Kat Owens Raises Environmental Awareness Through Art

Kat Owens is a plastic pollution researcher, artist, and activist. She merges science, policy, and the arts to address plastic pollution in her ongoing art series “Entangled and Ingested” which showcases portraits of animals affected by plastic pollution…made of plastic. Owens is also a National Geographic Explorer, a Fulbright Nehru fellow, and a Professor at the University of Hartford in the Department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies. Owens works with her students on a variety of projects to address real-world problems, such as collecting marine debris and addressing pollution along their hometown shorelines in Connecticut. Owen’s research in marine plastic pollution and river debris has been supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Fulbright Nehru Foundation, and the National Geographic Society. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. If you've passed through Bradley International Airport recently, you may have noticed a 60-foot-long, 20-foot-wide, life-size portrait of a sperm whale made from discarded plastic bags and shipping mailers. The piece was created by my guest today as part of her ongoing, entangled, and ingested art series. Kat Owens is not only an ambitious artist, she is also a plastic pollution researcher, activist, and professor. Owens merges science, policy, and the arts to create life-size portraits of the animals harmed by plastic pollution to raise environmental awareness.

• 2:21Alec Baldwin?

  Kat Owens is also a National Geographic Explorer, Fulbright NERU Fellow, and a professor at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Owens seamlessly blends her visual art with her day-to-day work. I wanted to know if she first considered herself to be an artist or an environmentalist?

• 2:41Speaker 06

  That's a good question. I would say an artist first, definitely. From a young age, I was very interested in drawing and making things and fortunately was able to, you know, get some art lessons and things before I got to school age where it was available through schools. And then I went to college, the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and I was a studio art major there and got exposed to all kinds of amazing things: painting, printmaking, a little bit of sculpture, drawing. But when I was at college, the subject matter for all of my work was insects. I was really into bugs. Yeah.

• 3:19Alec Baldwin?

  So bugs came into the picture when?

• 3:21Speaker 06

  In high school. I had a high school biology class where we had to do a bug collection. And I was always like an outdoorsy kind of kid, but that's when I started collecting bugs. And then I went to college and I was kind of just, you know, your art teacher says like, "Make something", and you don't know what to make, right? You know, nothing's like, your brain's not working like that yet, really like thinking about deep thoughts quite yet. So I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna make, I've got all these insects. I'm gonna start making art." And so I really got into it and would be, like, I was the bug girl at my college. And people would bring me bugs. I would go out to bars and people would be like, "Oh, my God, I found this great moth. I'm gonna bring it to the studio next week." And they would, which was really fun.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  Then I graduated with an art degree. And back then, in the 90s, they were kind of like, "Yeah, good luck." No information about like how to start a career. They said, "If you're lucky, after you're dead, people might be interested in your artwork." So I waitressed for two years and then I was like, you know, I think I'd like to study science more formally. And so I sat in on an entomology class. The professor at the College of Charleston let me sit in on his class and I really loved it. And so then I decided to take the plunge. I went back to school and got degrees in biology and anthropology. And all the work I was doing was connected to insects.

• 4:43Alec Baldwin?

  Why?

• 4:44Speaker 06

  Well, they're fascinating.

• 4:46Alec Baldwin?

  No, I mean, I agree. They're great. I watched my share of insect documentaries, but like, you really go down this road. I mean, you get degrees in all these really, really heady subjects. What was the goal? You weren't going to be an artist. You were going to do what?

• 5:01Speaker 06

  I thought at the time that I would be a scientist, that I would go to graduate school and study entomology. I was especially into beetles and I started a master's degree at the College of Charleston in environmental studies. And I was on the brink of doing a project about ground beetles in the Smoky Mountains. And I loved it. But then, over time, I had realized if you're an entomologist, you spend like six weeks out collecting bugs and the rest of the year looking through microscopes, counting leg parts, you know? And I thought, I don't know if I want to spend the rest of my life indoors looking through a microscope. And so I got more interested in sort of like the environmental policy

• 5:42Speaker 06

  side of things. And so I switched from the science track to the policy track in my master's program and started studying-

• 5:50Alec Baldwin?

  This is where? What school?

• 5:52Speaker 06

  At the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

• 5:54Alec Baldwin?

  The College of Charleston. Now, what is this place you went? It's called Twente?

• 5:59Speaker 06

  It's called University of Twente, yeah, in the Netherlands.

• 6:02Alec Baldwin?

  And you were there how long? A while?

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Almost five years. It was amazing.

• 6:07Alec Baldwin?

  And that was for what program?

