Ghostly encounters: Dealing with ghost gear in the Gulf of Carpentaria

Geoforum 78 (2017) 33–42

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Ghostly encounters: Dealing with ghost gear in the Gulf of Carpentaria Catherine Phillips School of Geography, University of Melbourne, 221 Bouverie St., Level 1, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 6 April 2016 Received in revised form 28 September 2016 Accepted 19 November 2016

Keywords: Encounter Waste Marine debris Ghost fishing Ocean governance Northern Australia

a b s t r a c t Ghost gear – abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear – has been recognised as a global environmental challenge since the mid-1980s, and yet little social science attention has fallen on the phenomenon. This paper explores how the burden of global fisheries, materialised through its gear, is experienced and managed. How is ghost gear encountered? How is it understood? What influence does it have, and what responses does it provoke? To consider these questions, the paper begins with detailing of an encounter with ghost gear and Aboriginal rangers on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. Understanding encounters as tangles of interlaced threads, rather than isolated intimacies, the paper also follows ghost gear beyond the experience of beach clean-up. How ghost gear journeys to this beach, and the mobilities and meetings that occur during its travels is explored, as well as the policy responses to ghost gear that figure it primarily as marine debris to be managed through territorial control as isolated ‘waste’. These more-than-human stories offer insights into the distributed agencies, complex relations, and differential responsibilities involved in the phenomenon of ghost gear, and efforts to deal with it as part of land-sea assemblies. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Synthetic fibres, knotted together as mesh. Tangled with itself and other remains – fishing buoys and lures, seaweed and driftwood, plastic bags and toothbrushes, bits of coral and bodies of marine creatures. The once useful. Now discarded. Laying on the beach, it seems passive. But perhaps it is more provocateur than this image suggests. The fragment of net pictured above is one example of abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear – also known as ‘ghost gear’. The ghost gear phenomenon has emerged as a global environmental management issue over the last 40 years. The advent of synthetic fishing gear has altered gear colours, buoyancies, ability to withstand water flows, even twine and net size. These plastics have allowed fishing to increase targeted catch, to spread to new areas, and to develop aquaculture, supporting the global harvesting and trading of seafood (Valdemarsen, 2001). But the same characteristics – buoyancy, lightness, strength, durability – pose dangers once gear becomes abandoned (Andrady, 2011). Synthetic gear does not simply disappear when discarded at sea. In fact, projections suggest that by 2050 ocean plastics will be more prevalent than fish (World Economic Forum, 2016). First recognised internationally as problematic in 1985 by the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on Fisheries, it has more E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.11.010 0016-7185/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

recently become the subject of a global, inter-sectoral initiative (the Global Ghost Gear Initiative) put in place in the wake of the United Nations Rio+20 conference. Amid efforts to regulate it, however, ghost gear continues to haunt oceans. How is ghost gear encountered by others – human or otherwise? What responses does it engender? How are its influences dealt with? These questions orient this paper, which joins a growing research agenda investigating materialities, governance, and politics of discard. I argue that a more-than-human approach to encounters offers a useful means of thinking through sociomaterial afterlives. Taking this approach allows a foregrounding of the coming together of things and bodies in particular spacetime, emphasising relations as they unfold. It also disrupts any notion that ghost gear is an isolated object that simply needs (and is amenable) to proper management. Moreover, it serves to extend waste literature toward investigation of the effort involved in dealing with discarded items (see also Gregson, 2011), and the implications of discard for nonhuman organisms and their environs. The analysis shows that a more-than-human approach facilitates a rethinking of the problem of ghost gear, and the means through which it might be redressed, by highlighting the distributed, complex, and particularity of the phenomenon in ways that attend to human and non-human agents. However, more-than-human approaches have gathered critique as overemphasising the present and neglecting broader context (see Popke, 2009; Goodman, 2015). Addressing this critique, I

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argue that an exploration of encounter need not exclude terrain and relations beyond the immediately sensible. Instead, encounters consist of tangles, multiple lines coming together and that we may pick up to follow into new meetings (see Ingold, 2010; Haraway, 2008). In this way, any one encounter stretches beyond particular moments of occurrence and to draw together wider worlds. To demonstrate this conceptual point, I explore experiences, travel, and regulation of ghost gear in northern Australia. The paper proceeds with a brief exploration of the more-thanhuman framing, in which focus falls on the themes of after-lives and encounter especially as they relate to ghost gear. After this, it returns, accompanied by indigenous rangers, to a meeting of ghost nets on a beach in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The narrative offered, based in ethnographic research, pays particular attention to the physical and emotional effort of rangers dealing with ghost gear, as well as the categorisations involved in their practice. The third section draws on literature to consider the oceanic journeys of ghost nets that result in their presence in the Gulf. The paper then reviews regulatory measures put in place to contain and redress the negative impacts of ghost gear, detailing some of these measures as well as the involved categorisations. The conclusions consider the contributions of this approach of more-than-human encounter to the thinking through of ghost gear, and its implications. 2. Encounters with problematic discards Ghost gear presented as potentially problematic in the late 1960s and by the 1980s was established as a global environmental problem. However, it was not until the early 1990s that communities in northern Australia began publicly articulating their concern about the amounts and impacts of discarded fishing nets washing ashore (Gunn et al., 2010). Responses included scientific assessments and consideration of management policies, often in association with other marine debris (see Gilman, 2015; MacFadyen et al., 2009; Vegter et al., 2014). There is much that might still be learned from these kinds of considerations. For instance, it has become clear that non-governmental organisations play a fundamental role in mitigation; in Australia, for instance, GhostNets Australia acts as a hub for data analysis, awareness raising, and global network development (Butler et al., 2013). There is also insight to be gained into possible technical and/or incentivised improvements to modes of collection, transport, and disposal. However, such an approach, I argue, is inadequate. First, an observable gap remains in social and economic studies addressing ghost gear (MacFadyen et al., 2009; Vegter et al., 2014), and there is increasing recognition that accounts of the ‘‘practices and experiences in mitigating the impacts of marine debris on biodiversity would serve to better inform the development and implementation of necessary policy measures and appropriate responses to this growing threat” (SBSTTA, 2014, 1). This paper begins to address this gap in its account of the material and emotional effort involved in collecting ghost gear. Second, in addition to the lack of practice-based accounts, Moore’s (2012) typology of approaches to waste would characterise the reigning conceptualisation of ghost gear as positivist and dualist – defining waste in essential and objectified terms. As Gregson and Crang (2010) observe, such an approach to waste can confine thinking to technical and institutional management, rather than open it out to broader consideration. In contrast, they point out that understanding waste as in process ‘positions waste firmly within a scalar world of fixings and flows . . . and signals the vitality of the inorganic within a networked world’ (Gregson and Crang, 2010, 1031). I am sympathetic to the commitment, evident in much of discard studies, to critiquing uneven flows of waste and interrogating governing orders. However, this approach does not leave much space to consider the

