The last straw in saving the planet

Somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica is a sea turtle that has no clue he sparked a worldwide consumer movement to ban plastic straws. With any luck, Tortuga X has no memory of the monster headache he suffered after a team of scientists extracted what they thought was a worm, but quickly discovered was indeed “Plastico!”

“Is it a straw?” asks Christine Figgener, the marine biologist who filmed the footage back in 2015. “Don’t tell me it’s a frigging straw!”

The video of the turtle has been viewed on YouTube upwards of 22 million times. The misadventures that marine life and other creatures in the wild are having with our discarded, singleuse plastics should matter to us. Videos like this ought to be essential viewing.

But somewhere between the initial shock and outrage and the eventual call to action — the vilification of plastic straws and the outright shaming of people who use them — a trend is emerging, showing just how effortlessly consumerism has eaten environmentalism for lunch and the role our superficiality has played in facilitating the digestive process.

Environmental bandwagons seem, over time, to have become public relations gold mines. The kind of change the food industry once fought tooth and nail has become too good for the bottom line to ignore. Is it impactful change, though, or the kind that exploits the human tendency toward self-satisfaction? All we need is to be made to feel a little bit better about our convenience-based products and our innate capacity for self-delusion will take care of the rest.

The Telegraph in the U.K. recently reported that “High street coffee chains and restaurants are rushing to take plastic straws and stirrers off their shelves ahead of a ban which could come in by the end of this year.” The industry seems almost overjoyed to be talking about banning straws. Saving Tortuga X and all Mother Earth’s creatures is an opportunity to tout “leadership” and showcase “innovation” and all the many “non-plastic alterna- tives” — some biodegradable, reusable, washable straw that might, however preposterously, not become a bacteria-infested tube — that haven’t even been brought to market.

So much talk about the many wondrous things that might happen feeds the consumer appetite for shallow, relatively painless change. Taking a consumer movement and wrapping it in the self-congratulatory cloak of environmental activism is a surefire recipe for brand loyalty.

If we focus on plastic bags, for example, we don’t have to think too much about what and how much goes in them. We can buy cloth bags and shop our way out of ever having to have a reckoning with our shopping.

So long as we’re grasping at straws about plastic straws, we never have to talk about the plastic cup or bottle in which it sits or the iceberg of waste upon which it rests. In this way we, and our oceans of plastic, can continue to float comfortably on the surface.

Tortuga X’s video went viral but his less famous cousin Tortuga Y (a mere 6.6 million views) also has a YouTube video. He is similarly impaled, but with a plastic fork. As you might have guessed, he neither captured the world’s sympathy nor its capacity to imagine a ban on that particular utensil.

Most of us are far too dependent on convenience products — so heavily invested are we in total expediency — to be able to evaluate the big picture of our personal waste, much of which is dubious in its recyclability.

Quite frankly, the big picture scares the hell out of us so we prefer trees to forest and the “I’ve done enough” sanctimony of eschewing a plastic straw here and there, for a season or two, maybe, until some other low-impact bandwagon sweeps through town.

Somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica is a sea turtle that has no clue he’s become the fast food industry’s latest, greatest excuse to bill itself as a superhero for the environment. Good luck to you, Tortuga X. I hope you don’t choke on a plastic spoon. We’re not talking about banning those yet, and we probably never will.