Photographer Michael Dyrland, in collaboration with Mike Marshall, imagines how the art of surfing and beach life will look like in a couple of decades from now, due to our man made pollution, in the photo series "HAZMAT Surfing":

When Washington-based photographer Michael Dyrland visited Los Angeles for a shoot, he anticipated surfing the open sea and riding the waves beneath the sunny sky. What he found, he admits, was not what he had hoped; after an evening of heavy rains, he was confined to the shore for days, the ocean contaminated with ten billion gallons of runoff composed of— as the photographer puts it— “sewage, garbage, oil, and shit (literally, human fecal matter).” Had he paddled into the water, Dyrland would have been vulnerable to staph infections, respiratory illness, MRSA, and Hepatitis C.

That fateful autumn trip laid the seeds for what would become HAZMAT Surfing, a series by which the photographer imagines what life might be like twenty or twenty-five years into the future, when our waters become so poisoned that we might only enter them in full biohazard gear. The more he dug into the issue of polluted seas, the more alarmed Dyrland became. He mentions the the Great Pacific garbage patch, a literal island of waste that stretches across the ocean.