nonhuman influences or the corporeal relations that are key to making sense of ghost gear. To address these needs for experiential and relational understandings of the phenomena of ghost gear, I take a more-than-human encounter approach. A more-than-human approach in the material register, as outlined by Whatmore (2006, 602) redirects attention from stuff or resources ‘out there’ to corporeality and the ‘livingness of the world’ enjoining ‘the technologies of life and ecology, on the one hand, and of prehension and feeling, on the other’. In this understanding, the world is made and remade through an ontological relationality among heterogeneous actors – including humans but also other creatures, technologies, feelings, elements, and even policies. Recent literature has taken up this call for more-thanhuman understandings, for instance, to approach oceans not as staid voids but as lively, energetic assemblages of forces and elements in order to better understand how people and marine worlds relate (Bear, 2012; Peters, 2015). Much recent work in discard studies also draws upon such relational ontologies to ask questions about the processes through which ‘waste’ comes into being (DeSilvey, 2006; Evans, 2014; Gregson and Crang, 2010), or about how disposal reveals the orderings and valuations of economies (Gregson et al., 2007; Lepawsky and Mather, 2011; Waitt and Phillips, 2015). Taking inspiration from these literatures, ghost gear escapes sole consideration as an essentially problematic object that needs (and is amenable to) proper management; instead, it becomes a performing, affective material implicated in complex oceanic and terrestrial worlds. This shift brings with it implications for understanding, regulating, and dealing with waste. More-than-human analyses have demonstrated a tendency toward exploring encounters, or the coming together of bodies and things in particular space-times. Laboratories, households, conservation areas, even ruins have proved fertile ground for investigation of the dynamics and differentiations involved in such meetings (DeSilvey, 2006; Haraway, 2008; Hayward, 2010). These studies provide rich insights into the performances and arrangements of humans and nonhumans, the affectivities and subjectivities involved, and the emergence of ethics. Leitner (2012) argues, for instance, that encounters hold transformative potential, perhaps especially when awkward or difficult. As will become clear, meeting and dealing with ghost gear can be disorienting – jarring aesthetic sensibilities, bringing fishing and disposal practices into question, prompting new thinking about how environments and human activities connect, and demanding practical and ethical engagement. Focusing on encounters also highlights experiential, affective, skilled interactions, interactions that ultimately serve to develop conservation methods and projects even if they tend to be obscured in official accounts and policies (Lorimer, 2015). Sympathetic critiques of more-than-human encounter approaches note an overemphasis of present and particular experience. Goodman (2015) offers praise and caution, suggesting that wider political and economic realities can be lost to descriptions focused on individual experience and responsibility. Similarly, Johnson (2015) maintains that more-than-human encounters are too confined to the present to connect with broader contexts, while Popke (2009) argues that such analyses risk prioritising individual rather than collective responsibility and ignoring preconditioning context. This points to a common challenge for more-thanhuman studies: conveying the richness of embodied encounter while also making connections with that encounter’s conditions and implications. This paper works to take on this challenge by considering multiple meetings of ghost gear, each tied to one another. The emphasis of encounter on embodied experience need not exclude terrain and relations beyond the immediately sensible. Instead, encounters can be understood not only as discrete events but as knots ‘whose constituent threads, far from being contained

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within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots’ (Ingold, 2010, 8). The task then becomes to trace these threads. And, as a next step, to consider their implications. More-than-human approaches increasingly argue that analyses must move beyond recognition that humans and nonhumans participate in collectives in ways that fundamentally alter socionatural configurations; they must consider how this kind of rethinking might allow new relations to emerge (see Atchison and Head, 2013; Lorimer, 2015). Hayes-Conroy and HayesConroy (2010, 1281) argue, for instance, that exploring how and where ‘social structures and bodily sensations come together and exude from each other’ makes us more aware of bodies-inrelation and, therefore, better able to mediate and intervene in methods, pedagogies, and policy. Haraway’s (2003, 2008) work also provides inspiration here. She insists that ‘actors become who they are in the dance of relating—not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimesseparate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter’ (2008, 25). Haraway (2008) describes complex worlds of multispecies encounter; for instance, relaying how living with her dog brings her (and us as readers) into partial connection with breeding cultures, economic imperatives, physical and emotional sensibilities, scientific experimentations, and biological processes. Haraway, however, does not stop with following lines of relation. She also demonstrates how actors’ meetings shape accountability. In short, it is not enough to learn about the relations in which we are implicated and the multiple threads that knot together in our encounters. We must also ask: ‘who cleans up the shit’ (Haraway, 2003, 317)? Drawing upon more-than-human understandings of encounter, then, it is possible to acknowledge the complex relations of a particular encounter as a momentary, intimate experience, but also as a tangle of multiple strands, the tracing of which lead to new ways of thinking and living in shared worlds. Further, in this case, the set of ideas brought together by more-than-human approaches provides new insights into the phenomenon and redressing of ghost gear by revealing a complex problem not easily solved with existing approaches to waste management, a causality that is distributed and emergent rather than singular and easily controlled, and a particularity that requires continual attention to who/what becomes implicated in and responsible for dealing with ghost gear. To begin then, I turn to encountering ghost gear as detritus that has washed ashore in northern Australia. 3. Experiential engagements ‘It’s a floating coffin. . . a death trap.’ Perhaps not the first image that comes to mind when looking at a lump of plastic mesh on the beach (see Fig. 1). But this is how Teddy, an Aboriginal ranger, explains a ghost net. He says this as we are taking a break, reflecting on the day’s work while watching the birds run and fly along the shoreline. I arrived a few days ago at this station, located on the northeast coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Yupangathi territory, to work with the rangers collecting ghost gear and monitoring sea turtle activity. Considered part of a ‘hotspot’ for ghost gear, this beach might be figured as a shadow place – one of the ‘places that provide our material and ecological support, most of which in a global market are likely to elude our knowledge and responsibility’ (Plumwood, 2008, 139). This section draws upon ethnographic research and story1 to help understand the bodily labour – the phys1 Lorimer (2003) calls for telling ‘small stories’ to reveal the material, sensual, emotional, and heterogeneous through mundane and local happenings. These stories also connect other practices and scales – linking, for example, the intimate and the regulatory. This aligns well with more-than-human approaches that explore the ongoing processes of corporeal and affective relation among humans and nonhumans.

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Fig. 1. Ghost gear washed up on a beach, northern Australia, photo by author.

ical and emotional effort – involved in dealing with the masses of derelict fishing gear that reach these shores year after year. This morning we covered about six of the 43 km of coastline managed by these rangers for the Napranum Aboriginal Shire Council. Lacking the equipment to remove nets directly from Gulf waters, they concentrate on ghost gear already (or nearly) ashore. After monsoon storms, rangers drive out here to haul nets above the tide line, preventing any return to the ocean. But the wet season’s tides, winds, rain, and crocodiles make for hazardous conditions, so ghost gear remains on the beach. Now, in the dry season, we collect those nets as well as others that have accumulated on the shore (see Fig. 2). Sometimes collection just involved scooping up a bit of mesh sitting on the surface and tossing it into the back of the truck for later disposal. Just as often though, the encounter morphed into something far more trying. Harder to collect nets had wrapped themselves around logs and other debris. Or, they had sunk into the sand, almost becoming part of the beach. We responded with shovels, ropes, and bodies working together at digging, pulling, shaking, rolling, hauling the nets from their positions. Sweating with effort in the increasing heat of the day, it is hard to ignore the sun; it scorches skin while slowly transforming plastics into fragments and (unseen) chemical compounds. As we dug, the sand went from loose and light to heavy with water; from collapsing into just-dug spaces to sticking, scouring grit. Either way, the beach – sand, water, sun – worked against us. Of the nets we collected today, the most deeply buried one results in us digging to about knee height, though I’m told some are much deeper. Herbie, another of the rangers, exclaimed at one point, ‘It’s really hard. You know, digging them out. [shaking his head] Digging them out! And trying to pull them out! Especially when you’ve got some stuck right down in the ground.’ Twice this morning we ceded to recalcitrant nets. The first was so deteriorated that it repeatedly snapped into bits as we tried to coax it free. Defeated, we cut out what we could and reburied the rest – obscuring the net and limiting its ability to entangle more creatures. The second net held together, but was too large and ensconced to extract, even with winching. This net was no record breaker – a single net can weigh tons and stretch for kilometres – but still, it vexed us. After multiple ineffective attempts, we dug around it, shook out what sand and debris we could, and left it exposed. The sun would dry it out, allowing more sand to be shaken out, making it lighter and more manageable by the time we return – with more hands – to wrestle it from beach to truck.

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Fig. 2. Collecting ghost nets, Cape York Peninsula, photos by author.

The purpose of our collections is to move ghost gear, to make it ‘move-along’ (Gregson et al., 2007), if only to a slightly less problematic place: the landfill. So far, no recycling or reuse scheme has proven viable for this remote area. Disposal remains free at this waste station, the recent reconstruction of which was funded by the nearby mining operation; however, others stations must store their collections or burn ghost gear in place because hauling to an appropriate facility is too difficult or costly. Amongst all the other landfilled waste, ghost gear will continue to decay contributing to the mass and leachate, becoming buried or burnt, incurring the ecological and cultural costs of such disposal on behalf of fishing industries and its consumers. What this will mean for the community in the future is uncertain. As Strathern (1999, 61) suggests, ‘one cannot dispose of waste, only convert it into something else within its own life’; waste continues to surprise through unlooked for and untoward returns. Our satisfaction with making ghost nets move along is short lived and full of caveats. For these rangers, collecting ghost gear is not only about tidying the beach; it is about protecting marine creatures. Herbie explains that caring for these creatures and this place, is why he loves being a ranger: ‘I just love being on country. Love what I’m doing. Protecting animals, you know, caring for country. Yeah. That’s why I joined.’ A myriad of creatures live in and visit this area, but marine turtles receive particular attention. Six of the seven endangered marine turtles find themselves in northern Australia during parts of the year, and this region is identified as high-risk for entanglement in ghost gear (Wilcox et al., 2013). Total deaths and injuries remain unknown, but estimates indicate thousands of turtles lose their lives to ghost gear each year in the Gulf (Wilcox et al., 2013). Clearing ghost gear from the coastline does not stop ocean entanglement or gear arrivals, which occur here in some of the highest densities in the world. However, it does reduce the potential for on-beach snares and prevents gear from returning to oceans, therefore preventing further harm to marine environs. This is one indication of how ghost gear connects to conservation: embodied engagement in caring for potentially threatened, absent-at-the-moment turtle bodies by clearing ghost gear. Ghost gear encounters, thus, become indirect engagements with turtles – a caring at a distance.

