Recently, I gave a reading at an eco-themed fundraiser event for a magazine I contribute to frequently. Along with the other presenters, I received a swag bag: a reusable canvas tote containing (along with various coupons and samples) a stainless steel water bottle.
The canvas tote bag and the reusable water bottle – if sustainability can be thought of as a single movement, these appear to be among its primary talismans. At urban planning conferences and green building seminars and climate change confabs, the giveaways are almost always the same. Carry the bag like a banner; hold the bottle aloft like an amulet. Whatever foe we are uniting against, whatever beast we intend to best, it will be defeated, so it would seem, by reusable water bottles and canvas totes.
Since the inverse in both cases is disposable plastic, I guess that’s the name of our foe. Or one of them, anyway – the climate menace is a devil with many faces, and we are only beginning to figure out which ones are ruses and which are the true faces of its evil. Maybe that’s why some less enlightened conferences still give away durable plastic reusable water bottles. One plastic version I received recently at least has an incantation inscribed on its base against the dread Bisphenol A (“GARYLINE / BPA-FREE,” it reads), while another (superficially identical) bottle bears the mark of the beast (a “7” enclosed by recycling’s universal triangular-arrows symbol). Get thee behind me, Polycarbonate!
I don’t mean to mock, or at least not too much. BPA is the very definition of a legitimate toxin, and it’s a scandal that it has been so carelessly smeared around our food. (I was awakened to it earlier than most by my friend Ian Connacher’s documentary Addicted to Plastic, which I highly recommend.) Plus, I do use canvas totes and stainless steel water bottles. I buy one of the former at every farmers’ market I visit, and one of the first things I did after hearing about BPA was turf every Nalgene in the house and buy a couple of brand-new Klean Kanteens.
No, I don’t mean to mock too much, but I do wonder sometimes what the point is. Will the climate beast indeed be vanquished by canvas and steel? Is this a first step toward a much larger and more fundamental society-wide shift, or have we fallen again into the doin’-my-part trap, that blue-box idyll that marked the dead end of the 1980s version of eco-consciousness? Recycle diligently enough, or so the thinking seemed to go, and the ozone layer will heal itself and the rainforests and whales will multiply like post-consumer toilet paper rolls. Haul the blue box to the curb, in any case, and intone the mantra: Doin’ my part!
This might sound sort of straw-mannish, but I canvassed for Greenpeace back in ’93, and bore personal witness to at least a couple of doin’-my-parts each night. These well-meaning homeowners responded to my donation pitch with a sympathetic nod and a wave toward their recycling bins. There were, don’t get me wrong, plenty of legitimate reasons to choose not to dig out the checkbook, but the blue box wasn’t one of them.
So: Is the canvas-tote and water bottle craze more of the same? Have we so eagerly switched to hauling our groceries in canvas sacks and drinking tap water from stainless steel so that we don’t have to address the much deeper problems caused by the hydrocarbons those banished plastic bags and bottles were derived from, or the much larger threats to our water supply?
I recognize that the perfect is often the enemy of the good. Fewer plastic bags is great; an end to the mass global con perpetrated by the bottled water industry would be even better. But I can’t help but feel that the mathematics are a bit out of whack here. That my personal impact on the planet has much more to do with what I put into those bags and how I get them home than it does with the materials themselves.
This strain of ethical uncertainty – this confusion over what exactly the right thing even is – seems endemic to this uncertain time, this interregnum between the fossil-fuelled industrial age and a new sustainable world order. Each of us, well-meaning green-minded consumers that we are, comes now to the grocery checkout with this crude homemade mental-slide-rule contraption to calculate the right choices. It’s fashioned out of scrap material, calibrated with some fuzzy math and not much empirical data, designed to measure something that doesn’t even have a definitive name yet, let alone a fixed set of dimensions. It’s so idiosyncratic at this point, so arbitrary and personal. How could it really matter?
Maybe the point’ll be clearer if I put it in highly specific terms. Here’s how my own personal grocery-store calculus goes:
Start with a standard supermarket trip. Subtract a small vegetable garden (but correct for the fact that I don’t plant it as ambitiously as I should, nor tend it as carefully as I’d like). Divide by the sum of the weekly trips to the nearby farmers’ market, where I do as much of my shopping as possible. Now subtract (maybe) the visits to stand-alone stores or regional chains over multinationals (but add on a car trip multiplied many times, because the regional-chain store is a bit further away than the multinational across a six-lane highway with no direct bike access. Divide by the sum of the six canvas totes I bring with me, and maybe subtract as well the plastic produce bags I generally don’t use (I’m not averse to having my apples brush against a canvas tote or a cereal box in transit). Subtract, finally, the two cases of aluminum cans per visit that we no longer buy since we invested in a home carbonation machine to feed our household club soda addiction.
Finally, we arrive at some figure. For the sake of this exercise, let’s say it’s 60 percent of the standard ecological footprint for a North American shopping trip. And now let’s say I’ve got my daughter with me and she’s gotten into the gum at the checkout, and so I’m conducting negotiations down at toddler level for a minute or two. I turn back to pay, and the nice thing about this regional chain is they haul your groceries out to the car for you, and so it’s only when I get home that I realize that before carefully placing my butter and my wife’s moisturizer and even the pre-wrapped chicken breasts (doubly sinful, I realize) into my canvas totes, they’ve tucked each inside its own plastic bag. As is the store policy that I’m always forgetting to say off the top I’d rather they didn’t execute, and that even if I do say so, they often forget halfway through, and in any case treat me like some kinda pedantic pain in the ass for bringing up more than once in a visit.
So a question: do those three accidentally obtained plastic bags in any way negate (or at least cut in half) the efficacy of the whole exercise? Do we now re-add 15 percent onto my footprint? Does it matter that my city accepts plastic bags at the recycling depot? What if I’ve got no idea what they do with them there? How, exactly, can I atone for this accidental sin? And if I don’t need to – if, in fact, a couple more plastic bags is kind of incidental in the grander scheme – then what was the point of the canvas totes in the first place?
And, finally, to the larger point: Isn’t this kind of a ridiculous use of our energies? Do we really want to take all this vigour inside us, all this awareness and concern, all our best intentions and our will to make real change, and direct it at this plastic-bag kabuki theatre thing? And isn’t it sort of strange and potentially counterproductive that these symbols of sustainable living – these canvas totes and steel water bottles – have very little to do, actually, with the greenhouse gas emissions that are the biggest problem created by our unsustainable way of life?
These are open questions, not rhetorical ones. I’d like to think they’re a first-stage consciousness-raising thing, en route to, I dunno, rooftop solar panels all around. But sometimes I wonder whether it would really be the ruin of the whole project if we admitted that very little we do as individuals based on the sums calculated on our homemade slide rules is going to matter much at all if we don’t get the whole human project pointed in a new direction by mid-century at the latest. In other words, sometimes I wonder whether fussing over plastic bags is deterring us from focusing our energies where the macro-scale change needs to happen.
Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need
Photo credit: flickr/skydear, Creative Commons license.