• 6:08Speaker 06

  It was a PhD program in sustainability and governance.

• 6:12Alec Baldwin?

  So you have a, do you have a PhD? You finished?

• 6:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely.

• 6:16Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, my God. What was it like studying that there?

• 6:20Speaker 06

  Very cool. I mean, I loved being in the Netherlands. You know, no car, biking everywhere. Wonderful place to be sort of like young and broke. I have my two oldest children. I had them there because it was free and you got all kinds of support.

• 6:36Alec Baldwin?

  How old are your kids now?

• 6:38Speaker 06

  They are just turning, their birthdays are last week and next week. Twenty and eighteen.

• 6:43Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:44Alec Baldwin?

  What does your husband do?

• 6:46Speaker 06

  He, at the time, he was, for a long time, he was building timber barns out of like, you know, they do like hand barn raising.

• 6:54Alec Baldwin?

  Sure.

• 6:55Speaker 06

  And.

• 6:56Alec Baldwin?

  Very expensive barns.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know a guy if you need a cheap one. But he did that for a long time. And then about 10 years ago, he's like, I can't keep climbing up these ladders. Like this is, I'm getting too old for this. And he went back to school and now he teaches botany in Connecticut.

• 7:12Alec Baldwin?

  So you stayed five years in the Netherlands?

• 7:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:16Alec Baldwin?

  But that's what it took for you to do the program, the doctoral?

• 7:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:20Alec Baldwin?

  And the degree was in what again?

• 7:21Speaker 06

  It's governance and sustainability. It's like environmental policy.

• 7:25Alec Baldwin?

  Right. And when you went into that, knowing it was going to be five years of your life, what was the goal? Meaning like where along the way before you started making artwork of innocent animals being contaminated and poisoned by our hands? What was the goal before, were you thinking of going into some kind of administrative job? Or you wanted an appointment? You wanted to work for a state? You wanted to run for office? What was the goal then?

• 7:51Speaker 06

  I think I, you know, I had all these degrees, right? I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate. I loved the professors I had and I thought, I want to be like them. I want to get a PhD and teach at a university. And that's how I ended up kind of on that track.

• 8:07Alec Baldwin?

  When you finished in the University of Tventa, when you graduated from there, what year was that?

• 8:12Speaker 06

  Two thousand and eight.

• 8:14Alec Baldwin?

  Okay, so that's a while ago. That's seventeen years ago.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:17Alec Baldwin?

  And what was the plan? You were gonna go do what? And what happened?

• 8:20Speaker 06

  I started looking for jobs at colleges, at universities.

• 8:23Alec Baldwin?

  To teach?

• 8:24Speaker 06

  Full-time teaching jobs, yeah. That's when I came over. And my husband was doing the timber framing at that time. And he was like, can we go somewhere where there are trees and barns? Like a history of trees and barns? And so we were almost exclusively looking in New England. And I applied for the job at the University of Hartford. And I got that. And I've been there for eighteen years.

• 8:44Alec Baldwin?

  Did you? So nothing in your academic career revisited Georgia? You don't know? When you grew up in Georgia, you left Georgia, never to return?

• 8:53Speaker 06

  I mean, I go to see family, but I haven't lived there since I was eighteen. No, I lived in Charleston for ten years and then the Netherlands. And then I've been in Connecticut ever since.

• 9:02Alec Baldwin?

  Right. When you started this work, what did you see? Like, for me, I see that plastics pollution has usurped many other environmental issues. Because, you know, everybody's under the impression of we've all been contaminated by massive amounts of plastics pollution.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:20Alec Baldwin?

  What was the thing that alarmed you? That you decided you wanted to pivot into this art project you've been doing?

• 9:26Speaker 06

  I was playing around with it as early as 2012. But I really started during the pandemic, doing the artwork and focusing on this particular project. So at that time, I'd been studying water policy for about twenty years. And plastic pollution started to be a big issue within environmental policy and water policy. And the more I looked at it, I knew in Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, we weren't one of these places. Like, you can see stories on the Midway Islands in Hawaii, where they just get like tons of plastic, like, showing up on their islands. And I knew we weren't one of those kinds of places. But I wanted to know, sort of like, what this big global problem looks like in my neck of the woods. So.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  I applied for funding from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the idea of the project was that I would take my students from the University of Hartford, and we'd go down to the beach and collect debris and analyze it and then share the results with policymakers. Like, I wanted to make that connection between...

• 10:29Alec Baldwin?

  State or federal?

• 10:31Speaker 06

  State. State-level policymakers. So we did that. That was funding that I got in 2016 to do that project. And it was really fun, really cool experience for my students. And then, based on that, I applied for funding from the Fulbright Foundation to replicate that project in a place called Thiruvananthapuram, India, which is in southwest India. And it's the same idea. We go, we collect debris, and we analyze it, we use scientific methods to do it, and then share the results with policymakers. And, you know, while I was there, I got funding from the National Geographic Society, too, to train other folks from around India in these methods.

• 11:13Alec Baldwin?

  Do they have a lot of money available for that kind of thing?

• 11:15Speaker 06

  National Geographic Society, they have a really strong grant program.

• 11:19Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 11:20Speaker 06

  And once you get in the door as an explorer, they offer all kinds of, like, really great opportunities to collaborate with other explorers and do all kinds of neat projects. So I'm very grateful.

• 11:31Alec Baldwin?

  Now, and some of these grants are grants that we might assume, maybe not, that are going to evaporate pretty soon?

• 11:38Speaker 06

  I don't know. I mean, National Geographic is independent, but NOAA has certainly been impacted by...

• 11:44Alec Baldwin?

  Right. That's what I was referring to, yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Which is a shame, right? Because it's really about, like, protecting resources for all of us that are critical for our survival, something we should all care about.

• 11:55Alec Baldwin?

  Well, you know, for me, the beginnings, or some of the beginnings of this, I mean, I've worked with people at UNEP, the former UNDP Development Program. I've worked with people for years now. And much of it related to plastics pollution. And, you know, some of the initial, you know, pulsing, dramatic presentations were about the Pacific garbage gyre.

• 12:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:17Alec Baldwin?

  Out there throwing off all kinds of, you know, it's just a piece of a giant garbage dump.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:23Alec Baldwin?

  Leaching plastic into the water in the baking sun.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:27Alec Baldwin?

  The size of Rhode Island, or whatever the hell it is now.

• 12:29Speaker 06

  Texas.

• 12:30Alec Baldwin?

  Okay, well, I was hoping you wouldn't say that, but I'm so sorry you said that. But the, I don't want to discourage our listeners, but when I was young, recycling was it. You were told, and if you could compost or whatever, you know, I made efforts in all those areas. But now plastics pollution seems to be the devil. I mean, everybody's really, really, really uptight about this. When did you first become aware of this? And what kind of work were you doing, even as a child?

• 12:59Speaker 06

  I mean, I wasn't really engaged on things around plastic and climate change or things like that as a, as a child. My awareness came much later because I am from a very small town, rural town in Georgia. But, you know, it was definitely for me in college and then later in graduate school. And even as someone who studies it, you know, my eyes have been opened so much over the last decade about recycling and what, what's really happening with recycling. I do recycle, I, I try to recycle, but it doesn't make me feel good all the time because I don't truly believe that a lot of the recycling is happening, right?

• 13:36Alec Baldwin?

  Being handled properly, yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so what happened in 2018 or 2019, China put this policy in place called the National Sword Policy, where they said they were no longer going to take our, basically like shredded bales of plastic.

• 13:52Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  And recycle them anymore. And when that happened, the sort of market for recycling disappeared because no one wants it. And so I know that, you know, whereas local governments, municipal governments used to get a little bit of money, I mean, it probably added up to like a couple $10,000, you know, for a town like my town, over the year, now there's no market for it.

• 14:19Alec Baldwin?

  Researcher, activist, and artist Kat Owens. If you enjoy conversations with artists inspired by nature, check out my episode with photographer Carolyn Marks Blackwood. So, singing, writing, the photography on that level, do they overlap?

• 14:37Speaker 07

  Yes, and they overlap to this day. I'm doing photography. I'm having museum shows that are coming up. I have galleries where I have shows. And I'm making movies with my partner. So when one part of my brain gets tired, I go to the other thing. And it's just a whole other part of my brain. It's wonderful.

• 15:02Alec Baldwin?

  To hear my conversation with Carolyn Marks Blackwood, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Kat Owens talks about the goal behind her entangled and ingested series, and what she is trying to say through art.

• 15:25Speaker 00

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• 16:48Speaker 09

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiral. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

• 17:10Speaker 10

  Everything about us, everything we do is temporary. And I just got terrified of that. You know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us. How I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people. And I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special. And enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not going to last.