In one of the nets collected another day, we found an entangled Hawksbill turtle carcass. After pausing briefly, we noted the remains, collected the net, and moved on. Continuing with only brief interruption might suggest indifference, but this was not the case. Later, Teddy made the loss clear, simply saying, ‘I feel sorry, you know, when we see them trapped in the nets. [looking away] And you go and find them dead. [pause]’ This is what Teddy signals as he calls ghost nets floating coffins and death traps; a worry about the threat of gear that waits for turtles to mistake it, and then continues to accomplish a purpose that once served humans, but no longer does: killing marine creatures. This one event reflects recurring encounters with entangled creatures – dead or otherwise. The incidence of ghost gear has become normal, if undesired. It is also not only an individual, present experience. It is a collective encounter that stretches into past experience and anticipated futures of death for animals at the hands of remote humans and their plastic proxies. Further, death-by-ghost-gear is not just sad. Loss of this kind and the grieving that accompanies it can prompt new thinking such that ways of living/dying and provisioning become questionable (MortimerSandilands, 2010). While life’s transience might be accepted, rangers express resistance to this particular form of death, for these creatures, and collecting ghost gear helps limit the possibilities of future deaths. Clearing the beach of ghost gear might be read, following Plumwood (2008), as maintaining material and ecological support for commodity cultures; it ‘cleans-up’ the remains of international fishing, dealing with ghost gear without recourse to those harvesting the oceans, producing nets, or demanding fish protein. It might, in other words, reinforce tendencies to keep the implications of ghost gear obscured. However, it is more than simple clean up. Each effort to extract ghost gear demands tweaks to the generalised and seemingly straightforward procedure of collection. Possibilities and responses vary depending on the particular material relations and on the necessary skills developed through previous encounters. Wet or dry sand, twisted and buried nets, brittle or strong plastics, tired but ready bodies, working or broken equipment – each make their differences, and tie this encounter to wider realities including seasons, funding cycles, manufacturing and fishing industry preferences, everyday habits, and cultural values.

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Further, unlike some conservation activities (see Lorimer, 2015; Phillips, 2013), ghost gear collection is not joy-full. This is hot, abrasive, sometimes frustrated exertion in which ‘corporeal sensibility twists forth in ache, ennui and enervation’ (Wylie, 2005, 240). Least favoured as an activity by the rangers, ghost gear collection also comes with a kind of grim recognition – recognition of the nets themselves, the practices that have brought them to this place, their seeming ceaseless arrivals, and the multiple threats they present. Concerns about equitable distribution and procedural involvement do appear: in expressed frustration with continual cleaning up for a distant industry likely operating beyond Australian jurisdiction; in concern over disappearing funding; and in desire for better access to research results, appropriate equipment, and policy summaries. However, the dominant thread running through rangers’ comments relates to taking care and responsibility for land and sea country (including its attendant creatures). This care is expressed as a practical labour and an affective state. This section has highlighted that dealing with ghost gear involves challenging physical work with difficult, hazardous material that provokes strong feelings, including resentment of ghost gear as well as grief and care for nonhumans like turtles and oceans. In addition, as part of their practices, rangers differentiate and judge ghost gear. 3.1. Categorising waste and creating data How does ghost gear come to count? One way, as illustrated, is through the physical and emotional work of its collection. This embodied experience connects with processes of categorisation that provide another means of figuring how ghost gear becomes meaningful. As gear is collected, we make qualitative judgments about what is worth collecting through two related categorisations. First, these plastics in this context become inappropriate elements for the ongoing socionatural ordering of this beach. This valuation moves beyond assessing ghost gear as useless and therefore ready for disposal; these materials become negatively valued as pollutants and problems. This judgment brings with it an imperative to act: to remove them. In this way, the work of ghost gear collection demonstrates the unaccounted for effects of the fishing industry but also an erasure of these effects through clearing away the evidence, preventing ghost gear from provoking further response. In this performance we enact what Hawkins (2006, 56) calls a ‘commitment to disappearance’ of waste through ‘techniques of invisibility’. But not all plastic, and not all ghost gear, is collected. Sometimes gear eludes extraction (as already described), but we are also selective. Our second categorisation discriminates between gear to be collected or left (at least for now). All the gear is considered problematic, but only some becomes worthy of immediate intervention. Which ghost gear will become landfill through this collection involves negotiating multiple and interacting criteria: effort, capacity, impact, aesthetics, affective response, and so on. Mostly we stop for large pieces of net, ignoring smaller bits, ropes, and other debris. The microbeads so reviled in plastic campaigns these days are surely present, as they are from pole to pole (Eriksen et al., 2014), but they do not feature in our work. The beach we leave behind is not free of plastic debris – even of a kind we can readily sense. Priority falls to those materials judged to be most obvious, offensive, and hazardous. Neither of these categorisations is made explicit during patrol. However, transgressions are noted; for example, when I pick up smallish net pieces to the rangers’ amusement, or receive warnings when approaching objects like urine-filled bottles. It does not take long, even with selective collection, for those of us riding in the truck bed to be perched high on a pile of gear (carefully avoiding the dangers of lures and bait bags). It is not hard to believe that

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an estimated three tons of ghost net reaches each kilometre of this beach every year (Wilcox et al., 2013), or to understand why efforts must preferentially target some ghost gear. These categorisations have further impact that just what remains or is recovered. As we select and collect ghost gear, we also create data that feeds into scientific efforts to quantify incidence and impact. Using a remote device, we enter information about location, type of net, material, mesh size, and so on. The non-governmental organization GhostNets Australia launched data collection with rangers to assess ghost gear’s origin countries (and industries), as well as to determine presence with the aim of using calculated statistics to inform policy and orient conservation activities. The form, accessories, and substance of the nets provide indicators of their target species, which can aid efforts to trace ghost gear. However, the data we collect does not offer a direct line to culprits. Aside from limitations due to incomplete collection, any one net can have multiple meshes, and we see only pieces. Even if gear was marked by industry, a requirement in some countries, markings do not necessarily remain intact or identifiable. Complicating matters further, the database questions are also not always straightforward to answer; they are confounded by tangles of multiple gear and nets, changes to colour and strength from deterioration, varied understandings of texture, among other things. And component sourcing further obscures origins; as an Australian netmaker explained when showing me his work, gear often assembles plastic parts from Thailand, Japan, and India as well as previously used ropes or weights provided by fishers. All of these aspects, in addition to the complexity of oceanic journeys, makes tracing origins a speculative, if informed, activity. In addition to informing conservation policies and programs, the data we create also connect to resourcing. Over the last several years, rangers’ ghost gear collections have been funded through government allocations. However, this funding has always been precarious, and at the time of my visit, it was not to be renewed. This raised questions about ongoing collection of ghost gear and data. Some, though not all, ranger stations had committed to regular patrols within a subsection of coast, regardless of funding – here it is a designated 10 km – and were integrating ghost gear collection into other activities (like marine turtle monitoring). The continuing effort shows a level of care on the part of rangers, but also suggests that the work of dealing with ghost gear, despite the significance of the problem and the data evidencing it, may be sliding back into shadow. Attending to ghost gear encounters in this way reveals that relevant questions include not only ‘who cleans up the shit’ (Haraway, 2003, 17), but what is actually cleaned up and how. In processes of categorisation, ghost gear becomes remade: as a more exclusive category of waste requiring removal (versus that which remains) and as a set of data available for conservation research and policy. Moreover, the threads of this encounter do not stop with embodiment or with categorisation and data creation. Two other relevant threads are followed in subsequent sections: the first explores how ghost gear travels to this place and what it encounters along the way, while the second considers how ghost gear is met in policy, particularly how regulatory efforts attempt to deal with ghost gear’s problematic presence in marine environments.

4. Afterlife journeys with lively oceans When fishing gear escapes operations within which it had a clear place and function, the once useful gear becomes ghostly – a reminder of its previous life but not belonging to it. No longer directed by human hands, ghost gear joins oceanic worlds to move and become meaningful in new ways, with often troubling impli-

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cations. This phase of gear afterlives, after discard but before coming to rest on the Gulf’s shores, provides orientation for the following section. The particular paths taken by any one piece of ghost gear remain obscure; however, a more speculative approach offers insight into the liveliness of oceans (and their resident creatures) and related mobilities. With this interest, I join recent waterrelated geographies aimed at showing ‘the ways in which the sea is not a material or metaphorical void, but alive with embodied human experiences, more-than-human agencies as well as being a space in and of itself that has a material character, shape, and form’ (Anderson and Peters, 2014, 4). Following a more-thanhuman line of inquiry serves to disrupt any sense of the ocean as staid or empty, and to highlight the crucial role that lively oceans play in the ghost gear phenomenon. In pieces or still whole, ghost gear lays on the beach, taking in the sun, slowly disintegrating (Fig. 1). In contrast, most ghost gear comes aground on the Gulf’s east coast in a soaking roar – riding the king tides during monsoon season. If not collected in time, gear can become caught up by waves and return to circulate in the Gulf’s mini-gyre. For gear sitting beyond easy reach of the tides, waves may offer a periodic stirring allowing gear to skim to another spot, turn with other marine debris, or sink further into the sands. Each of these movements alter the capacities of ghost gear to affect its environs – for instance, risk increases for marine creatures if gear returns to oceans, while prolonged removals mean increased exposure times and types as plastics deteriorate. Before finding its way to these shores, ghost gear can flow with ocean waters for weeks, months, even years after abandonment by fishing vessels. Peters (2015) draws attention to the importance of drifting as a mobility in relation to understanding how oceans and people have related over time, using the example of abandoned ships. In the case of ghost gear, drifting is a particularly troubling movement; keeping at least a portion of mesh at the surface more effectively entangles creatures that use ocean surfaces as well as their depths. In fact, recent assessments suggest that the most problematic net for sea turtles in the Gulf is precisely the kind of net that drifts well (Wilcox et al., 2015). To be sure, drifting is important in the repertoire of ghost gear, but it is just one of several possible movements. Ghost gear moves horizontally and vertically in oceanic worlds; sometimes sinking with accumulated creatures or entangled detritus, sometimes floating adrift on the surface pushed here and there with winds and tides, sometimes stuck in the shallows with seagrass or snagged on coral, waiting to rejoin the currents. Some ghost gear is dense compared with sea water and sinks easily, but others’ buoyancy and durability allow it to travel further and longer. Circulating clockwise through the Gulf waters, ghost gear endures significant seasonal and episodic changes impacting how it travels. It may swirl and churn with turbid and nutrient-rich waters, skim and drift with winds of varied force and direction, rush and sweep with freshwater inundations, twist and tumble with tropical cyclones, surf and submerge with rising and falling swells. South-east Asian waters have become suspected as the predominant source of ghost gear in the Gulf (Wilcox et al., 2013). The warm, low-salinity current connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans carries ghost gear south, where it is swept into northern Australian waters by monsoon winds and caught up in ocean currents that leave it tracing Gulf coasts. The amount and types of fishing nearby is suggestive for understanding ghost gear incidence; Indonesia hosts the world’s second largest fisheries industry (FAO, 2012) and the Arafura Sea is a known hotspot of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (Stacey et al., 2011). Alternatively, ghost gear may flow to the Gulf through the Torres Strait from the South Pacific (Griffin, 2008), or (in relatively small numbers) find its way from within Australian waters (Gunn et al., 2010).

Whatever its movements and routes, ghost gear’s arrivals are heightened in extreme weather. For example, over 4000 nets with over 400 turtles are estimated to have washed ashore in the six weeks following one cyclone in 2001 (Limpus and Miller, 2002). Increased storm and cyclone frequency and intensity, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and higher temperatures – all part of climate change – will exacerbate the flows and implications of ghost gear. My conversations with fisheries officers and conservation advocates reveal that despite becoming a matter of concern, gear loss – purposeful and accidental – will always be a reality. Gear loss occurs during conflicts with other boats or because of snags on things like corals, when inclement weather and strong currents tear or drag gear free, or when worn gear gives and washes away (MacFadyen et al., 2009; SCBD, 2012). Fishers also abandon gear – because it becomes too difficult to retrieve, it is less costly to discard at sea (if they are not caught), or it provides evidence for prosecution of illegal fishing. When natural fibres were used, this kind of loss and abandonment was less problematic because the materials disintegrated. However, synthetic gear persists. This shift in material, in addition to increasing fishing rates, has resulted in surprising accumulations and effects. Ghost gear and other plastics do not just travel oceanic environments; they permeate and reconstitute them. Ghost gear presents in recognisable form – as nets, lures, buoys, bags, and so on – as well as in decaying states including fibrous pieces and chemical compounds. It appears throughout the water column and on sea floors (Eriksen et al., 2014; Woodall et al., 2014). However, its presence is not evenly distributed. Ocean gyres have gained much attention as places where plastics accumulate because of converging water and air currents, but plastics impact other places differentially as well. For example, only 10 per cent of marine debris in the Mediterranean is estimated to come from shipping and fisheries (Arcadis, 2012), while in the Gulf of Carpentaria approximately 80% of debris is ghost gear, and it accumulates at up to three tons per km per year (Gunn et al., 2010; Wilcox et al., 2013). Endangered sea turtles, among other creatures, travel these waters regularly and use these places for eating, breeding, and nesting. This, in combination with the disproportionate burden imposed on remote communities to deal with ghost gear, suggests that such geographic differentiation deserves close consideration. Moreover, ghost gear, though estimated at only 10 per cent of marine plastics world-wide, inflicts inordinate harm (MacFadyen et al., 2009). To begin, it is cited most frequently as the culprit in marine animals’ death or injury through entanglement (Gilman, 2015; SCBD, 2012). Then, as gear degrades, like other oceanic plastics, its pieces are ingested by organisms ranging from plankton to whales, often resulting in perforation, impaction, and/or starvation (SCBD, 2012). Additionally, ingested plastics can accumulate in bodies, releasing toxins, leading some researchers to argue that marine plastics should be classed as hazardous waste (Rochman et al., 2013). Aside from problems for particular marine organisms, ghost gear impacts fisheries through replacement costs, but also because in situ it ensnares vessels, impeding navigation or causing further gear loss. Ghost gear also alters ecosystem processes and compositions by obstructing water flows, scouring seabeds and corals, carrying invasive species across regions, even becoming incorporated into sea- and landscapes (see Carson et al., 2011; Goldberg, 1997; Katsanevakis et al., 2007; MacFadyen et al., 2009; Vegter et al., 2014). In these ways, ghost gear recasts fishing, and remakes oceanic and terrestrial futures. Tuana (2008, 203) reflects that ‘[p]lastics have left their signature on the flesh of many bodies’, emphasising the disproportionate material transformations spurred through plastic-related work of industrial labourers. Similarly, the rangers discussed in the previous sections suffer disproportionate burden of ghost gear.

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In addition, this section has pointed to some of the dangerous implications of plastics for nonhuman bodies – fleshy, shelled, watery. These bodies alter, in their turn, the ghost gear they encounter – disintegrating, pushing, snapping, churning, eating, tangling with it. Oceans through this account cannot be understood solely as resources or sinks, as empty expanses or staid worlds; instead, oceans team with life and activity. Oceanic worlds are tied up with and crucial to processes of socionatural transformation, as this section detailing the complex meetings and mobilities of ghost gear traveling through and with oceans demonstrates. As Bear (2012, 36) argues, ‘the sea can be much more than an expanse of salt water and is difficult to separate from elements, actants, and affects that surround and permeate it.’ That the waters ghost nets travel accommodate so many forms of life and ways of living points not only to the liveliness of oceans, but also to differentiation and complexity in the threats ghost gear presents. How the shadow realities presented by ghost gear – whether on beaches or in oceans – might be dealt with through regulation is the subject of the next section.

5. Governing ghost gear: territories and categorisations Oceanic history is full of efforts to create and control areas through demarking territory, but only recently have human geographies begun to analyse how lively oceans and regulatory orders intersect (see Bear and Eden, 2008; Gibbs and Warren, 2014; Steinberg, 2013). According to Steinberg (2013), oceanic governance often resorts to terrestrial referents and mapped regions controlled by states. Ghost gear’s regulation and management is no exception. This approach, as Steinberg suggests, does not take adequate account of oceanic worlds. Once on land, ghost gear management and disposal is covered, along with other waste, by national, state, and municipal policies, while landfills tend to be run by private contractors. In this way, terrestrial referents are quite relevant, but they make less sense in dealing with ghost gear as a complex and distributed phenomenon that impacts land and sea. How, then, do regulations attempt to deal with ghost gear? If experiential encounters highlight embodied effort, and ghost gear’s oceanic travels draw attention to fluidity and lively nonhumans, then regulations attempt to manage ghost gear as waste, reasserting control through territorial and material categorisations. An international legal framework specifying jurisdictions and mandate is provided by the Law of the Sea Convention. In it, statecontrolled lands provide the points from which borders are measured and to which control is assigned. Australia’s policies mirror this formulation. Federal and state authorities govern ghost gear, but taking a closer look at regulatory measures denies that these arrangements are either simple or static. In the Gulf, Queensland and the Northern Territory split responsibility, each holding jurisdiction for waters stretching to three nautical miles from their coasts. Federal authorities govern waters from this limit to the boundary of the exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles). Beyond this border lie other countries’ jurisdictions, each with fisheries and regulations of their own, as well as open waters outside any nation-state’s control. In addition to these federal and state boundings, varieties of Aboriginal land rights apply to approximately 85% of the Gulf’s coast and waters (Gunn et al., 2010). In this context, current and future efforts to deal with ghost gear are informed by a colonialist history and ongoing political and economic marginalisation, combined with the region’s physical remoteness (from urban centres), relatively intact ecologies, and cultural values of caring for country (see Altman and Kerins, 2012; Vincent and Neale, 2016). Ghost gear regulation a fraught endeavor that must be continuously worked out in particular places, through practice.

