Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of
Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.

Garlands of festively coloured plastic festoon the fences, shrubs, and trees. Intricate patterns accumulate on storm drains, in window wells, and in the leeward side of buildings. Eye-catching pieces bob along in the current of rivers and on the waves of ponds. Like the midden heaps of ancient civilizations these accumulating artificial artifacts speak volumes about our current one.

The triumph of technology to transform a petroleum substance into an array of consumer goods is astonishing. What is more astonishing is the reality we have become one with plastic. We are awash in single use plastics. Reuse and recycling are trumped by discarding, dumping, and dismissing the issue.

A great war rages across the land. Fought in fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and in the halls of power and influence, it is divisive. Like all wars, it tears at families, communities, and the country. It pits the likes of Danielle Smith, Doug Ford, and the orange-haired bobble head from south of our border against an alleged conspiratorial green force of evil. These green people, if you listen to the plastic trifecta of reason, are apparently hell-bent on wresting from your cold, dead hands the very plastic implements that make life worth living.

Plastic straws. You heard it here first. Plastic drinking straws, those short, cylindrical tubes of plastic are a galvanizing element in the war. The battle lines are drawn. The swords and arrows of conflict are plastic drinking straws.

Danielle Smith, the sometimes premier of Alberta when she isn’t engaged in clandestine trips to Mar-a-Lago to discuss straw dog strategies of provincial separation with her friend, uses a heart-wrenching tale to support the use of plastics. Poor little Jimmy tearfully sits with his chocolate milkshake and a collapsed paper straw. All that anticipation with no suck, no treat. I felt a little clutch in my throat hearing the tale, delivered from Smith’s dining car in High River.

But it’s a shallow, self-serving metaphor about the absurdity of replacing plastic drinking straws with alternative paper ones. Of course alternative straws don’t tend to clog up dumps, drains, and inevitably our brains. In Jimmy’s case, waiting a bit for the shake to soften in the heat solves his problem. In Smith’s case, thinking longer term about a petrochemical industry that is the feedstock for plastic, and sorting out the costs from the benefits would be helpful.

For Jimmy and Danielle, waiting is insufferable and thinking is too hard. Banning plastic straws is simply an assault on “freedom” and we can’t have that! Having a screeching fit over freedom of choice is a classic deflection from the real issues over single use plastic waste.

Research has unmasked a major environmental health issue with plastic. Plastic never really breaks down into its original constituent parts. Instead, the pieces just keep getting smaller and smaller, becoming nano particles in science-speak. Those particles become incorporated into everything around us— air, water, soil, our food, and inevitably us.

We are rapidly becoming plastic people. Maybe this explains some of the allegiance to plastic (and the plastics industry). Like attracts like and the more we become plastic beings, having it incorporated into our organs and brains, the more it whispers to us, increasing our loyalty to our new, artificial makeup. OK, that may be a wild conspiracy theory!

What is in the realm of reality is the petrochemical industry, in league with the oil and gas industry is so intertwined with government, one has a hard time distinguishing where one stops and the other starts. That speaks to agency and political capture by industry. Although the puppeteer’s strings aren’t obvious, we know who they control.

Trace the lines back from the battle over plastic drinking straws and single use plastics and it will lead to the plastics industry and their supporters in government. It explains why great storms, plagues, and economic uncertainties will befall us if we give up on plastic straws. It would be, to coin a phrase, “the straw that breaks the industry’s back.”

Avoid being sucked into the efforts of politicians and industry to have you clutch at straws (drinking ones) and avoid the real issues of single use plastic waste. Plastic straws suck!

For more on the issue of Single Use Plastics, visit Wasteless at https://wasteless.ca/