• 17:44Speaker 09

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:55Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Kat Owens has traveled the world for her research. After attending college in Charleston, Owens spent five years in the Netherlands completing her PhD. She continued her research in Finland, India, Indonesia, and Uganda. These days, Owens resides in Connecticut and teaches at the University of Hartford. Owens and her students gather samples and data from marine debris collected along the Connecticut shorelines. Having lived and studied in so many unique places across the world, I wanted to know what drew Owens to Connecticut.

• 18:36Speaker 06

  I applied to a few universities in the Northeast for a job and I came to Hartford and I really loved it. It has a real potential for interdisciplinary work because it has a music school, an art school, an engineering school, a college of arts and sciences, a business school. So it's got a lot of depth, even though it's a really small institution, relatively small institution. So I thought that would be, that they might kind of get my whole interdisciplinary way of doing things and it might be more, you know, just like a good place to grow and thrive. And then they hired me, so like that all came together.

• 19:12Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, they're geniuses if they hired me. Now, describe for me, you said you started this, the artwork, the specific artwork we're talking about in during COVID. And interesting how a lot of people needed something like that to soothe them. And we all had our way to negotiate our way through COVID. Describe to me the genesis of the pieces. Describe to me how that process begins. Is it all recycled material? Describe to me what you're making as an artist.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this began during COVID when all of that research that I was doing out in the field got canceled. And my regular job, and it's true, I'm sure for everyone who was in education at any level at that time, like it just exploded into all this terrible, you know, you're stuck in these meetings, you're making choices that aren't great. And I was really stuck in a lot of Zoom meetings at that time and struggling with it because I'd just come back from India. I had all this kind of momentum behind my work and I thought like, things are really coming together, like maybe we can change policy on this issue. So what I started to do is to create these life-size portraits of different species that are harmed by plastic pollution.

• 20:27Alec Baldwin?

  Such as?

• 20:28Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, there are over 500 of them.

• 20:31Alec Baldwin?

  Sure. What was your first one?

• 20:33Speaker 06

  The fairy penguin. Which is a little penguin, a little cute blue penguin that I believe is from, it goes between South Africa and Antarctica. I'm not a penguin scientist.

• 20:44Alec Baldwin?

  Why that, why, why that animal? Why?

• 20:46Speaker 06

  It's cute and it's small. I started small because I wasn't, so what I do is I hand sew film plastics onto canvas to make these portraits.

• 20:55Alec Baldwin?

  When you say film plastics, you mean what?

• 20:57Speaker 06

  By that, I mean any kind of like soft pliable plastic that's not too thick.

• 21:02Alec Baldwin?

  Plastic bags?

• 21:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's plastic bags. It's a lot of like food packaging, a lot of mailers, you know, from online stores.

• 21:11Alec Baldwin?

  Remember like the little window you cut out?

• 21:13Speaker 06

  No, not that. That's cellulose. I don't really worry about that because I'm often looking for colors, not for clear plastic.

• 21:20Alec Baldwin?

  Right. You have a storage facility for this material?

• 21:24Speaker 06

  I mean, I have a lot of bins and my biggest problem is that people save it for me and they give it to me and it's almost too much for me to process. I've had to ask, and I only have like four or five people who save stuff for me and then give it to me. But it's overwhelming because there's so much. And, you know, I have one friend, every time we go for a walk, she hands me like a bag of, of garbage because it's all the stuff her family, you know, the, the squash they eat and the fruit that they make smoothies from. It all comes in these plastic bags.

• 21:55Alec Baldwin?

  Right. So the first one you did, now when you say life size, what's the biggest piece you made?

• 22:01Speaker 06

  So the biggest one I've made so far is the 60 foot sperm whale. It's 60 feet long.

• 22:07Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:09Alec Baldwin?

  And you did this where? Where do you, where's your studio?

• 22:12Speaker 06

  My studio is not that big. Post-COVID, in my town, Middletown, Connecticut, the downtown business district was trying to get people onto Main Street because people had stopped going outside, right? And there was an old Woolworth's building and they let me get in there and use it. A local kids museum built like some walls around the front of it. This place called Kid City. And they let me use it as an open studio for six months, which was huge. I mean, I never would have been able to like do that in my living room. And I had just open studio days where people could show up. A lot of people would just walk by and. Kind of say like, what is happening here? You know?

• 22:51Alec Baldwin?

  They can see into this glass, obviously.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, big glass windows.

• 22:54Alec Baldwin?

  Lot of glass, okay.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, big, open front. And I had all the pieces that were done at that time. It was probably like 20 pieces up on the walls around. And so people could come in and just like, check it out or sew. And, you know, it would have people sew for like, a few minutes. And I had some people who kept coming back over and over again for weeks, which was really cool.

• 23:14Alec Baldwin?

  But you worked your way toward the whale. You didn't go full on whale, you know, day three, right?

• 23:20Speaker 06

  No, no, I had done probably 30 of them, you know, by the time I tried with the whale and crammed as many, you know, of the larger pieces as I could into my, my home studio. So I had sharks like going around like, like walls, you know, two or three walls of the studio because they didn't fit otherwise. And I, I've definitely had them out in our living room. My family's like, can you please put that away?

• 23:47Speaker 06

  I mean, I was trying to, with this project, what I'm trying to do is make connections between all of us and this problem. Because it's often in the scientific literature, they're often like, kind of pointing a finger towards the developing world and saying, these are the dirtiest places in the world. These are the worst polluting countries. These rivers are the top 10 dirtiest rivers. And it's always the global south. And I'm not an expert in India after spending six months there.

• 24:14Alec Baldwin?

  Why, why do you think it's that way there? Why? When you see footage of like, some river in India, it's just like a stream of garbage going down.

• 24:22Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. I mean, it is a huge problem there. They don't have the waste infrastructure that we have. So like, their garbage isn't picked up the way our garbage is. And like, in our community, where we lived in India, you know, it's very common to gather all kinds of garbage and just burn it. You know, which would, you know, is not good at all for the people living nearby. And certainly for the people who are burning that waste.

• 24:48Alec Baldwin?

  No, no, I also want to indicate, what's the difference between a Fulbright and a Fulbright Nehru? I never heard of that before.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Fulbright Nehru's are just the Fulbrights that happen in India.

• 24:59Alec Baldwin?

  India, that's it.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  So they get money from the American government and the Indian government. And so they have like, co-naming of that grant.

• 25:06Alec Baldwin?

  Over what period of time were you in and out of India?

• 25:09Speaker 06

  I was there in 2019 for six months. I took my whole family and we lived there for six months.

• 25:15Alec Baldwin?

  Right, and what did you? Was your husband building shelving or cabinets or woodworking over there? No?

• 25:22Speaker 06

  No, no, he was not. I mean, he checked out some, some interesting buildings there. But no, he was actually doing a graduate degree at that time. He was doing it at the Yale School of Forestry, but he was able to do it remotely because he was at a point in his research where he was, he was working independently.

• 25:38Alec Baldwin?

  What did your children? How old were they during the Indian phase?

• 25:41Speaker 06

  They were six, 12 and 14. It was an incredible experience.

• 25:46Alec Baldwin?

  What was it like for them? I'm sure, I want to pivot to that. What was it like for them, for that?

• 25:50Speaker 06

  You know, you tell your kids about the world, but you can't explain things to them in the same way of, of seeing it. So, I mean, it really blew their minds. They got, they got to go to school there. We lived in this big apartment tower. We were the only sort of like non-Indian family in this group of three towers. And they were kind of like, it was funny, they were kind of like locally famous, you know? Because we stood out, you know? My husband's six, eight, so he stands out anywhere. But like, traffic would stop when we were crossing streets sometimes. Like, people would hand me their baby at a mall. And I'm like, what is happening here? Just to take a picture. That probably happens to you all the time, but it doesn't happen to me.

• 26:32Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I mean, I don't, I don't know, I gotta go to India and find that it's gonna happen. What's going on for me in India? How's my career doing in India? But, but let me ask you this, which is that I don't understand why this country is struggling still with this issue.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:47Alec Baldwin?

  Why we're not investing so much money into, you know, you want people to just use glass or these, I mean, again, right when you have a little puff of air under your wings here in terms of your hope, then they tell you, well, you realize every Coke can is lined with plastic.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  Right.

• 27:04Alec Baldwin?

  There's a plastic lining and they, and they show you the work they do to take them, and also the plastic bag comes out and they peel it out of the Coke can. You're like, oh, God, you know what I mean? What is it you think about this country that you believe we're so disengaged from our environmental responsibility?

• 27:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I teach environmental policy and you know, you look at the history of polluters in our country, right? A good example is GE putting PCBs in the Hudson River. So you look at that historically and you think, what were people thinking? Like, did they not know? Were they naive? Were they not paying attention? And I really feel like plastic is, is that for us now, right? You know, because what happened eventually, right, is that people cottoned on to it and said, this is unacceptable. And it became a super fun site, right? And they're putting billions of dollars into cleaning it up. But of course, it's like unringing a bell. You can't get all of that out. And it's true for any kind

• 28:06Speaker 06

  of pollutant. It's so much more efficient and inexpensive.

