The Last Straw

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Me at the state fair on a plastic hunt

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours,

and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles

of the rain 
are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

By Mary Oliver from Dream Work

The geese are traveling, up above us this time of year.  I saw a perfect “V” of them Friday night when I was out in the yard with Adele Rose, the “soon-to-be-2 year-old ” in my life.  The sun had set, the sky had that just before dark near purple hue to it.  The birds flew in close to us, almost right above the house where you could see their great flapping wings and very long necks, and Adele Rose who loves owls, was mightily impressed.

Tonight, the weekend over and the work week soon upon me, on a whim, I picked up a book of Mary Oliver’s poems, reading a few of them until finally I settled on  ”Wild Geese”, an old friend of mine.  It’s funny how you might think that you “know” a poem–that it is inside of you already and then reading it again after a long absence, it is a new thing, almost altogether.

I think what happens is life  itself moving over our bodies and our souls day in and out like a river, swirling about us. In its current we swim, we breathe, we live, we laugh, we grieve, we worry, we grow and change.  Life, it does not stop for us, not one bit.

“Geese” I said and “geese” she answered back.

Happy New Year everyone!

Tomato plants in my front yard--mid June

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.
Dalai Lama

This morning I counted 21 tomatoes on my 4 tomato plants.  The peaches on my tree which sprouted from my compost pile will be ripe soon and it has been raining every night here in Durham, NC for the past 3 or 4 days.  These are all good things, yes indeed.  Summer is here and the cotton is high, or at least promises to get there if the rain keeps up.

Here are two new initiatives which have excited me:

1) A 9 year old boy named Milo Cress from Vermont has started a “Be Straw Free” campaign in his state.  His website tells us that each day we use 500 million straws–enough disposable straws to fill over 46,400 large school buses per year.  He is asking restaurants in his home town of Burlington Vermont to sign a pledge to give people a choice, straw wise.  People are listening, the governor of Vermont, for one.  You can go to his website and find out more about what  he is doing and sign your own pledge if you so choose.  This young man has research behind him and a plan in front of him.

2) A grocery store with no packaging is planning to open in Austin Texas.  The name of the store is In.gredients and  this is what it says of itself:  ”in.gredients is a collaborative effort between business, community, and consumers with the goal of eliminating food-related waste while supporting local businesses and farmers.”  Go in.gredients!, is what I say–I wish you great success in your new enterprise.

Meanwhile, I continue to feel fortunate to be able to go to my local Durham Farmer’s Market twice a week if I want to where I can get fresh local produce and bring my own packaging very easily. Some new neighbors have offered me access to their front yard, which is full of ripe tomatoes and cucumbers as I write this, and the blueberries are ripe for the picking all around.

All of this is good news.  The hard stuff for me is still how much non-recyclable single-use plastic I find around me all of the time.  After a year and more working on being single-use plastics free, sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all I see.  More on this later, I am thinking…

Right now  I want to say thanks to all around me who are sending me information and changing their lives because they want too. Some of the things my friends have told me they have done since I have begun my quest to use much less plastic in my life are these: they have bought refillable coffee mugs, begun to compost, begun bringing their own bags to the grocery store and stopped using single-use plastic water bottles.  I feel grateful for the gracious attention these friends are paying, and also grateful to the many people I meet from day to day doing the same.

Plastics are in our lives to stay.  We love our computers and our shoes and our drainpipes and our swimsuits.  Our tennis rackets and our cell phones and our plastic tubing.  Fountain pens, lawn chairs and flyswatters.  Many  many people are working on making all of this more sustainable all of the time.   More and more plastics are becoming recyclable, yet many still are not.  All of this paying attention can be hard work. It can also feel good.  I mean, my compost pile is an amazing and very active place.

Lately I have been struggling with my own righteous indignation over the glut of plastics in our lives.  Why aren’t more people bringing their own bags, or not using straws or whatever?  Why isn’t recycling easier?  Why is the plastics industry keeping those arrows around those numbers on disposable plastics which are NOT recyclable?  Why? Why? Why?  I do not have answers yet as to how to deal with all I have  been feeling.  I know I feel a responsibility to keep learning about our earth and how all this plastic is affecting us, and also, equally important, what initiatives people are taking–which is why I am so excited about the two examples above.

