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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2007-08-30, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2007. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt Strange friends Know what a nurdle is? You should. We’re pumping five and a half quadrillion of them into the environment each year. They’ll all be around for the next 500 years. Nurdles are grains, granules, kernels, pellets – of that most familiar of modern-day materials, plastic. An amazing phenomenon, plastic. We’ve only been producing the stuff on a large scale for 50-odd years yet already it permeates every stratum of our lives. Our clothes are increasingly made of plastic; our cars and airplanes and boats are largely plastic. So are our cell phones, our credit cards, our sunglasses and our artificial heart valves. I’m typing these words on a plastic keyboard. Billions of items that were once made out of metal or wood are now plastic. But unlike aluminum or cedar, plastic doesn’t degrade when we’re finished with it. Of all the billions of tons of plastic we’ve produced in the past half century, not one nurdle of it has died a natural death. A tiny fraction has been incinerated (transformed into a different, less visible form of pollution); the rest is still with us, in landfill sites, in vacant lots. But mostly in our oceans. One time I met a woman who had traveled all over the world. Tell me the most amazing thing you ever saw, I said. She didn’t even hesitate. “On the shores of the Red Sea”, she said. “I looked down from a hill one morning at dawn and saw thousands – millions – of ghostly white, blue, green and yellow creatures wafting across the sand away from the water, as far as the eye could see.” What were they, I asked – storks? Flamingos? Seagulls? “Plastic bags,” she said. They had washed up on the shore, dried out in the sun, and begun to migrate who knows where. About 1,000 miles off the coast of California there’s an undulating blob of bags and other plastic crap going round and round and round. It is the size of two New Brunswicks. It will rotate out there for centuries after you and I are dead. It’s a wonder we aren’t buried in plastic bags. We manufacture 500 billion of the things – a million every minute – each year. And we throw them all away – except they refuse to go away – they stay, and the damage they do is nigh incalculable. The discarded plastic bags that make their way into our waters wreak havoc with ocean life. Sea turtles mistake them for their favourite food – jellyfish. They eat the bags and die. Dolphins, porpoises and a host of sea creatures think they’re seaweed and gulp them down. What’s really sad is, plastic bags are a frill, a sop to our sloth and thoughtlessness. We could easily bring our own, re-usable cloth bags to the grocery store. Broccoli doesn’t care how it gets from the checkout counter to the refrigerator. Happily, there seems to be a grass-roots revolt growing against this most disposable and despicable form of plastics pollution. Last year, filmmaker Rebecca Hosking caused a mini-revolution in a small town in England. Hosking had spent a year filming life – and death – on the beaches of Hawaii. When she returned to her home town of Modbury, she set up a local screening of her film and invited the town’s 43 shopkeepers to attend. “Come and see where the plastic bags you hand out end up,” she told them. They saw sea turtles gasping and choking on plastic bags. They saw dolphins, belly up in the surf; sea birds enmeshed in plastic. When the film was done and the lights came up, Hosking asked for a show of hands in support of a voluntary ban on plastic bags. Unanimous. And Modbury became the first town in Europe to be plastic-bag free. Other jurisdictions are taking action too. Five years ago, Ireland slapped a ‘plas tax’ on all plastic bags sold in the country. The tax not only raised millions of Euros which were subsequently channeled towards environmental projects, it also reduced the use of plastic bags in Ireland by an astonishing 95 per cent. In 2002, officials in Bangladesh discovered the primary cause of flooding that had inundated two-thirds of the country twice in a decade – discarded plastic bags had clogged the nation’s drainage system. The government imposed a total ban on polythene bags. No major floods since. Last year, Hong Kong called for a ‘voluntary’ ban on plastic-bag use. So far, Hong Kong supermarkets have handed out 80 million fewer plastic bags. When you think of it, it’s all ‘voluntary’ in the end. If we wait for our trudging, begrudging, snail-paced governments to act we’ll be up to our Adam’s apples in plastic. So, what to say when the check-out clerk says “Paper or plastic?”? Not ‘plastic’for sure – but chopping down a tree to produce a grocery bag seems like a pretty Faustian bargain, too. How about “Neither, thanks – I brought my own bags.”? Arthur Black Campaign could turn nasty The moment is here. Not a soul to infiltrate the solitary environ which has somehow become, for one blessed afternoon, devoid of the usual comings and goings that can often define my household. Even the many ubiquitous responsibilities have taken a break. It is, in short, the perfect opportunity to sit with a good friend. I find that friend in the usual place, waiting patiently in the den, for me to find an opportunity to come sit and relax. And settling into my cuddly chair it’s easy to pick up where we last left off - the story that has been shared pulling me back and taking me away. No longer do I care about little hassles; I am far too caught up in the much greater problems of Thad and Liz Beaumont. I am currently engrossed for a second time in The Dark Half, my friend, a book by horror meister Stephen King. And as I read with wide-eyed disgust, as lips and nose wrinkle at the perfectly penned description of hideous atrocities, I find myself wondering why. What could I possibly find enjoyable about the gruesome images churning forth from these pages. Like my choice in music, my reading material is often geared to the mood I’m in, or to the situation. For example summer reading