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As an example of the organisational complexity and coordination involved, consider the activities of the Dhimurru rangers. Since 1996, working with GhostNets Australia and Conservation Volunteers Australia, these rangers have collected ghost gear from an estimated 101,000 ha of land and water. This area includes the Dhimurru Indigenous Protected Area (IPA), which is part of Australia’s National Reserve System, and is managed cooperatively by the state’s parks department and the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation, which is itself accountable to traditional owners, whose lands are held by the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust (Hoffman et al., 2012). Rangers also patrol lands outside the IPA, including a township, community government area, and bauxite mining leases held by corporations. Support for the ranger program, including ghost gear collection, comes from federal conservation programs, funds from nearby mining interests, and tourism fees. Dealing with ghost gear in the Gulf, as this example shows, involves federal and state authorities, but also much more – including indigenous property laws and cultural practices. Ghost gear does not have dedicated regulation; instead, it plays a minor part in broader agreements focused primarily on marine debris. These policies, and attendant regulations, articulate concern about ocean plastics as polluting and/or threatening. The objects covered as ‘plastic marine debris’ or ‘ocean plastics’ range from ‘derelict fishing nets that are kilometres long and can weight [sic] many tons, to beverage containers and other consumer items, to small fragments used as abrasives and from breakdown of larger items’ (Hardesty et al., 2014, 22). While ghost gear is one form of this marine debris, the concern covers all plastics – as a material category of ocean pollutant. Regulation of marine debris depends upon whether it was discarded at sea or on land. For ghost gear, as ocean-based marine debris, Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) remains the key international agreement. It prohibits any ship from discharging any plastic garbage – including nets and other gear – into the sea. This means all plastics (whether whole, ground, or incinerated into ash) must be disposed of at equipped ports. Exceptions are made for gear if loss is accidental or ensures the protection of the environment and/or crew. In Australia, Annex V is effected through the Protection of the Sea (Prevention of Pollution from Ships) Act (1983), and complementary legislation in the states and territories. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority cooperatively run compliance programs for Australian waters, relying on state officers and rangers in select jurisdictions. Continuing accumulations of ghost gear in the Gulf, likely coming from vessels of Annex V signatory countries, reinforces the need to address compliance of legal fishing operations as well as dealing with the not insignificant illicit fishing activities ongoing in the region. However, enforcement continues to be a challenge, one attributed to limited awareness of measures, ship crew attitudes, and lack of infrastructure and staffing capacity (DEWHA, 2009; Jones, 1995; MacFadyen et al., 2009). In addition, regulations require that ghost gear be directly linked to a particular vessel – a relatively rare occurrence that relies upon self-reporting, marked gear collection, or recorded observation of violation. Meeting this direct link requirement is unlikely in monitored waters, but even less so in open ocean. So far, it has been the threats marine debris poses to marine creatures that have provided impetus for regulatory measures. For example, ghost gear has been targeted as a key problem in Australia’s conservation policies including the Threat Abatement Plan for the Impacts of Marine Debris on Vertebrate Marine Life. Such motivation presents both opportunity and challenge. Recognising the threat of plastic marine debris has prompted research, increased mediation efforts, and garnered attention, as well as pro-

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viding opportunity to link land and water conservation policies, for example, by supporting the work of rangers such as those in the Gulf. Unfortunately, recent assessment indicates the plan has failed thus far (DEWHA, 2015). Further, in focusing on conservation related particularly to species, these efforts do not address questions of what ghost gear might be doing aside from its encounters with specified creatures. This is not to suggest that the impacts on, for instance, sea turtles are not worthy of attention. They are. However, oceanic plastics, and ghost gear in particular, require both more encompassing and specific redress. The treatment of ghost gear as part of ‘marine debris’ illustrates what Bear and Eden (2008) call a ‘weak definition’, or one that allows room for maneuver; the myriad risks ghost gear poses, from entanglement to toxic build-up, need not be specifically addressed because a suite of strategies deals with the grouped category of plastics. In this formulation, the threats posed by ghost gear are not ignored, but neither are its particularities attended. And yet, it is clear that the differentiated distribution, impact, and mutability of ghost gear is significant. How to reconcile this dissonance remains an open question for policy. These plastics-focused approaches also concentrate on the ‘after-lives’ of fishing gear – or what happens after gear detaches from human-directed fishing and becomes ‘waste’. Unfortunately, this allows fishing and plastics industries to escape responsibility unless a specific culprit can be identified and proven to be at fault. As already indicated, the materials, pathways, methods of disposal, and reporting protocols involved make such identifications, and ensuing prosecutions, unlikely. In addition to becoming marine debris in conservation-related policies, ghost gear can be included in fisheries management measures. This is more rare, and often involves a deferral to MARPOL, however, it is worth mentioning because of the difference in how ghost gear becomes considered. The focus in these policies is less on plastic’s afterlives, and more on sustaining fisheries. And, though ghost gear is recognised as problematic, these agreements also appreciate what synthetic gear affords – cost-effectiveness, selective harvest, etc. As exemplar, reiterating the text of the FAO’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, the Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean encourages states to ‘adopt measures to minimise waste, discards, and catch by lost or abandoned gear’ as well as to ‘promote the development and use of selective, environmentally safe, and cost-effective fishing gear and techniques’. Unfortunately, these agreements also seem ineffective; Code compliance has been assessed overall as ‘dismal’, with ghost gear management receiving the poorest scores (Pitcher et al., 2008). Strategies endorsed for fisheries sustainability, such as controlled catch amounts, may indirectly benefit ghost gear incidence due to likely reductions in gear use and conflicts in any one area. However, ghost gear management remains largely outside the articulated concerns of fisheries management. Following the thread of governing approaches shows ghost gear’s story to include regulatory boundaries and material categorisations called upon in the effort to deal with its influence. Policies dealing with ghost gear, whether as marine debris or as part of fisheries management, reiterate territorially-based spaces of control but also refuse strong definitions or specified measures. This may reflect the difficulties of creating regulations across varied interests and jurisdictions. Or, it might be a system designed to fail, allowing select actors to avoid responsibility while continuing oceanic exploitation. It might also be suggestive of acknowledgement that the movements, accumulations, sources, and even types of gear remain poorly understood, and that ruptures of imposed boundaries remain inevitable, if still problematic. What is clear, is that possibilities of dealing with ghost gear are limited by divisions imposed between land and water, assignations of responsi-

bility to state and/or individualised ships, and silence regarding the uneven burden experienced – by humans and nonhumans. Moreover, how regulatory approaches attempt to deal with ghost gear is not isolated. Policies, and their successes or failures, are deeply implicated and influenced by how ghost gear becomes encountered on beaches and in oceans.

