Red Nails at Hands Across the Sand

This past weekend I was given the opportunity to document the Hands Across the Sand event taking place on Coney Island beach. For those who didn’t know about it groups all over the world organized a simple protest against near- and off-shore oil drilling, the abuse of the environment to pull the remaining non-renewable carbon energy sources from the earth, and the destruction it is causing our ecosystems – in particular the oceanic ones. As a scientist who works in the field of human disease I often feel overwhelmed by the sense that all my work could be for nothing if we continue to destroy the earth around us. I recognize the fact that we may have needed these fuels to build our societies but as human population growth has sped up so has our use of these materials and we clearly now need to find other ways of creating energy, cleaner ways. Convincing profit making companies of this is a different matter but the more people who show a common interest in wanting this to happen the more likely it becomes that someone will eventually be driven to find a way to do it.

The protest was a simple one. At 12 noon the gathered people on over 700 beaches in the USA, over 900 total around the world, formed a single line facing the sea and joined hands for 15 minutes. They formed a line in the sand to  mark that now was the time to cross over to clean energy and to place a barrier between the oil coming ashore from rigs and drill heads in pipes as well as symbolically for the oil spill in the gulf. This was not a reactionary protest against BP or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hands Across the Sand was conceived before that and the first protest was held across Florida on February 13th 2010.

This was my first time photographing an event. We had originally hoped we could secure a spot with some elevation over the beach to view the line from above but this proved not to be the case. The images of lines of people with joined hands all along the beach are fantastic in scope but on a busy beach on a hot day in Coney Island I was not able to get an image that isolated the line from the beach goers from ground level or the boardwalk. In the end, to me it was the simple act of the joining of hands between all sorts of people never mind their age, race, ethnicity that was the most powerful and symbolic.

It was brought home even more to me after leaving the event. Hot, sweaty and tired I slumped into the subway car to listen to my iPod and relax. I have a bunch of TED talks on there and chose one at random to watch. It just so happened to be the one by oceanic scientist Jeremy Jackson entitled “How we wrecked the ocean“. He showed the scope of what we are dealing with and why we must get governments around the world to make actionable changes to our policies and activities that continue to harm the world around us. I urge you to give it half an hour of your time.

Thank you to all those who organized the event in Coney Island and helped those of us there to document it, espcially Anne Craig, Maia Harris and Stephanie Massaux. You can see some more images from the quick edit in my own set on flickr here, a full selection from Salvatore Corso here, or more from all the other gatherings in the flickr group here.