The last of a peach smoothie with a choice of re usable straws--metal or bamboo

Clara (aka Kitty) Couch in the news

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Lao Tzu

This is a ceramic sculpture by Clara Couch in collaboration with Pinky Bass whose photographic images are on its surface. It is owned by Davidson College

My new wheelbarrow at work.

“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.”— Douglas Adams

“You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.” — Crow elder

This is the “before the bugs” time of spring here in Durham, NC.  The leaves are full and green on all of the trees, and lawns have mostly been mowed for the first time.  The rains have kept the pollen count down.  My neighbors and I were lucky with the recent storms, just one tree down, falling into the street. Now with one less large oak tree in the neighborhood and much more sun reaching the ground, I am thinking of planting tomatoes for the first time in years.

Meanwhile, I have been working in schools throughout my region and even spent last week at the coast, watching the moon rise most nights, an orange ball, coming up on the eastern rim of the Atlantic Ocean.  It has been good, this morning, to spend some time working in my yard with my new red wheelbarrow.

marine food web--Fuquay Varina High School 2011

My work monitoring single-use plastic continues.  Several weeks ago I had the great pleasure of working with the Marine Ecology Class at Fuquay-Varina High School making the ocean food web out of discarded single-use plastic.  First, we cleaned the creek next to the school of all of the plastic detritus that had  blown over the fence next to the parking lot. The students also brought in all of the throw-away plastic they had used in their homes for a week.  Students selected animals from the ocean food web, covering the list from whales at the top to plankton at the bottom and made them out of this collected plastic.  We hung this food web made entirely of cast off plastic up for science night.  The students entitled it “Killer Plastic.”  Among many wonderful creatures you can see the ethereal jelly fish made out of plastic bags floating top left.

Plastic collected on the beach in 5 afternoons--mainly just walking back and forth

Last week I got to stay in a small motel right across the road from the Atlantic Ocean while I did a residency  with the students of Grandy Primary School in Camden, North Carolina.  The weather was warm and every day after work I took my green folding chair down to the beach. Each afternoon I walked over the small dune which separated the ocean from the road and read my book, watched the birds and surfers, dug my feet in the sand, and in general felt very lucky.  This was a short walk, and each day it was the same walk, yet the plastic I found along the beach and on the path through the dunes was plentiful and continually arriving. Here is the thing about this plastic.  It was not hard to find.  I only picked it up as I walked back and forth.  The beach is big.  It looks empty of this stuff.  But it is not.  I constantly found plastic bottles and plastic bags, both the kind from grocery stores and the clear looking things around snacks, straws, whatever.  And then there are the caps and old faded balloons and bits and pieces of things.  More of the stuff that our marine wild life might swallow.  A lot of it gets thrown in the trash can beside the pathway over the dunes.  Anything that doesn’t make it there gets swallowed by the ocean pretty quickly.

What happens to the stuff that gets swallowed by the ocean?  Again–the ocean is very big, but still, this picture of a turtle to the right is always in my mind and one of the reasons why I pick up any loose plastic when I see it floating around or half buried in the sand.  I am not the only one who does this; if you are reading this, you probably do it too.

Meanwhile, I live my life.  Some days are easier than others.  Always, my favorite times are  simple ones.  Today it has been how green my yard is, how damp and ready to grow things the soil has become.  On a whim, I bought the red wheelbarrow pictured above a few weeks ago at a small hardware store out in the country.  Did I buy it to care for my garden or for the nurturance of my soul?  I would say it is a toss up.  With this simple machine, a wheel attached to an inclined plane, I move compost to my garden, leaves to the compost, dirt here and there.  Working in my yard nurtures me.  Turning my compost, or digging in the actual garden where I turn the soil and find earthworms galore, I am happy.  In my yard, I shift dirt about, weed and plant, plant and weed, listen to the birds sing, and wait for the hydrangeas to bloom.  The world is big and we are all busy in it.  Worms and a wheelbarrow bring me home.  There are no chickens in my yard, but I do see an occasional white-tailed rabbit happy in the grass.

