CHESTERTOWN, MD—On Sunday, Nov. 3, environmental artist and educator Marcus Eriksen will visit Chestertown to talk about the plastics polluting our oceans. Eriksen is the executive director of the 5 Gyres Institute, which is largely dedicated to the study and awareness of plastic pollution. His talk, “Saving Our Synthetic Seas,” will take place in The Imperial Hotel, 208 High Street, at 7 p.m. as the culmination of Downrigging Weekend in Chestertown.

Eriksen holds a Ph.D. in Science Education from the University of Southern California. He is co-founder of 5 Gyres Institute, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that supervises transoceanic research expeditions, education projects, and campaigns to understand the ecological impacts of plastic marine pollution. In 2008 he and a colleague sailed from California to Hawaii, a total of 2,600 miles over 88 days, on a homemade raft made of 15,000 plastic bottles and a Cessna airplane fuselage. Eriksen is the author of My River Home (Beacon Press, 2007), which chronicles his experiences on the Mississippi River and as a Marine in the 1991 Gulf War. He is also an environmental artist whose sculpture of a fallen soldier is displayed at Chicago’s National Veterans Art Museum.

This lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Center for Environment & Society, Sultana Projects, Inc., and Tall Ships of America. For more information: http://www.washcoll.edu/centers/ces.

Kathryn Gilley ’14