New Orleans is not a city known for environmentally responsible behavior. Recycling is scarce and plastic "go cups" are plentiful. The excess for which many people visit the Crescent City seems almost antithetical to a conservation mindset.
But New Orleans is a complex place with a surprisingly diverse population, and one New Orleans resident -- my friend Sally, a local attorney -- is a testament to the fact that New Orleans and conservation are not a contradiction. And if someone in New Orleans can do it to then anyone can, which is why I'm dedicating this Earth Day blog post to her.
Sally is so New Orleans. She's been a resident for decades, used to live in the French Quarter, knows just about everyone in town, it seems, and today owns a beautiful house in the Garden District. She is also absolutely obsessed with plastic straws. Or rather with mercilessly exterminating them and all their progeny for all time, in perpetuity, with malice, forever. When Sally orders a drink she orders it without a straw. If it comes with a straw, she sends it back. Not the straw, the drink. She sends the drink back and orders another one without a straw.
Sally does this because plastic straws and plastic in general are huge and worsening environmental problems. According to a study released earlier this year, by the year 2050 experts project that, measured by weight, there will be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans.
So you don't miss the gravity of that by reading on without pause, I'm just going to say it again. Experts project that by the year 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
This is a global tragedy unfolding in what may seem to us like slow motion but in the grand scheme of things is the blink of an eye. A little over 30 years from now, the toddlers currently playing with blocks and bumping their heads everywhere will be my age. Most of the people you know will still be alive. Justin Bieber will be a real honest-to-goodness adult and might even start acting like one, but he'll be far from an old man. And in the oceans on planet earth there will be more plastic garbage than fish. The recent viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril portends a truly gruesome future for sea creatures on earth.
Sally's lonely campaign against plastic straws is courageous in a place like New Orleans. Not only does the city cultivate and cherish a devil-may-care mentality, it is, ultimately, in the American South, where resistance to thinking about environmental issues runs thick as molasses. But if she can wage war on plastic in New Orleans, surely the rest of us can do just a little more.
Fortunately, products being developed to help those of us without Sally's steadfast willingness to be an anti-plastic gadfly. There is a cultural movement toward buying stronger, longer-lasting products, and even -- like at the outdoor gear retailer Patagonia -- to fixing things rather than just throwing them away. There are even biodegradable utensils, including, yes, straws, like those from the company Aardvark, which is donating 15% of sales from its special sea turtle branded straws to the researchers whose viral sea turtle video turned so many stomachs and yanked at so many hearts.
For Earth Day, I'm giving Sally a packet of Aardvark straws. I doubt she'll use them -- she's become such an anti-straw radical at this point that I'm not sure she could bring herself to put one to her lips. But maybe she'll give them to someone else in New Orleans, and maybe they'll start using them instead of plastic. And maybe some day I'll stroll up to a bar, order a cocktail to go and get a cup with a biodegradable straw stamped with sea turtles. Now that would be cause for hope -- to paraphrase Jay-Z, if we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.