The Red Wheelbarrow

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

compost on my garden--getting ready for spring planting

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

R. Buckminster Fuller

“We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” Anonymous

For the past month I have been traveling, mostly in North Carolina doing residencies in schools.  Though I love this work, it means that I am missing home and often trying to figure out where to eat in strange lands.  If I am very lucky I stay with friends, but more often, I am on my own.  While at a terrific residency  at Rosewood Elementary School in Wayne County, K&W Cafeteria became my home away from home–a place of vegetables, and no plastic utensils.

Weekends seem to have been time for laundry with fleeting glimpses of friends, a basketball game or two, plus hunting down the Trout Lilies which are blooming along the Eno River.

one of this spring's last Trout Lilies along the Eno River

For the past weeks, I have been listening to the stories of the tsunami in Japan, feeling horrified by the destruction, sorrow for the many deaths incurred, and a frustrated feeling of wanting to do something.  Here is the thing–a 9-point earthquake which has shifted our earth’s axis and the tusunami which came after it are out of our control–yours, mine, all of us.  We feel powerless in the wake of such devastation.  The tectonic plates of our very own earth shifted and this has happened.  Where I live here in North Carolina, a 3 hours drive to the Atlantic Ocean with the sun shining and green buds on trees everywhere, I have been feeling both distanced from this disaster and overwhelmed.   What can I do here?  Nothing?  About the tsunami, probably not.  But I am reminded again and again that it is the things that I CAN do, however small, that are important.  For me, in the whirl of travel and residencies, it has been putting compost on my garden and watching the tree limbs change in color from stark grey to muted shades of brown and green and orange and red, as their leaves begin to unfurl.  It has been to dodge single-use plastic, and see every-day that I can do this.  In stores, there is usually a glass or fresh option, and these days with all of the new food trucks around, I can even find take-out food in brown paper bags!  For you it might be riding your bike somewhere instead of driving, or stopping to show a new young child in your life the flowers of spring as they unfold.  Walking forward, and as one of my meditation teachers has said, softening ourselves into the things we must do, keeping active, moving along, in delight and joy when it is easy, and with courage and kindness when it is not.

Below I am posting R. Buckminster Fuller’s letter to Michael, a 10 year old boy who wrote to him in 1970.  It is in his book “The Critical Path” but I have also seen it in newsletters and introductions, and when I am teaching, I often read it at the end of a class.  From my early 20′s as a young artist, I have kept this letter inside me.  As a heartbeat.  For me and for you.

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning ”thinkers and doers.”

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see

need to be done, and no one else seems to see need to be done. Then

you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be

done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will

bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has

acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by

others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are

intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t

work. That is what you want to know — the truth about everything –

and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations

have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite

non-working elements embraced by their system.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar,

find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new

word. Words are tools — and once you have learned how to use a tool

you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is

not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can

comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life — initiative. Because of

it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You

will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Buckminster Fuller

After re-reading this letter, I kind of want to end with a big vocabulary word for me to learn and you to look up—-Humm, here is one I just learned….Olefin….Look it up, or not, I certainly had too, and am now ready to do what Mr. Fuller said, or so I hope.

Meanwhile, here’s to mud between your toes and spring beauty in bloom.

There are lots of blooms on the small peach tree beside my driveway. which originally sprouted from compost.

“I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.”

R. Buckminster  Fuller

Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on. -Pema Chödrön

Last night at a meditation group that I go to, the teacher suggested that when we wake up in the morning we pay attention to our first breath.  Was it an inhale or an exhale?–just that.  From there she went on to how we allow our day to unfold, being mindful as we go along and as we remember.  Breathing.  Breathing all of the time.  So, just in case you are curious, I woke on the exhale this morning.  The day is cool and sunny.  On the way back from swimming at the Y, I remembered to think about my breath again in the car. And I think to myself, ” All this is interesting, but what does breath have to do with my daily life?” And then an inner voice answers me quietly and very definitely –”Everything Bryant, just everything.”  Okay, so here we go.

After my last post which was also my first post of this new year, friend and fellow blogger Rebecca Currie asked me a big question–”So Bryant,” She said. “How did you do it?”  By this she is asking me how I pulled off a year without single-use plastic, which if you look around, you know is everywhere.

So Rebecca, here are the answers as best as I can figure:

1–I “did” it because I really wanted to.  I saw it as my job.  So I was vigilant.  I said NO to the plastic lids on cups and plastic straws as well.  NO to all plastic bottles in stores.  Have you noticed that many bottles look like glass, but when you really feel them, they are plastic?  NO to all styrofoam take out stuff.  NO to plastic bags in stores which are so easily given to us.  Lots and lots of “no-thank-yous” everywhere.

