Civilised Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
***This project explores how men in postindustrial coastal communities are negotiating a 'toxic masculinity' that used to be primarily informed by labour in polluting industries (e.g. steel, mining, and petro-chemical) but is now being primarily reproduced through their leisure/recreation. The blue spaces – oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers – the live with are dying. Men who surf, fish, dive, and swim now think, feel, and act with the rhythms, flows, surges, and throbbing of not only water but pollution. They are negotiating their masculine sense of self through leisure in polluted blue spaces. An entanglement with pollution and toxicity is sometimes resulting in what Anna Lora-Wainwright refers to as a 'resigned activism', taking practical everyday step to survive the day to day living with pollution. However, a history of living with and finding worth through pollution is also resulting in a 'doubling down' on toxicity to maintain particularly valued masculine disposition and identity. In his book The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari (2008) describes an experiment conducted by biologist Alain Bombard, who takes a “healthy, thriving, almost dancing octopus” from polluted seawater and places it into a tank of unpolluted seawater” (29). The octopus sinks to the bottom of the tank and dies. The octopus experiment is a powerful analogy for these men who are immersed in polluted blue spaces.Our photo essay is aimed at stimulating questions about the entanglements of masculinity and pollution. Guattari, F. (2008). The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum.