20 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
Dispatches Big Idea
11.19
administration has a deplorable environ-
mental record, this idea is one of the few
things that President Trump has said that I
resoundingly agree with. In fact, he’s exactly
right. When it comes to the environment, we
have bigger problems than plastic straws.
Which is not to say that banning straws is
misguided. The plastic versions are indefen-
sible. In the U.S., we throw an estimated 390
million of them into our landfills every day.
Thanks to growing awareness, straw bans
have proliferated, spreading from Seattle
to Washington, D.C. But while outlawing
straws is easy, truly addressing our planet’s
health is much harder.
We’re only half woke to this reality. Take
it from a fellow straw disdainer, passionate
plastics recycler, and longtime bike com-
muter: these small actions make us feel like
we’re doing something positive in the face of
overwhelming challenges—and we are. But
when we stop at this level, forgoing the straw
but accepting the plastic plate and wrappers,
we’re just self-administering palliatives. To
make real change, we’re going to have to suffer
more than we do when we wheel a recycling
bin out to the curb or cut an annual check to
our environmental surrogate of choice.
Let’s stick with plastic for a moment, be-
cause it’s illustrative. While plastic pollution
is no small thing, plastic recycling is a joke. In
the history of plastics, only 9 percent of it has
ever been recycled. The contents you dutifully
collect each week are more likely to be shipped
overseas and eventually dumped—often into
the ocean—than they are to be transformed
into an upcycled fleece vest. Plastics recycling
doesn’t make economic sense in the U.S.—or,
increasingly, in the countries like China and
Malaysia where we’ve historically shipped
our used milk jugs. Which is why, at the cur-
rent rates, by 2050 there will be more plastic
in the ocean than fish by biomass. The best
thing to do with plastic is to dramatically re-
duce the amount of the single-use variety we
consume. Cutting single-use plastics from
your life isn’t that difficult. It takes mindful-
ness more than anything. But it demands a
fundamental shift in how we, as soft-palmed
consumers, live our lives.
Revolution is a better word for such a shift.
And since this is the Big Idea column, that’s
what I’m calling for. Don’t be frightened—
Che Guevara isn’t going to rise from the dead
and make you work on a kolkhoz. This is a
democratic revolution, the kind that made
America great to begin with. Also France. It
was that country’s revolution that Thomas
Paine, one of our founding thinkers, was
going on about when he wrote the following
words, which I’ve tweaked to appropriate for
my green revolt. When the polluting status
quo is “too deeply rooted to be removed, and
the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers
too abominably filthy to be cleansed,” Paine
said, then “anything short of a complete and
universal revolution” is not enough. “When
it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole
heart and soul should go into the measure, or
not attempt it.”
Do you see where Tom and I are going here?
It won’t matter if the oceans are full of plas-
tic if life as we know it on earth comes to an
end because we didn’t address climate change
and a thousand other wrongs simultane-
ously. There’s little to be gained in debating
paper straws versus Trump Straws. Revolu-
tion is about attacking Paine’s “hereditary
despotism” of the establishment, something
that elites, plebs, coal executives, lobby-
ists, environmentalists, farmers, Trumpians,
Al Goreians, software engineers, ranchers,
homeowners, red staters, and blue staters all
contribute to. We each play a part in the prob-
lem, but we need to stop feeling helpless or
paralyzed by our complicit guilt. We can rise
up. We can’t stop at changing our drinking
utensils and shopping with reusable bags.
Last spring, the writer Bill McKibben, a
founder of the climate-activism organization
350.org, published Falter, a follow-up to his
1989 classic on climate change, The End of
Nature. Given that we’ve made approximately
zero progress on the climate issue in the past
30 years, McKibben’s viewpoint has under-
standably grown darker. Falter offers a dev-
astating look at the severity of the problems
we face—and the book isn’t optimistic about
our chances of solving them. But McKibben
hasn’t lost all hope. He identifies two key
20th-century inventions that give us cause
for optimism. One is solar technology. The
other: nonviolent political uprisings.
“The first Earth Day in 1970 saw 20 million
Americans in the street or roughly 10 percent
of the population,” McKibben says. “That was
enough to get real change. That’s what we
need again, and around the world. Along with
working on individual changes in our lives, we
have to be slightly less individual—to come
together in the groups and movements that
can actually change the underlying rules.”
The individual changes aren’t much harder
than banning straws, but they require sacri-
ficing some of the pseudo luxuries we’ve
grown accustomed to. Cut back on or stop
eating meat. Vote for electrified mass tran-
sit—and then use it. Make that home invest-
ment in solar. Plant trees and turn to wood
construction over concrete. Use your buying
power to support outdoor brands that use
renewable and recycled materials. If you can
afford an electric car, buy one—and encour-
age your government to invest in renewable
energy to charge it with.
And although this seems hypocritical from
a magazine that extols adventure travel, per-
haps the most important consumer change
we can all make is to book fewer flights. I take
eight to ten domestic flights each year for
work and to visit family. Air travel feeds my
children and lets them know their relatives.
But it’s also destroying the planet I’ll leave
them. Today, 12 percent of transportation-related CO 2 emissions come from air travel.
And the aviation industry is expected to triple
its carbon footprint in the coming decades.
But what if it didn’t? As consumers we need to
choose the right over the easy—and minimize
our environmental impacts when we cannot.
It’s great that so many of us now feel guilty
grabbing a plastic straw for our disposable
drink cups, but imagine if we looked at order-
ing a cheap plane ticket or overnight delivery
the same way? That’s real sacrifice.
As for McKibben’s call that we should
think more collectively, those opportunities
are flourishing, too. A sort of eco e pluribus
unum is upon us. “The most hopeful sign
this year has been an explosion of pressure
groups,” he says. Fridays for Future, inspired
by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, ral-
lies students to go on strike for the climate.
You can sign up and organize your own strike
using its website. Extinction Rebellion de-
mands that citizens in the UK form assem-
blies on climate and ecological justice that
direct the British government on policy. The
Sunrise Movement has helped ensure that
the climate debate is being talked about in the
current U.S. election cycle.
These are the beginnings of big global
movements, but if a plastic-straw boycott is
what it takes to get people contributing, then
so be it. You might recall that our revolution
was initiated on a similar boycott. (Ironically,
we dumped that English tea into the ocean.)
But it was the underlying collective change in
consumer behavior across the colonies that
mattered. Our founders switched from tea
to coffee and used other economic tactics to
strategically grow independent from Eng-
land. That was a different crisis—the global
plague of colonialism. Right now, a global
environmental crisis is upon us. It’s time to
discard complacency. It’s time for desperate
resolve. It’s time to move beyond straws. OMarc Peruzzi is an Outside contributing
editor. He lives in Missoula, Montana.́,W·VLQWHUHVWLQJDERXW
plastic straws,” said
President Trump.
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the plates, the
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