2–I went to my local farmers market almost every Saturday.  There I found produce unbagged that I could slip into my own bags.  Also, bread  and baked goods always packaged in paper, eggs–the list is endless here.

3–I brought my own bottles and tins to Whole Foods and they weighed them for me.  Then I could get many things from the bulk bins there.  Where I live we also have Weaver Street Market,  a co-op with bulk bins as well.  I would not have been as successful as I have been without these alternatives.

4–Cousin Monty’s Granola.  Making this up every 3 or so weeks, full of almonds and flax seed and many good things, meant whenever I was hungry and needed a boost it was there and it was good.  Really good.

5–I made my own yogurt.  This proved to be much easier than I had ever imagined and very good as well.

6–I carried my own steel water bottle.  To make this work I kept 3 in circulation in case I forgot, which was often.

The above are the basics as to how I did it.  And mostly how I am still doing it.  I am in a groove .  No stopping now!

As an experiment and to give myself a break–this month I bought a few things packaged in plastic.  These were a box of Cherrios, 2 snickers bars, and 2 boxes of crackers.  I enjoyed all of them–especially the

My January 2011 plastic detritus--missing the Snickers wrappers

Snickers bars–certainly all that high fructose sweet sticky stuff is a powerful drug.  I wanted to see what I was missing, plus, well, I am not perfect here.  What I really want to continue buying is, believe it or not, crackers, though even this may change as my young friend Lydia has begun to send a group of us passionate emails about her new found love of making flat breads, chapattis, Korean pancakes, the list is amazing.  (A note on packaged crackers here–the stuff inside the cardboard box is not waxed paper–It is made to look like it but it is NOT.  Try putting it in your compost and you will see that it does not decompose–yep– it’s plastic.)

Recently several people have forwarded this video to me of Van Jones speaking of plastic pollution in our world and its connection to economic injustice.  He makes a powerful case for our paying closer attention to how we use and dis-use plastics in this world.

He speaks of our addiction to disposability.  How we feel good about putting our plastic bottle in our little blue bin but do not consider the consequences of recycling this bottle, which is burning it, thus releasing very  toxic fumes into the environment.  Mostly this is happening in Asia where environmental air standards are much lower.  Because of all of this burning of plastics in Asia, the clean air gains of Los Angeles have been wiped out and are back to their pre 1970′s standards.  He challenges us to think of the very idea of disposability–of species, of raw materials, of people themselves–because it is the very people who work making and “recycling” plastic products that suffer the most.

The very air we breathe is suffering from our addiction to our use-it-once-and-then-toss-it mentality.  And all of us are breathing all of the time–every diatom, every cell, every species.  Inhale. Exhale. Repeat and repeat again.  To live, to be alive, we breathe.  Everyday, all of the time. Spiders, earthworms, palm trees, porcupines, whales and goldfish, monkeys, dogs and people– All species of everything alive on earth..all of us.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are moving back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

Rumi

Park Avenue, New York City on the Eve of a blizzard, late Dec, 2010 photo: Lydia Pecker

“No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it.”–Albert Einstein

“We are writing our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears.”–Margaret Atwood

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

Floundering.  Swimming up stream?  Just plain wondering what I am doing?  This past year, striving in every possible way to use NO disposable plastic, I find that my eyes and heart are so accustomed to dodging this stuff that I cannot stop.  Or, put another way, I guess I do not want to.

A friend just sent me the Blue Hill Maine co-op newsletter.  The community had just watched the documentary “Bag It.”  Here is a startling fact learned from the newsletter, re the movie.  ”We have created and used more single-use plastic in the last ten years than we did in the entire 20th century.”  Bag it, bottle it, seal it, cap it, cover it–keep it separate, keep it clean, drink it up, toss it away.  It seems we have just begun our consumption of single-use plastic here.