• 28:11Alec Baldwin?

  The Gulf BP, just forgotten, just forgotten.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. And, and it's like, preventing it makes so much sense environmentally, economically, in every way. And yet, our leaders don't, are not interested, I would say our business leaders and our political leaders are both focused on the things that can get them, you know, clout in the short term and not the long term. I mean, I think a politician would, would never say like, well, we're going to do this. It's going to cost a little bit more money, but your grandchildren and your great grandchildren are going to have clean air and soil and water because of it. I think that's just sadly, like, it's really hard to get people to, to care. But I talk to people all the time who know about this issue

• 28:56Speaker 06

  and care about this issue. And they take a canvas bag to the grocery store, but everything in there is like wrapped in plastic. So it's like, decisions were made long before you showed up at the grocery store, that, that you seem to have no way of changing.

• 29:09Alec Baldwin?

  Well, people aren't willing to change their lifestyle in that way. They, they think the long-term effects, let's say of plastic, are something that takes decades to have any real impact in your life. But are people willing to trade off, slowing down and living their life more thoughtfully in order to avoid? Plastic contamination, in other words, your life is, is, is one of the reasons that enables you to live this kind of life is this product. Are people willing to make a switch? I'm terrified to say I don't believe so.

• 29:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it depends, right, on some of it. But, but I think they're taking advantage of the fact that people are so overtired and

• 29:49Alec Baldwin?

  Overscheduled.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  Overscheduled, right? A lot of plastic packaging for food is certainly convenience based, right? So I think it's hard to ask people who are already overburdened by other things to, to give up all of that. Water bottles are different for me, though, because that's like-

• 30:07Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 30:08Speaker 06

  It's so easy to stop drinking bottled water. There are very few communities in, in the country, there are some, of course, right, where the water is not safe to drink. But for most of us, like, our tap water is, is great.

• 30:19Alec Baldwin?

  You think so?

• 30:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I drink tap water.

• 30:22Alec Baldwin?

  I know, in New York, yeah, I drink, I drink filtered tap water all day long, yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  I mean, you're just taking a public resource and they've, they've taken that public resource and they put it in a bottle and they're charging you for it at a rate like higher than, you know, you would pay for gasoline for your car. And it's in a container that's like slowly breaking down.

• 30:42Alec Baldwin?

  Researcher, activist, and artist Kat Owens. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Kat Owens talks about her artistic process creating entangled and ingested, and how she works in a plastic-based medium.

• 31:16Speaker 11

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• 31:46Speaker 12

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• 32:37Speaker 09

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 32:55Speaker 13

  Man, I'm a Black and Mexican kid from San Pedro. And I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in L.A. was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

• 33:31Speaker 09

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:45Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. In 2020, Kat Owens had plans to continue her research in Uganda, Colombia, and India. But when her travel plans were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, she began exploring rivers closer to home. It was these local waterways that inspired the idea for Owens' art series, Entangled and Ingested. Six years later, Owens has created 119 portraits of animals who have been harmed by plastic pollution. Some of Owens' pieces are created on a massive scale, including the 60-foot-long sperm whale recently on display at the Bradley Airport.

• 34:27Alec Baldwin?

  I wondered where else has Owens had the opportunity to exhibit her work?

• 34:32Speaker 06

  I have had shows with many of the pieces in them, and I have a few coming up next year. I'm going to be at the Hartford Public Library in the spring of 2026, and at this place in West Palm Beach, Florida in the summer of 2026 called Resource Depot that tries to keep waste out of the waste stream.

• 34:50Alec Baldwin?

  Now, tell me, do you have a somewhat longer relationship with Resource Depot? Meaning, what's the environmental, what's the market for your environmentally-based art in Palm Beach, Florida?

• 35:01Speaker 06

  I don't know. I mean, probably not great.

• 35:03Alec Baldwin?

  You're about to find out, right?

• 35:05Speaker 06

  Find out the hard way. Yeah, they had a show, like a group show, and I applied for it. And then the director contacted me and said, you know what? You should do, we should do just a solo show with your work here because it's such a good match for what we do. So I was like, that sounds great. But my dream is to see all 46 of these pieces together in one room. You know, like, I think that could really make an impact on how people think about this problem. I take it around to schools, and, you know, I have had exhibits in several places. The big whale, the sperm whale, has been at the Hartford Airport for about a year and a half.

• 35:40Alec Baldwin?

  I think all your art, if you keep going in this direction with these large pieces, the only place to display your art would be like the Javits Center.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know. I need like a, I don't know, like an airplane hangar that doesn't have anything in it, you know? Something huge, because I've got at least two whales over, or three whales over 50 feet, and I'm working on right now the fin whale, which will ultimately be 80 feet long. So I need more space. Yeah.

• 36:05Alec Baldwin?

  Is the size of the piece now become your obsession? Is it like, what's the biggest? Let me get some dinosaurs in here.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  Well, it's all based on the literature. So I'm working down this list from the scientific literature, a list of all the different species that are affected by entanglement and ingestion. So the biggest whale on my list is the fin whale. It's not the biggest whale. The blue whale is the biggest whale out there. But the fin whale is the biggest one on my list.

• 36:31Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:32Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you approach a piece, whale, mouse, in between, when you're doing that, how does it work? You're on a canvas?

• 36:39Speaker 06

  Canvas, cotton canvas. I buy it in six-foot-tall rolls that are 90 feet long and then cut it down to the sizes that I need. And yeah, I, I, I cut down the canvas. I sketch out the animal. If it's small, I can just sort of eyeball it and do it. If it's a big whale, I have to do like a schematic where I'm measuring out.

• 37:01Alec Baldwin?

  Computers?

• 37:02Speaker 06

  No, just by hand.

• 37:04Alec Baldwin?

  Okay.

• 37:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:05Alec Baldwin?

  Then what are you applying to the canvas?

• 37:07Speaker 06

  So I'm hand sewing all the plastic. Yeah, I sew the plastic onto the canvas.

• 37:13Alec Baldwin?

  But I mean, in terms of your identifying the material you use, it's all recycled material?

• 37:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not the stuff I find when I go into a beach cleanup because that stuff is really gross and not healthy. You wouldn't want to be in a room with it or touch it very much. But when I started this project, I'd been saving this kind of film plastic, the film plastic that my family used because I was, often it's marked with those chasing arrows that say like, please recycle. And you think, okay, this must be recyclable. I just have to figure out how to recycle it. So this is my field. And it took me two years to realize that actually you can't recycle most of it.

• 37:51Alec Baldwin?

  Now, your husband, did he wake up at one point and you woke up and he's like leaning over you, staring at you? And you say, what's his name?

• 37:59Speaker 06

  Michael.

• 38:00Alec Baldwin?

  And you say, what is it, Michael? And he goes, it's gotta stop, honey. It's gotta stop. Stop bringing all this plastic into our house.

• 38:06Speaker 06

  He does get a little frustrated with it sometimes. He, he's like, I'm, honey, I'm just so glad you're not into like metal recycling. Because at least this can be like folded up and rolled up and and put away. Like I have a closet with a row of hangers on it and it just has like penguins and puffins and, you know, dolphins hanging from them.

• 38:28Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you do the piece, you are sketching something in terms of color. You you're creating an image in whatever fashion, computer or on a paper. And then you and then and you're bringing to the piece itself, multicolored pieces of plastic to create a toucan or whatever it is you're gonna make, something with a lot of vibrant color, correct?

• 38:48Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, I'm just, I have it all divided out by color. I have like a bin of yellow, a bin of orange, a bin of purple, blue. And then I just sort of make decisions as I'm sewing it. And sometimes I use things like patterns from different materials. And sometimes I use those to create depth or to build, like the turtle behind me.

• 39:09Alec Baldwin?

  Yes, it's gorgeous.

• 39:11Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you.

• 39:12Alec Baldwin?

  It's gorgeous.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  That's a green sea turtle. And so sometimes that's like coffee bags that have like modeled coloration on them, right? So that I can sort of try to build like what a turtle shell actually looks like through pattern and color and and that kind of thing.

• 39:30Alec Baldwin?

  Now, you say you do exhibit in in museums?

• 39:33Speaker 06

  I have.

• 39:34Alec Baldwin?

  Is anything hanging anywhere now?

• 39:36Speaker 06

  Let me think. Well, so mostly local stuff happening right now. The Bradley Airport in central Connecticut has the sperm whale. In Hartford, I have four or five pieces in the Connecticut Science Center. I have a place at the Parks and Rec Pool in Middletown. The indoor pool has a a big orca that I made with elementary school kids from my town. I went around to all the elementary schools and and did that. And next month, I'm gonna be in Iceland for the month on a artist residency. If anyone's in Akureyri, Iceland, they might find me there sewing puffins, I guess, probably, and a harp seal, maybe making a harp seal.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  But, yeah, I'm always trying to find more places to exhibit my work because the whole point of it is I want this, I want people to make connections between this problem and their own lives and then ideally get them to take political action about it because I really do think we can still influence our political systems and we need to try.

