What Can One Do About the Big Environmental Picture?

I’m beginning to feel about the environment the way I feel about health. The experts are so contradictory that one doesn’t know what to believe in.

One day cholesterol will kill you. The next day it’s good for you. Coffee is bad. Coffee is good. Sugar is bad. Sugar is essential. Eggs will kill you. Eggs are nature’s perfect food.

The mind reels.

Now the environmentalists are squabbling as if they were doctors.

I am not an avid environmentalist, but I do try to do what I can. I use paper instead of plastic, when I have a choice, but that’s about as much as I can personally do. I do pollute the atmosphere by driving a car, but in Los Angeles driving a car is inescapable.

I really don’t know what the average urbanite can do. I urge my wife to bring home our groceries in paper sacks, rather than plastic. But when she does a big shopping she usually uses plastic. The bags are so convenient with those holes at the top for your hands.

Now I read that environmentalists are at war over whether plastic is really worse than paper. Most of us have automatically condemned plastic because it is nonbiodegradable. Now we are told that degradability is not necessarily good. It actually may be harmful, because when biodegrading, garbage releases toxic substances into the environment.

There isn’t much any one person can do about the big picture. As I say, I try not to pollute. But considering the amount of groceries we buy and the amount of junk mail we receive, it’s hard to avoid. Our trash cans are so full of plastic and paper every week that it’s becoming harder and harder for my wife to carry them out. It all goes into landfills.

I feel guilty every time I see her dragging those enormous cans full of plastic and junk paper out to the sidewalk on Mondays. To be truthful, however, most of our trash is mail-order catalogues. She must get 30 a week. There is no escaping the fact that we are helping to pollute the environment.

The environmentalists also have doubts, from what I read, that cloth diapers are safer environmentally than plastic diapers. Some environmentalists point out that it might make more sense to conserve water during a drought by using disposable plastic diapers, rather than washing cloth ones. Whichever side is right on this question, it is of only academic interest to us.

All this concern for the environment reminds me of the general store in Shafter, at which my Uncle Tom spent his life behind the counter. Shafter is a small farm center northwest of Bakersfield, and undoubtedly has supermarkets today, not to mention a movie theater and a McDonald’s. When I used to visit my cousin Annabel in Shafter in the 1920s it had none of those amenities.

The general store at which my Uncle Tom worked was the only store in town. Everybody traded there, most of them on credit. My Uncle Tom also worked on credit: that is, his employer usually was behind in his pay. Uncle Tom took it out in merchandise.

I loved to walk into that store. The mixture of aromas was inebriating. It would be beyond a small boy’s knowledge to name them all. But I remember pickles, coffee, bread, ginger snaps, onions and chocolate.

When you asked for pickles my Uncle Tom would walk out in front of the counter to the pickle barrel, lift the lid off, and say, “How many?”

When he lifted off the lid the aroma of pickles would be released into the store, causing mouths to water. If you said you wanted three he would pick them out, with his bare hands, and wrap them in butcher’s paper. Coffee would also be shoveled out of barrels and into pound sacks, so that the aroma of coffee pervaded the store.

Since everything had to be wrapped in paper, perhaps the environmental impact was just as devastating as it is today with the arms full of plastic containers we carry home.

It is easy to fall into the “good-old-days” syndrome. There was a time, I think, when in some ways life was better in America. When the streets were safe. When the air was clean. When one could take Sunday drives without gridlock. When schoolkids didn’t use drugs.

On the other hand, we had infantile paralysis. We had no television to bring the world to our living rooms, including wars. Women had no panty hose. A baseball player couldn’t make $3 million a year. And there were no supermarkets, which are, after all, the symbol of our prosperity.

All the same, I’d like to walk into my Uncle Tom’s store once again.