“To do what is right, not what you should.”  This is the message a friend of mine received in her very first fortune cookie of 2011.  As I sort through the memories of the past year, and all the plastic stuff I did not use, but needed to–stuff like glue and tape–stuff I did not use but really wanted to–stuff like crackers, I am wondering which of these things I am going to allow back into my life.  Most stuff, like any take-out plastic, plastic bags, straws, styrofoam of any sort, I am happy to continue not to use.

plastic inside the boxes of food eaten by me in captivity during the NYC blizzard of December 2010

I have been listening to a collection of tapes called the “Monticello Dialogues” by William McDonough.  These tapes were lent to me by a young man behind the cheese counter at my local Whole Foods who has been wrapping my cheese in paper this past year.  Like Thomas Jefferson and Buckminster Fuller, McDonough is a visionary.  He believes we can figure this out and make a better world.

McDonough reminds us of our “timeful mindlessness.”  We are all in a hurry….don’t have time to think about our choices–he suggests “mindful timelessness” instead.  In short, I think he is saying, give yourself the space and time in your life to do the things you can to care for the earth–recycle, bring your own bags, whatever this is for you…And because it is McDonough, he encourages you to see this earth as a place of vast abuundance, where a better and more balanced world is possible if we put our minds and hearts into it.

And by the way, did you hear the the COUNTRY of Italy has banned the single-use plastic bag.  Yes, I said THE COUNTRY OF ITALY!

These past few weeks as I work in my backyard studio and see the birds, Carolina wrens, cardinals, nuthatches and more, stuffing themselves with the seeds I am putting out, as I see the daylight lasting

one goldfinch, a nuthatch and a wren or two on my studio table

longer each afternoon, as the tips of the daffodils show themselves under the damp humus and melting snow, I know that spring is indeed on the way.  The earth has shifted and spring with its awakening is indeed coming again.  So, late in this January of 2011, I wish you all a Happy New Year.  I have changed the name of this blog to THE LAST STRAW: A Continued Quest for a Life Without Single-use Plastic.  I am still curious, and determined, and certainly I am not perfect in this.  I think the question of how we use the resources found in the earth for this new century is a big one.  How to provide for all of us all over the world.  Recently, I have been attending some neighborhood meetings sponsored by Clean Energy Durham, where we are learning to make our homes more energy efficient in simple direct pass-along ways.  This organization encourages us to learn and then share our knowledge with our neighbors.  It is a good model for community and for environmental awareness and empowerment.  I was telling my young hosts Chris and Irene about my commitment to use as little disposable plastic as possible.  Chris said, “You know, I have discovered that if I actually drive the speed limit then I save 4 miles per gallon.”  Wow.  It is these individual acts of paying attention that inspire me, keep me curious.  What will the new year bring?  For myself, I am hoping to figure out what is right for me, not acting righteously–(I SHOULD do this and SHOULD do that)–but acting from my core, doing the best I can to keep figuring out what I want to do, and doing it.

Meanwhile–while I was in New York this late December–I got to See Jomama Jones in her show “Radiate.” Jomama is a fabulous diva created by the playwright and actor Daniel Alexander Jones.  Jomama’s show was full of wonderful music from herself and her back-ups the Sweet Peaches.  She left us with these wishes for the New Year, which I am passing on to you:

WISHES FOR YOU

by Sharon Bridgforth (for Jomama Jones in “Radiate”—Dec. 2010)

I wish you health and wholeness.  That all the Abundance that seeks you, finds you sweetly and without delay.

I wish you friends that make you laugh to tears.  Friends that treat you dear.

I wish you companionship that is adventurous, kind, compassionate, hott and sexy.

I wish old wounds heal.  That you offer your best self each moment of each day.

That generosity leads your actions and thoughts.

That you be gentle with yourself when you fall short.

I wish you Harmony and Alignment

Creativity and Inspiration.

I wish you quests of spirit that delight your Soul.

That gratitude and joy guide you.

That you Fully be yourself/always.

That Grace define you.

That you Shine.

That you be free.

I wish that you know we need you.

That your presence matters.

I wish you love.

“Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”  Carl Jung

“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”  Albert Einstein

Around the world they are doing it–making Christmas trees out of discarded stuff.  Everywhere.  Here are a few favorite recycled Christmas trees I found on the web this morning.

Recycled bottle Christmas tree

Chinese christmas tree made out of plastic silverware

Christmas tree out of Mountain Dew cans

Christmas tree made of wooden pallets

It seems everyone is doing it, everywhere.  Recycling creatively and having a good time with it.  So here’s to new ideas, new possibilities for us in the recycling and reuse of all we make and use on this planet earth.