• 40:38Alec Baldwin?

  Now, let's talk about your understanding through your other work. All of your credentials and so forth. I mean, what's happening in your mind? What's the biggest problem pollution wise in this country? Where is it coming from?

• 40:52Speaker 06

  Oh, I mean, it's coming from a million communities, right? I mean, we do have relatively good waste management and yet, you know, go outside any parking lot you've ever been in and there's waste everywhere. And I go down, when I travel, you know, you see the highway. There's all kinds of litter all along the streets. And so a lot of it, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it gets out of the waste stream and then goes into rivers. I read a statistic the other day that said 10,000 tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year, which is crazy.

• 41:26Alec Baldwin?

  Did any of the work you've worked on address specific outcomes of plastic pollution? Have you gotten into that at all?

• 41:34Speaker 06

  I don't study sort of like the impact on health. I don't study microplastics or nanoplastics. I know people who do, but we really don't know what the health impacts are going to be yet of accumulated contact with plastics over decades. But, you know, part of the issue, so global markets altogether produce over 400 million tons of plastic every year. And their stated goal is to increase that number, right?

• 42:02Alec Baldwin?

  Right, the petroleum industry.

• 42:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And they absolutely want to increase that production. So at this point in time, we're not even talking about what are the important uses of this material, right? Like certainly there are important uses of this material. It's, it is all around us. It's, there's a reason it's so popular. It's inexpensive and it's, well, because we're only counting like how much it costs, not how much it costs for its full life. But, you know, we're not even having a conversation about like, what are, what's the most important use of this material? I was with a friend at the hospital recently, you know, hospitals use lots of single-use plastics, that's great. But then they brought the patient water and it was in a styrofoam cup. And I was like, are you kidding me?

• 42:46Alec Baldwin?

  When I see people pack packages with styrofoam, the peanuts that they call them, styrofoam, I'm like, I'm like, I'm never going to speak to you again for the rest of my life, now that you sent my birthday present in the styrofoam peanuts.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  It makes steam come out of my ears.

• 43:01Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, my God, but, but the plastic industry, like the tobacco industry, the same thing. They know what's going on. They know what's happening. They know what the deleterious effects of all this are.

• 43:10Speaker 06

  I mean, and their MO is kind of like to throw a little money towards some vague recycling programs and then continue to produce. And 99% of plastic is still made with virgin fossil fuels because that's the cheapest and the easiest way to do it. And so there are actually things that they could do to lessen the impact, but I don't see a lot of companies that are really trying to do that. There are some like food companies who seem to be making choices in packaging to get away from plastic, which is exciting to see, but it's a tiny amount. And things that used to be, you know, I encounter packaging all the time from cat litter, dog food, bird seed, all of that is like in plastic now.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  And it wasn't that long ago when all of that came in like multi-layered paper, right? And for most people in the world, like that's a fine way to package that good, right? You know, where, yes, you might have like mice get into your garage, but for most of us, it's an okay packaging type. But it has become the standard, right? Where our expectations, if something's good, or if it, you know, we want it to look a certain way, it's going to come wrapped in plastic.

• 44:22Alec Baldwin?

  I want to mention one more thing, which is just so for people to understand, you have these pictures and this beautiful artwork you do with these materials and this kind of, you know, obviously without, it goes without saying, unorthodox methodology with what you're doing. But do you ever get sick of it? Do you ever sit there and go, I want to get back into policy and try to fix this?

• 44:42Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, two things there. I don't get sick of it. Like it's very calming and meditative practice for me to sew. So I really enjoy that process, but at the same time, I hate the materials.

• 44:54Alec Baldwin?

  It's a huge amount of sewing, yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a lot of sewing. But I hate the materials. It's very weird as an artist. Usually, you know, you're excited about the oil paints and the materials you're using, the watercolors. It's very weird to be spending so much time with something that you really hate. But I think, I mean, part of the reason I took on this project is because I was tired of just communicating with other scientists about this issue because I think it's no fun to talk about it with a bunch of people who already know everything about it, right? Like I want to connect with people and then get them to contact their leaders and demand something better.

• 45:28Alec Baldwin?

  I just want to say, first of all, thank you for doing this with me. I feel like this is the one we've got to solve. We've got to solve this because it's really, really, I think, doing a lot of, more importantly, unseen things, unknown things. Who knows what's going to be the plastic, the bill we're going to get handed 25 years from now soon. Thank you so much.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 45:54Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to Kat Owens. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 46:33Speaker 14

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