Life Before Plastic

When the first factory-made men’s shirts arrived from America to Quito, Ecuador in the late 1950s, they came in clear plastic bags. I don’t know which of my classmates first realized the potential of the bags as ultra-modern, super-cool book carriers, but when she showed up in school with her books neatly encased in one of those bags, we all longed for the day when we too could discard our hand-tooled leather satchels and replace them with plastic bags.

When my mother finally bought one of those shirts, she let me have the bag. I remember carefully sliding my books and notebooks into it, and admiring the effect of my school things neatly contained by a material that, like Cinderella’s glass slipper, simultaneously protected and revealed them.

But my plastic bag was as fragile as the glass slipper, and after a while the corners of my books made holes in it. I didn’t much care, however, because by then my parents and I were packing our suitcases for our new home in the land of plastic, America.

Before those bags, for the first thirteen years of my life, in Spain and later in Ecuador, I had lived a plastic-free existence. The objects that surrounded me were made of wood, metal, glass, stone, wool, cotton, clay, paper, straw, rubber, or celluloid.

Other than paper, very little was ever thrown away, and objects like the red clay pan in which the maid washed the dishes, or the long bag of unbleached cotton in which she brought the bread home from the bakery, had been around since before my birth, and I thought of them as sort of second-class members of the family.

Other than as containers for dried flower arrangements, who uses baskets anymore? But all through my childhood the eggs, almonds, cherries and sausages that my grandmother shipped to Barcelona weekly from her farm came by train in a deep two-handled wicker basket covered with burlap, and both basket and burlap were piously preserved and returned to her by that same train.

When my mother went to the fish market she carried a flatter basket, its handle looped over her arm. I had a basket of my own, a smaller version of my mother’s.

I loved the fishwives, goddesses who sat enthroned above their displays, wearing blood-spattered white aprons decorated with broad bands of lace.

Fish of all sizes and colors, squid, octopuses, mussels and clams were arranged mandala-like on round wicker trays, and gleamed as brightly as the rose window of a gothic cathedral. After my mother had made her choice, the peixatera would wrap up for me a single iridescent blue sardine, to carry home in my own little basket.

The Mediterranean of my childhood was crammed with fish, one of the few reliable bounties in those hardscrabble, post-civil war years. Now it, like the rest of the waters on the planet, is having the life choked out of it by millions of tons of plastic—fish-ensnaring, habitat-poisoning, indestructible plastic, most of it in the form of plastic bags.

The plastic bags that had seemed so rare and precious to my schoolmates and me in 1958 have become the banner of environmental destruction. Things must change, and soon. In the words of Joanna Macy, “While the agricultural revolution took centuries, and the industrial revolution took generations, this ecological revolution has to happen within a matter of a few years.”  (quoted by Richard Rohr)

The scope of the disaster is so enormous that I often want to just give up. But if optimism is the only moral choice, then I must act as if my efforts count. So in my own small battle for the survival of the planet, I keep my flag—a well-worn New Yorker canvas bag—in the back of the car, and proudly fly it when I walk into a store.

Rock or Lion?

Every morning, while my uncle hitched the ancient farm horse to the cart, my grandmother would come out of the kitchen to supervise. "That horse," she would say, shaking her head,"is going to kill somebody one of these days." No matter that the horse hadn't broken into a trot within living memory: disaster could strike at any time.

Years later, I am in college and living at home. I am warming up the engine of my Renault Dauphine to get to my morning class across Birmingham, Alabama, when my mother runs out of the house and thrusts a hard-boiled egg through the driver's side window. "Here. Eat this on the way. You don't want to faint at the wheel and cause a tragedy." No matter that I have never fainted in my life, but it is best to be prepared.

Both my grandmother and my mother had lived through the terrors of the Spanish Civil War, so they had an excuse for their hyper vigilance. And they were convinced that it worked: after all, the cart horse never did kill anybody, and I never fainted at the wheel of that tiny car.

Unlike my mother and grandmother, however, I have led a peaceful existence, free (so far) from wars and other disasters. So there is no apparent reason for my own deep-seated conviction that it is only my constant watchfulness that keeps the world from falling to pieces.

Here is what goes through my mind on a routine trip to the market. At this season in Vermont the roads are rife with cyclists. What if one of them swerves in front of my car? What if, in the fruit aisle, the grapes I put in my cart are contaminated with a deadly bacterium? What if, at the checkout, I find out that our credit card's been hacked and we are now penniless?

When he was an old man, Mark Twain said that he had lived through many catastrophes, most of which never happened. Like the women in my family, Twain suffered from what scientists call the "negativity bias," a tendency towards pessimism and anxiety engraved in our DNA over millions of years by natural selection.

Say you are an early human wandering on the African savanna. Behind a tree in the distance, you see a beige-colored mass. It could be a rock, or it could be a lion. If you optimistically assume that it is a rock but it turns out to be a lion, you and your potential descendants are toast. If, on the other hand, you are an anxious type like Mark Twain, you will take to your heels immediately and, regardless of what the beige object actually turns out to be, you will live to pass on your genes, which will include a tendency to expect the worst.

The problem in our time is that, with lions on the wane, the negativity bias causes unwarranted stress and militates against the health and well being of millions of us modern Cassandras. It may even work against reproductive success, since deciding to become a parent requires at least a modicum of optimism. So the lesson for people like me might be to learn to imagine fewer lions, and trust in the ubiquitousness of rocks.

But the thing is that, for both optimists and Cassandras alike, there will ultimately be a lion behind the tree. It will be no use pretending that it is a rock, or hoping that it is old and toothless. That lion will catch us no matter how fast we flee.The closer I get to that final encounter, the more I think that the trick is not to run or struggle, but to face the beast and respectfully ask it to deliver the killing bite as quickly and kindly as possible.

Good Advice From Old Voltaire

In 1755, an earthquake followed by a tidal wave and a city-wide fire destroyed Lisbon and killed 40,000 people.  (Sound familiar?). In a rage at the random maliciousness of fate--and especially in a rage against the followers of Leibnitz, who believed that a world created by a perfect God must of necessity be ultimately perfect--Voltaire wrote Candide.  The hero of the story, a naive and optimistic soul, undergoes a series of catastrophes before retiring, a sadder but wiser man, to the countryside where, in an Age of Enlightenment commune, he and his friends raise their own food, bake their own bread, and weave their own cloth.  His parting words at the end of the story, and Voltaire's message to the ages:  "We must cultivate our garden."

How curious that today Voltaire's advice works not only metaphorically (work hard, take care of yourself, be good to those around you), but literally:  in a time when a single month's climate-induced catastrophes dwarf the Lisbon disaster, it is a very good thing to cultivate our garden.

By growing at least some of our own food we decrease the number of refrigerated trucks spewing emissions on our highways.  We save trips to the grocery store, spewing ditto.  We increase the number of oxygen-producing green things.  We give our bodies the best possible nutrition and some much-needed exercise.  And by getting our hands dirty we come in contact with soil micro-organisms that stimulate serotonin production in the brain...which may give us just the right dose of optimism to keep us going in these apocalyptic times.

This is what I've been cultivating.  Back row, from left to right, tomatoes, butternut squash and delicata squash.  Middle row, broccoli; lettuce, mustard and zucchini (the zucchini will take over when the salad greens bolt);  Swiss chard.  Front row, kale, peas (not doing well due to recent hot spell), and more broccoli.  The tropical-looking stuff along the right side is rhubarb.