Christmas tree made out of glass bottles, tin cans and plastic refuse from the beach--artist--yours truly

The world is full of creative minds.  Like bees we are humming along. Perhaps, this season we are even singing.  Merry Christmas everyone.  Thanks to all of you who have helped and supported me in my (no longer reluctant) year without single-use plastic. This has been a full year for me.  I have learned much and see much more learning and understanding, thinking and doing along the road ahead.  As much as anything my inspiration this year has come from you the readers who have questioned me, educated me  and inspired me.  I thank you all the time.

Duquesne Fils-Aimé regularly wades into a river of waste in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to clean out the city’s canals. Despite the filth, he is thankful for the job, he said.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order in the continuous thread of revelation.”

“Write about what you don’t know about what you know. ”
Eudora Welty

Convenience might kill us in the long run.  I grew up hearing the frantic warning–”Don’t ever put that plastic dry cleaning bag over your head, you can smother yourself.”  Looking at the picture above, which was on the front page of the New York Times about a month ago, I think about what all this single-use plastic is doing to our world.

For the past few days I have been listening and re-listening to a Radio Lab podcast of a conversation Robert Krulwich had with Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly.  The show was entitled What Does Technology Want? Johnson and Kelly are authors of the books Where Good Ideas Come From and What Technology Wants, in that order. Think about it this way–stuff gets invented because we need it and we want it.  Because our world is “ready and waiting for it.”  For example, Elisha Gray registered his discovery of the telephone 3 hours after Alexander Graham Bell.  The telephone’s time had come.  It was waiting to be invented.  The same sort of thing happened with the electric light bulb.  The scientific world had made all the discoveries necessary to support these inventions.  According to Johnson and Kelly,  there are really no “Eureka” moments.  Stuff happens because of all that has come before.  They also say that ideas, like plants to the sun, lean in the direction that the world “wants.”

Are we ready to address our over-use of plastic?  Do we “want” to pay attention to the fact that we are using oil, a finite resource in a non-renewable way?  For that matter, are we ever going to make small affordable cars that use this resource wisely?  What must happen scientifically and culturally to make this a priority for us?

If you listen to NPR you hear stories about electric cars and wind-generated energy, which makes me think we are leaning towards some sort of environmental stewardship.  I do not hear much these days about plastic, how it is used everywhere all of the time in almost all packaging of anything, from food markets in the developing world to our fancy gourmet cheese counters here in the States.  So much of our food is sealed in plastic for freshness and shelf-life, yet no one is talking about the toxic off-gassing of this non-biodegradeble material we are using to hold our food.  Plastic sheeting, plastic wrapping, plastic clam shells, plastic lids with plastic straws covering mostly plastic drinking cups.

A woman dries plastic bags for recycling on the banks of the Buriganga River in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where authorities have clamped down on bag use. Photo: ReutersI

I am finding that I have more questions than answers as I approach the end of my year without single-use plastic.  Mostly–with a  bit of vigilance and a sense of humor, saying over and over, “This is my job, this year”–I feel I have been successful in my quest.  I have found most of the food I have needed in glass or at farmers markets.  Everywhere, however, on almost everything, are tiny plastic seals, tabs, labels and caps– EVERY everywhere.  I also see, all the time, and everywhere as well, people filling their trunks full of groceries in plastic bags, folks strolling down the streets or sitting in internet cafes or waiting for buses with their giant “big-gulp” drinks of something, usually with a plastic cup and almost always with a plastic straw and lid.  Plastic water bottles are everywhere–along our roads, in offices and homes and cars and in people’s hands.  EVERYWHERE.  Always always always.  I ALSO see kids and adults with their own use-again water bottles and lots of people with their use-again bags at the grocery store.  It’s all there.  My questions are– “Are we leaning towards paying attention? Do enough of us feel that the time has come to do so?”  Steven Johnson says if an idea comes before it is supported by the ethos of the community, then it will flounder.  I hope we are ready to deal with this plastics issue.  I have been wondering a lot about what it would take for us–our society, our culture, our world–to begin to take this over-use of plastic seriously.  What would make us shift our awareness and our actions?  It is becoming clear to me that looking for the answers to these questions will be the next stage in my journey.