in search for remnants of plastic, future fossils from the Plasticene. So, in a way, I have become what I had always hoped. Because of the things that we find, we frame them as archeological remnants. They are indicators of our consumer culture and they will be around for a long, long time. They really are exemplars of our existence in the same way that the fossils are.
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