It’s a Sunday morning in April 2021, a few days after Earth Day. I’ve just arrived at the Gateway National Recreation Area, a narrow crescent between the Sandy Hook Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s drizzling, and the Twin Lights Historic Site is barely visible through a scrim of fog. I’ve signed up to volunteer with the Plastic Wave Project, a small grassroots organization here at the Jersey Shore that raises awareness of microplastics and their effects on our waterways, and by extension, on the human and nonhuman animals that depend on these for our survival.

Volunteers pile onto the beach. We’ve come from all over New Jersey, representing a vast range of ages and experiences. Some of us still wear face masks, a vestige of the pandemic from which we’re only now emerging. We’ve brought rain gear, trowels, work gloves, buckets. Overhead, gulls swoop down to shore in a tousle for fresh fish. At our feet, scores of dead menhaden languish at the tide’s edge. The mass die-off would continue throughout that spring and summer, causing a nauseating stench that suffused our coastal communities. As I would later learn, mass fish die-offs of fish are a direct result of the vibrio bacteria that thrive in our warming waters, as well as pollution from sewage and stormwater runoff. Events like these are what brought some of us here today, to protect our bay and shoreline in whatever small way we can.