Scotian Shores honours Ann Schweitzer while removing decades of marine debris from Long Island
By Passages Editor Monica Stark, photos courtesy Scotian Shores
For two weeks in August, volunteers with Scotian Shores worked their way along some of the most difficult-to-reach stretches of coastline on Digby Neck, Long Island and Brier Island, climbing over rocks and rough terrain, filling supersacks with decades of accumulated marine debris and, in some cases, relying on local boats to get both themselves and what they collected back out again. By the end of the Second Annual Ann’s Legacy Shoreline Cleanup, they had removed everything from thousands of plastic bottles to old fishing gear, Styrofoam, buoys and rope. Passages interviewed Scotian Shores founder Angela Riley in late September about the Annual Cleanup, and about what can happen when people who care about a place combine their knowledge, time and resources to take care of it.
The annual cleanup is named in memory of the late island resident Ann Schweitzer, although Riley never actually met Ann. Her first encounter with Ann’s story came only after Ann’s death, when Riley was surveying Long Island for shoreline debris. She stopped at Ann’s former home hoping to ask permission to cross the property to reach the shore, but found the house empty and left. At the time, Riley had already identified Long Island as having some of the greatest concentrations of what she calls “legacy pollution” she had encountered in Nova Scotia—debris that had been accumulating along isolated stretches of shoreline for decades—and she was beginning to dream about what it would take to clean it up.
A year or so later, Riley returned to Freeport with a Scotian Shores crew for an Ocean Week cleanup, this time using Ann’s Community Greenhouse as their base. She hadn’t known about Ann’s role in creating the greenhouse, but began hearing stories about her there. During the same visit, a couple contacted the team about approximately 250 pounds of debris they had collected from their cove. When Riley went to pick it up, she discovered that they were living in the same house she had visited before. She finally got to see the shoreline she had originally hoped to access, and heard more about Ann and the group of local women who had built and created things in the community, sometimes hauling materials up the island’s formidable hills to do it. Later that evening, Riley met still more people who had known and worked alongside Ann.
For Riley, who describes herself as a spiritual person, the series of connections was difficult to dismiss. She kept returning to Long Island, and the places Ann had helped create became part of the infrastructure that allowed Scotian Shores to tackle the island’s old, deeply embedded shoreline pollution. Eventually, the name for the cleanup seemed obvious. “Ann is the one who planted the seeds of where we base a lot of operations from when we come to Long Island,” Riley explained. The word legacy carries a deliberate double meaning: Ann’s legacy in the community, and the legacy pollution volunteers are working to remove. Although Riley can’t know what Ann would have thought of the project, she suspects “she would be happy to know the island she loved and cared for so much is still being taken care of and still very much loved.”
This August, the cleanup included work on Brier Island and Digby Neck, but most of the effort was concentrated along the Bay of Fundy side of Long Island. Part of the reason was the amount of old debris known to be there, but accessibility has also shaped the condition of our shorelines. Brier Island, Riley noted, is generally cleaner because more of its shoreline is accessible and organized cleanups have been taking place there annually for more than a decade. Long Island and Digby Neck contain much more remote stretches that are difficult to reach on foot, and even more difficult to leave while carrying what has been collected.
The support Scotian Shores received on Long Island made it possible to concentrate on some of those places. Local fishermen took to their boats, transporting volunteers and retrieving filled supersacks from shorelines where carrying them out over land would have been impractical. Landowners provided access through their properties, while other residents followed the crew’s progress, shared their knowledge and helped identify areas where debris tends to accumulate. For Riley, that local involvement is essential to doing this kind of work safely and efficiently.
“I can’t stress this enough—we couldn’t do this without the locals,” she said. A nautical chart may show the coastline, but it cannot replicate the knowledge of someone who has spent a lifetime working along it. A periwinkler knows the shore from years of travelling it; a fisherman knows how closely and safely a boat can approach a particular cove; and property owners know the routes that can save volunteers from hiking kilometres across difficult terrain before the cleanup has even begun. What looks like an extreme cleanup operation to a visiting volunteer may be familiar ground to someone who has spent decades working there.
What the volunteers found also tells a story about the Bay of Fundy and about how far marine debris can travel. More than 2,600 plastic bottles were collected during the cleanup, making them the most common individual item found. Riley explained that light, buoyant objects are particularly likely to be carried by the Fundy’s winds and currents, which is why bottles, buoys, balloon floats, Styrofoam and other plastic containers appear so frequently on our shores. Many of the bottles collected this summer were familiar local brands, including Big 8, but others could be identified as American by the information on their deposit labels.
Scotian Shores has been collecting data alongside the debris, and that information makes it clear that what washes ashore here is not simply garbage originating from the communities nearest the beach. The organization has recorded more than 60,000 lobster tags from shorelines in southwestern Nova Scotia and around the Bay of Fundy; according to Riley, their data indicates that between 40 and 60 per cent of those tags came from American sources. Other objects have travelled much farther. A buoy from Spain has even turned up on Long Island. The combination of Fundy tides and currents, storms, historical fishing activity and the enormous concentration of fishing along the eastern seaboard means our coastline can become a collecting point for debris originating across a very large area.
Fishing-related material inevitably makes up a substantial portion of what the volunteers find, but Riley is careful to put that in context. Fishing is our largest industry and has been taking place in these waters for generations. Not every piece of gear in the ocean was carelessly discarded: storms happen, gear gets cut loose when another vessel passes over it, seals can carry off bait bags, and lightweight objects can disappear in a gust of wind. There are losses that can be prevented, and Riley believes more attention needs to be paid to those, including greater awareness of what materials really are biodegradable. Scotian Shores had already collected approximately 470,000 lobster bands in 2026. But some loss, she argues, is unavoidable, which means shoreline cleanup itself will continue to be necessary. “Do your best,” she said, “and help us clean up the losses.”
Fortunately, removing something from the shoreline no longer necessarily means moving it directly to a landfill. When Scotian Shores began its work about six years ago, Riley says most of what the organization collected had to be thrown away. Today, it is able to recycle or repurpose an estimated 60 to 80 per cent. During Ann’s Legacy, usable buoys, rope, and fish bins were returned to people in the Long Island community, while six large bags of refundable containers were placed by the road and quickly claimed. Usable balloon buoys were given to one of the boat captains as a thank-you. Hard plastics and floating rope went to Nova Scotia recycler Sustane Technologies, and metals, tires and even oil containers can now be diverted from landfill. Some materials remain difficult to deal with, however, including polystyrene, broken balloon buoys, leaded and polyester rope, pieces of rubber and aquaculture piping.
The scale of the work can be daunting. Since 2020, Scotian Shores has removed close to two million pounds of debris from Nova Scotia shorelines, and the same tides that deliver debris today will continue delivering it tomorrow. A beach can be cleaned only to have more material wash ashore with the next tide or storm. For people living here, however, Riley wants to emphasize two things: much of the debris arriving on our coastline did not originate on the Islands, and the work being done to remove it really is having an effect.
“The areas being cleaned ARE noticeably better,” she said. “We are making a difference.” And there are many ways local residents can help without joining a crew on a five-kilometre hike into an isolated cove. Keeping accessible shorelines clean allows Scotian Shores to concentrate its resources on the places most people cannot reach. Property owners can provide shoreline access, while people with boats or ATVs can help move volunteers and debris. Residents can also tell the organization about large concentrations of garbage they have spotted. And, Riley added, those who simply want to cheer the volunteers on, or bring them snacks and cookies, are welcome too.