6. Continuing entanglements Without synthetics we would not have the fishing industry we have today. Nor would we face the burden that comes with it. Plastic’s capacities for manifesting durable, light, strong, coloured fibres of varied density makes much of the difference for fishing – boosting catch rates and harvesting efficiency, increasing industry scale and influence. However, as discarded gear travels with and through the sea, it lets go of its previous existence in fishing, becoming otherwise. The processes of transformation for ghost gear do not end with abandonment at sea. No longer attached to vessels, gear disperses, ensnares, rips, drifts, tangles, churns, and disintegrates as it participates in the ‘energetic materiality’ of the sea and takes new shape as ghosts. Ghost gear becomes oceanbased marine debris, worthy of collection (or not), an externality to be minimised when possible, a challenge to regulate effectively, a threat to marine creatures, hazardous waste, a target for conservation policies, and so on. My aim in this paper has been to consider what it means to contend with ghost gear’s inhabitations. I have argued that adopting a more-than-human encounter approach offers new ways of thinking through how ghost gear becomes understood and dealt with. Moreover, encounters, I contend, emerge not as isolated, immediate meetings between separate bodies, but as intimate tangles – interlacings of multiple threads through which bodies inhabit and remake worlds. Demonstrating these points, the paper details fishing gear’s afterlives along three lines. The initial encounter with ghost gear on the beach offers a situated experience from which to proceed. It details the physical, emotional, and categorising work that goes into collection of ghost gear, providing insight into which nets become collected in the Gulf of Carpentaria, as well as how and why. The valuations and processes worked out through embodied encounter are shown not only to be conditioned by but also to feed into evolving conservation agendas, even if relevant policies and programs do not make this obvious. Curiosity about how ghost gear comes to be on these beaches leads to a second thread, which flows into oceanic worlds. Herein, multiple mobilities and nonhuman encounters illustrate the range of ghost gear and its impacts. Through following ghost gear journeys, oceans become known not only as lively but as crucial agents in the phenomenon of ghost gear. How ghost gear becomes encountered, and responded to, through policy constitutes the third line of inquiry. The previous sections’ elaborations of ghost gear as a complex problem with differentiated agents and impacts provide informs the assessment that existing territorial controls and material categorisations prove inadequate measures in need of rethinking. These three threads of ghost gear’s ongoing story should be read through and with each other, revealing the continual becomings of ghost gear and the ways in which it shapes and is shaped through its encounters. The ubiquitous but differentiated presence of synthetic ghost gear, the continuing surprise at its movements and implications, its endurance beyond common (human) spatial and temporal referents, point to a need to extend more-than-human analyses to include difficult, unruly, and/or harmful matters, their uneven implications, and the effort of dealing with them. Ghost gear exerts real damage experienced by humans and nonhumans, individually and collectively. This observation provides not a basis for judgment

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of materials as either inherently good or bad, but a mandate to explore ghost nets as they travel and transform – in corporeal, affective, and cognitive terms. In this exploration, the stories of ghost gear have been demonstrated to be about more than effective management. Ghost gear makes its presence felt, in unequal ways, on land and in waters: it evokes concern and angst, threatens to visit death or pain onto others, offers spectral reminders of fishing industries and growing consumption, contests territorial demarcations and attempts to govern with its movements. The material and affective force of ghost gear is undeniable, and demands response. Tensions arise from the distributed causes and effects, the complexity of factors and agents, the multiplicity of assigned responsibilities and capacities to meet them. These tensions cannot be resolved through reinscribing borders or through isolating plastics as an object of waste management; instead, what responses occur is continually negotiated through practice – including those occurring on coastal beaches, in oceanic worlds, and through policy-making. A more-than-human approach acknowledges this multiplicity of ghost gear and its influences, and encourages consideration of differentiations in and possibilities of responsibility. What is owed to those people and places that are differentially impacted by ghost gear? How should we deal with the remains of global harvest and consumption? This case suggests we might consider how land and sea are connected rather than completely separate realms, how the onus to establish direct connection to a particular ship to be prosecuted misdirects attention, how control areas do not deal well with mobile nonhumans – whether migrating creatures or less directed gears, how Aboriginal and Western approaches to caring for country might exist in productive tension rather than opposition. Aside from these more targeted responses, this accounting points to broader considerations. Who/what do we owe for our existence? What responsibilities emerge from that owing, and our shared vulnerability, in individual and collective terms? How, and what would prompt us, to change our worlds? My hope is that this paper contributes to the provocation of this kind of practical and ethico-political rethinking. Acknowledgements I am grateful to all the participants who shared their time and thoughts during the research, particularly the Nanum Wungthim Land and Sea Rangers and GhostNets Australia. Thanks also to Lisa Slater, Tim Neale, Leah Gibbs, and Chantel Carr for their constructive comments. This paper draws from a larger research project, funded by an Australian Research Council grant to Gay Hawkins (DP130101249). References Altman, J., Kerins, S. (Eds.), 2012. People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures. Federation Press, Sydney. Anderson, J., Peters, K. (Eds.), 2014. Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean. Ashgate, Farnham, UK. Andrady, A., 2011. Microplastics in the marine environment. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 62, 1596–1605. Arcadis, 2012. Case Studies on the Plastic Cycle and Its Loopholes in the Four European Regional Seas Areas. Arcadis, European Commission, Brussels. Atchison, J., Head, L., 2013. Eradicating bodies in invasive plant management. Environ. Plan. D 31 (6), 951–968. Bear, C., 2012. Assembling the sea. Cult. Geogr. 20 (1), 21–41. Bear, C., Eden, S., 2008. Making space for fish. Soc. Cult. Geogr. 9 (5), 487–504. Butler, J., Gunn, R., Berry, H., Wagey, G., Hardesty, B., Wilcox, C., 2013. A value chain analysis of ghost nets in the Arafura Sea. J. Environ. Manage. 123, 14–25. Carson, H., Colbert, S., Kaylor, M., McDermid, K., 2011. Small plastic debris changes water movement and heat transfer through beach sediments. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 62 (8), 1708–1713. DeSilvey, C., 2006. Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things. J. Mater. Cult. 11 (3), 318–338. DEWHA (Department of the Environment, Heritage and the Arts), 2009. Background Paper for the Threat Abatement Plan. Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.

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