Although having been in the Cayman Islands for a week, LMV director Ed Scott-Clarke is still not sure whether he can stay to complete filming of Plastic Shores. Upon arrival on Tuesday (20th), his passport was seized by immigration and he has yet to have it returned. The main bone of contention seems to be what and who LMV will be filming and the amount of time LMV proposes to stay on the islands. The latter point is understandable, considering the financial status of the islands and the eagerness of many to gain citizenship here.
The Cayman Islands are well-known for diving and sailing holidays, as well as beautiful beaches and smart restaurants. Grand Cayman, the largest of the three islands (the others being Cayman Brac and Little Cayman), also hosts the world’s only population of Blue Iguanas. LMV visited the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme and met up with its head warden John Marotta. The Recovery Programme has been a spectacular success story for conservation, bringing the Blue Iguana back from functional extinction in 2004 to a population nearing 700 today.
John took LMV to a beach set away from the more popular tourist spots where he normally collects vegetation to feed the captive lizards in the programme (the programme makes sure that all food fed to the Blue Iguanas is representative of their natural diet and comes from the Cayman Islands). Whereas all the other beaches LMV has seen on the islands are made up of pristine white sand, this shoreline was more like something from Big Island, Hawai’i on the edge of the Pacific Garbage Patch. The beach was covered in plastic bottles and, according to John, it was comparatively clean due to a recent storm that had cleared most of the debris. 90% of the waste had come from cruise ships, which habitually dump trash as soon as they are out of national waters. Because of the way currents work, most of this washes back up on the Cayman Islands.
The CI government, fortunately (and unlike in the UK), seem to have a comprehensive cleanup strategy for this waste. Of course, as a large part of their economy is based on tourism, this would make sense. This hasn’t stopped some people trying to highlight the problem though. On South Sound Road that loops around the bottom of Grand Cayman, there is a tree covered in shoes and flip-flops. Called the Cayman Shoe Tree, it was started by Canadian electrician Wolfgang Brocklebank and his Swiss girlfriend Giovanna Inselmini to raise awareness for the amount of shoes washed up on the Cayman coastline. People are encouraged to add more shoes they find on the CI shoreline to the living sculpture.
