As usual, I’m not exactly sure what Danny Westneat is getting at. (That’s just kinda his style: tossing out apparently contrarian tidbits, and then leaving it to readers to impose their own agenda.) Danny interviews Ravenna’s renowned “oceanic garbologist” Curt Ebbesmeyer, who points out that those plastic grocery bags the mayor wants to slap a 20-cent fee on are just “one little battle out of a million.”
“If the mayor really wants to get on the stick, he should go after plastic bottles. Or plastic wrapping of food products. Or how about a tax or a ban on petroleum-based plastic, period?”
For his part, Danny performed his own field… um… beach research, confirming Ebbesmeyer’s remark:
I did my own garbology “dig” at low tide in Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park. In half an hour poking along 300 yards of shoreline, I found a demoralizing 173 pieces of trash.
Take out the wood (paintbrush), the metal (beer cans, foil wrappers) and the miscellaneous (earplugs, nicotine patches, ropes, a corncob, an orange traffic cone), and I was left with 137 pieces of plastic.
Top item, by far: Plastic bottles. Followed by plastic bottle caps. Then plastic lids and plastic cups. Plus a slew of plastic food packaging.
Number of plastic grocery or drugstore bags? One.
Sure, we get it Danny… one city discouraging the wasteful use of disposable bags won’t make much of an impact on such a huge problem (the way one individual conserving energy won’t slow global warming). But I know something that would make a difference, and quick: we could all, you know, stop littering!
When I was a kid in the early seventies the most visible element of the nascent environmental movement was a nationwide anti-littering campaign. It was drummed into us at school, it was relentlessly reinforced in PSAs on TV and on billboards. I even saw a state trooper pull over a car for dumping a handful of trash out the window on the Atlantic City Expressway.
Nowadays I witness trash spewing out of car windows or falling out of the hands of defiant teens on a regular basis. Recently I confronted a kid on a neighborhood playground for dropping their empty candy wrapper on the ground, and they just looked at me with one of those expressions of disdain reserved for, well, adults, before indifferently turning around and walking away. If that had been me thirty-some years ago, told to pick up my trash, I would have been mortified.
No doubt the social taboo against public littering was always strongest amongst affluent suburbanites, but it appears to be waning across the board these days, and I don’t see much of a concerted effort to reinforce it. So let’s start drumming it into our kids again, confronting offenders with reproach, and instructing the police to hand out littering tickets on our streets and our sidewalks. And let’s get that crying Indian back on TV again, for chrisakes.
Goldy
As the older of two yidden but one who grew up in the city, I am skeptical of your claim to politesse 30 years ago. Maybe Philly, suburban Philly, was a lot more genteel than Boston but when I was 15 Officer Kranski, Colonel Bestman, or Master Scully from French S%M 1, were the only ones with the clout to get nay of my classmates to pick up a Baby Ruth.
Goldy sez:
“Recently I confronted a kid on a neighborhood playground for dropping their empty candy wrapper on the ground, and they just looked at me with one of those expressions of disdain reserved for, well, adults, before indifferently turning around and walking away. If that had been me thirty-some years ago, told to pick up my trash, I would have been mortified.”
This is a result of the LEFTIST PINHEAD Agenda where kids are taught there is no right or wrong answers….which translates into no right or wrong actions.
Goldy, did you think about this “kids” feelings when you confronted him/her?
Perhaps this child had been abused or in some other way damaged to the point that throwing the candy bar wrapper on the ground was a way for him/her to express themselves and release the abuse.
Like you Goldy, I would have been mortified as a kid had an adult confronted me on something like this.
HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Goldy–
These are the consequences of a permissive society with no discipline.
Connect the dots Goldy.
What! Right, another liberal, Big Brother attempt at social engineering. What about my rights as an American? What about my rugged individualism? What a bunch of mamby pamby wussies. Littered roadways exude bravery, innovation and patriotism of the highest order.
Heh. I was thinking the exact same thing.
Maybe we need a new spot with somebody like Chuck Norris, and this time warn people who litter that he’s gonna kick their asses! Huck would approve, so it might even reach JeebusLand.
There are, of course, different state and national efforts to get people to stop buying/consuming water in disposable bottles.
Maybe a new national campaign with Jesus’ tear streaked omnipresence backed by a litter strewn purple mountain majesty?
Goldy, I agree: we did go through a period where littering was socially unacceptable, and the terrain looked much better.
I go back as far as Seattle Jew, and while he is correct that in OUR youth, prior to recorded history, there was total carelessness about litter. Forest fires were the thing then. But thereafter, in the late 60’s, things started to change.
Sadly, even if the campaign begins again, it’ll take years to impact.
I agree, bring back the crying Indian (Native American), or an updated equivalent. We need a public campaign to remind people that tossing your garbage is socially unacceptable. I can tell you that my tiny bit of beach front on Lake Washington experiences a shocking amount of garbage washing ashore. Mostly plastic bottles and aluminum cans, along with a significant number of flip flops, baseball caps, and tennis balls, but rarely have I seen a plastic bag.
The “crying Indian” PSA was indeed an extraordinarily memorable piece. Anyone who ever saw it knows exactly what you’re talking about.
That said, I was upset by what I found when I googled for information about Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who portrayed the Indian. You know something’s amiss when a Snopes.com link shows up on the first results page … it turns out that Cody was actually Espera de Corti, son of Sicilian immigrants. While he completely adopted the values, lifestyle, and persona of an American Indian — both on-screen and off — he was no more a Cherokee or Cree than I am.
Goldy – I too, ask people who litter to pick it up, not just teens, but also adults (GROWN ADULTS) and am shocked at how much attitude I get back. They act like their mother will come by to pick up after them! Maybe if enough people get on litterers, things will change, but over a very long period of time. These people that throw trash (I too, see it way too often) are the same people that don’t clean up after their animals and children, leaving it to the rest of us to clean up.
I don’t get Westneat either. Is he saying that since plastic bags are a small part of the problem (based on his, and the plastic guy’s anecdotal evidence) that it’s not worth doing anything?
In parts of Europe (Germany, Scandanavia at least) consumers got fed up. They started unwrapping their goods from those mattress sized plastic sarcophigi leaving them at the checkout counter. Pretty quickly the responsibility for that crap was slapped back onto the producer. The use of plastic dropped, surprisingly. It’s still a pretty serious social stigma there to litter, though. And you’d be hard pressed to find littered borrowpits, and dumpy farmyards festooned with decades of rusting machinery and/or automobiles anywhere.
Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia: Cities are cleaner. People generally don’t litter. They take pride in their communities. And those communities budget the money necessary to keep up appearances.
Alone among industrialized countries (and some of the poor countries I’ve been in are better, too), Americans don’t seem to give a fuck about shitting in our own nests. Why is that? I can think of about 20 reasons, but the bottom line has grist for both liberals and conservatives: a lack of personal responsibility and a lack of concern for the community. Oh, and we’re also drowning in material goods (and packaging) we don’t need. A strong PSA would be nice, but the problem’s rather larger than that.
…”(the way one individual conserving energy won’t slow global warming)..”
It is now supposed to be called “climate crisis”. The warming part is obsolete because the global temps have reached a plateau since 1998.
@2 “This is a result of the LEFTIST PINHEAD Agenda where kids are taught there is no right or wrong answers….which translates into no right or wrong actions.”
Gee, I’m really persuaded by that, C, given that the kids I see littering here in Green Lake Park wear designer sneakers and get into BMWs with Bellevue plates driven by soccer moms who undoubtedly vote Republican.
Plastic lasts forever and will be in our environment until the sun explodes and swallows the earth about 4 billion years from now. Roughly 5% of it ends up in landfills, and the other 95% makes its way into the sea, where it ends up floating in the middle of the oceans. There, winds and waves will, over millions of years, grind it into fine particles that will be ingested by — and kill — progressively smaller members of the food chain until ultimately it eradicates the plankton forming the base of the food chain. That will be the end of life on earth.
N @9: As I believe the Master Thespian once said, “Acting!!”
2 No. It’s a symptom of the crumbling of the social contract in the face of laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself, only-the-big-dog-survives I’ve-got-mine-so-fuck-you irresponsibility promited under the guise of “rugged individualism”. Since the turn of the millenium it’s been a real challenge raising kids with any sense of responsibility when they see a degenerate, spoiled n’er-do-well become President and send their older brothers and sisters off to kill and die in a senseless debacle.
YellowPup:
And as Tommy Flanagan once said: “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
N @ 18: Don’t know how to break it to you, but Mark Hamill wasn’t really a Jedi and wasn’t from Tatooine (he’s originally from Oakland, CA).
I hope this doesn’t ruin the Star Wars films for you.
The point was not supposed to be an argument against doing the plastic bag fee. It was supposed to be an argument that with this proposal we aren’t even remotely getting serious about the plastics problem. It wasn’t that Seattle should do nothing because we are just one city. It’s that we should do much, much more or we aren’t addressing the issue that we say we are. But as I have confused both horsesass and the Stranger with this argument, I guess I didn’t make it clear (though apparently for this site I never do.)
Danny @20,
Like I said, I wasn’t exactly sure what your angle was (or whether you had one) and I didn’t mean to imply that you were against the plastic bag fee. I guess I should have been vaguer. I was just using your column as a springboard to talk about a pet peeve of mine… littering.
Goldy, those anti littering commercials you saw as a kid were paid for by the plastics lobby as a way to fend off being regulated or having buy back prices on their plastic bottles.
Read all about it in: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. It’s a great book.
Mr. Cynical @ 2:
Again you take your wild-ass, right-wing, non-thinking rhetoric and spin it in to some stupid logic only a Republican would believe.
Do you honestly think some kid raised by Liberals is going to pollute Mother Earth????
Get real. That kid who littered is the byproduct of two retarded Republicans procreating. That’s why abortion needs to be safe and legal to keep idiots like you from having kids.
Moron.
“how about a tax or a ban on petroleum-based plastic, period?”
This is what should happen, and now. Imagine being a member of the first generation coming of age when the end of oil finally strikes. They’ll deserve to be pretty effin’ pissed off at the way their predecessors wasted that shit.
gbs one my assume that the best part of you ran down your fathers leg
idiot
Syncronicity. This appeared on bloomberg.com on 4/10/08:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/.....refer=home
Do you remember the “do not litter” TV ad with the Native American man crying at the end. I think we should start airing that ad again over and over as it made a strong impression on my (then) 10 year old mind. The Simpson’s did a parody of this same ad (I had to explain the reference to my 14 year old).