Ocean trash affects the psyche of humanity, researchers find
WASHINGTON — Humanity is badly damaging the oceans. To give just one example, we’re filling them with eight million metric tons of plastic annually, equivalent to “five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world,” according to researcher Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia.
It’s obvious that this harms the oceans and the organisms that live in them. But plastic and other forms of trash also mar shorelines and, thus, the experience of beachgoers. And according to new research, that may actually take a toll on the human psyche — or at least, undermine any psychological benefits that come with going to the beach to begin with.
To understand why, it’s important to dip into the fascinating and growing literature on the psychological benefits of natural environments. Recent research has shown that nature walks decrease harmful mental rumination (a risk factor for depression), that kids who go to schools that feature more greenery perform better on cognitive tests, and that viewing images of a green roof helps performance on a taxing cognitive task — to name just a few findings.
But it’s not just greenery — coastal or water-related scenes also have psychological benefits, being perceived as “restorative,” in the sense of helping unburden the brain by relieving stress and re-energizing us, and just all around making us feel positive. A psychological paradigm called “attention restoration theory” postulates that these environments positively affect us through a variety of mechanisms, including “being away (psychological distance from everyday stressors)” and “fascination (the ability to capture involuntary attention),” as a recent study in Environment and Behavior puts it.
That study, conducted by Kayleigh Wyles of Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the U.K., and colleagues of Plymouth University, extends the research on the restorativeness of ocean environments in a new way — by showing that we likely lose this beneficial quality when we muck up these environments with trash and debris.
In three separate studies, the researchers showed that while people tend to rate a photograph of an oceanside scene as being restorative, adding litter to the scene had a strongly negative impact on that assessment. “In addition to environmental costs of marine litter, there are also costs to people,” noted the authors.
When it comes to litter, “we know it has detrimental effects already to the environment and to economics; there’s lots of financial costs and ecological costs,” says Wyles. But the new study demonstrates that “it can have an impact on individuals’ health and well-being,” she says.
To show as much, the researchers took photographs of British beach scenes at high and low tide, but then either Photoshopped in images of litter or literally moved existing beach debris and trash into the shot (leaving the rest of it unchanged). Then, study subjects were asked to rate the images based on their restorativeness, being asked how much they agreed that “that is a place which is away from everyday demands and where I would be able to relax and think about what interests me,” “that place is fascinating; it is large enough for me to discover and be curious about things,” and so on.
The trash in the foreground only took up about seven per cent of the overall image, but it had a big effect on the perceived restorativeness of the landscapes. People found low tides more restorative than high tides, but they also found both scenes to be greatly marred by trash.