tends to ask less of me than what I require on a long, blustery winter weekend. My genres can vary from a banal love story to something as beautifully rich as The Kite Runner. I like Austen and Dickens, though admittedly not a steady diet. But it was as a pre-teen that I discovered a penchant for not just twists in my tales but ones decidedly sinister. From little detective Nancy Drew I grew to love Dame Agatha Christie’s gentle stories of murder. The yen for a little mystery in my life, however, has taken a somewhat surprising turn as an adult. Surprising because I am at heart a timid person. I hate being frightened. Also, I’m a Libra who likes the aesthetically pleasing. I’m uncomfortable when confronted by even the remotely revolting. But give me a book with enough gore to colour a Mel Gibson epic and I’m lost for hours. Typically faint of heart, worried about every molehill, it’s odd that I should be such an enthusiastic fan of the creepy and macabre. Albeit, one who’s been known to be afraid of the dark after reading them. My first introduction to horror meister Dean Koontz in the early 1980s left me too terror-struck to shut off the lights and go to bed one evening. I believe I sat on the couch for almost half an hour before mustering up the required courage to act like an adult. That kind of nonsense is over, but admittedly there are moments of disgust. So what’s the attraction? There was a story I heard of a young man who didn’t want to see the Harry Potter movies, because J.K. Rowling’s writing invited the use of imagination. When reading we can let that take us as far as we’re comfortable, rather being slapped in the face by ghastly images on a wide screen. The horror thriller author may paint the picture, but it’s up to the reader how closely they look. Also, I like the way King and Koontz write. While they may not be Hemingway they find the right words and phrases to draw this reader in. The end of each chapter begs me to go on. And once begun, I find these friends difficult to leave. They’re good company, strange as that may be. Other Views Talk about using our nurdles Predictions are flying the Ontario Oct. 10 election campaign will turn nasty -- so what will the politicians be saying about each other? The forecasts are based particularly on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals claiming in a recent by-election their New Democrat opponent once lived on the streets and sold drugs. General elections also have grown steadily more aggressive. In the last, in 2003, the Progressive Conservatives pointed to “Squinty McGuinty, he’s still not up to the job.” The Liberals are certain to recall an incident in 1993, when John Tory, now Ontario Conservative leader and their closest challenger, co-chaired a campaign to re-elect prime minister Kim Campbell and ran TV commercials emphasizing the partial facial paralysis of Liberal leader Jean Chrétien. A voice commented it would be embarrassing if Chrétien became prime minister and the commercials were deplored by politicians in all parties and helped Campbell lose the election. The Ontario Liberals remember this, because every couple of months one of their backbenchers drops it into a debate, and it is too tempting a weapon to resist using if they feel pressed. Some will feel recalling the incident is unfair, because it happened a long time ago and has nothing to do with the policies being debated in the current Ontario campaign. But there also is an argument it is fair game, because politicians should be judged on their records, which are guides to how they will behave in the future. The Liberals probably will raise Tory’s record in business, when he ran a large cable TV company and cut jobs, which they also have referred to briefly in the legislature. Job losses currently are a hot topic, but most business leaders have cut some at times and it may even come with the job. But the Liberals will gain if they can make Tory seen as a boss who did not hesitate to cut others’ jobs, but kept his own. The Liberals likely will stress Tory is rich, which does not have much relevance. His father is wealthy, he has good connections in business and was being paid $1 million a year when he quit to run in politics. Tory will respond he has been more fortunate than many and worked hard and helped his employers succeed. But politicians like to be seen as ordinary citizens, knowing first-hand their concerns. For this reason Tory’s predecessor, Conservative premier Ernie Eves, insisted he was more at home on Main Street than Bay Street, Mike Harris called himself “Mike, the guy from next door” and Bob Rae, a silver- spooned New Democrat, wanted it known he also worries about paying his mortgage. The Liberals will make sure voters know a Conservative candidate, Randy Hillier, as a farmers’ leader, blocked roads and encouraged demonstrators to defy police, and suggest Tory is comfortable with such tactics. The Liberals have to be aware two former Ontario Conservative ministers Jim Flaherty, now a powerful federal finance minister, and Frank Klees argued when running against Tory for leader he lacked experience to lead a province and they could use his comrades’ assessments against him. The Conservatives will peek further into the home life of Environment Minister Laurel Broten, who should be reducing pollution, but planned a two-storey garage at her house to accommodate four vehicles used by her and her husband until neighbours objected. The Liberals put out a photograph of Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod with Tory at a rally and added a caption suggesting she wished she was elsewhere baking cookies and the Conservatives can accuse them of belittling all women in politics. The Conservatives also can stress McGuinty has looked after a Liberal woman politician, Jane Stewart, exceptionally well, providing her with two well-paid assignments on the public payroll, and she is the daughter of former long-time party leader Robert Nixon, whom Liberals revere as “the best premier Ontario never had”. Here is a lot of scope for this debate to turn ugly. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk