A Turtle, A Straw, And A Decade Of Bad Ideas

There are few people among us with chelonophobia, the fear of turtles. From an evolutionary perspective, there isn’t much reason for turtles to fill one with terror. Even snappers, which can do some damage, don’t truly pose a threat. From a philosophical perspective, it’s turtles all the way down, so there’s ample reason to love them. And most people do, which is why they are such a powerful tool when environmental groups push stupid, destructive ideas.

This is what happened after marine biology graduate student Christine Figgener filmed her team removing a plastic straw from a turtle’s nose in 2015. From there, the push was on to switch to paper straws, those manmade horrors the likes of which have never been seen before. That plastic straws make up a minuscule portion of ocean plastic waste is immaterial. What matters to environmentally conscious Americans is that they can demonstrate being good people as they try to slurp a Tiki drink through a rapidly deteriorating tube. But much like Britney Spears, oops they did it again, because as it turns out, paper straws are worse for the environment. 

We’re all very sorry for your loss, lovers of materially deficient alternatives. Now what will you throw in your recyclable bag when checking out at the grocery store? You can’t just switch back to plastic. Except, another oopsie, because the value of reusable bags instead of plastic ones is also questionable. 

Publications just asking questions about that topic include bastions of retrograde right-wing thinking such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Boston Globe. Naturally, critics complained those outlets didn’t consider every facet of plastic versus cotton and didn’t assume people would use the reusable bags enough. The plural of anecdote isn’t data, but I know a whole bunch of y’all with drawers full of reusable bags, which suggests people aren’t using them enough.

We don’t have to keep doing this. I get it; conservation is great — environmentalism, not so much. Conservation gives us parks and wetlands. Environmentalism dries up wetlands because farmers make more money producing corn for inferior fuel. We haven’t quite gotten the Omni-Net from “The Simpsons” yet, but surely that, too, is on the horizon.

The problem is we keep thinking about intricate systems in simple terms. One olive ridley sea turtle gets a straw lodged in its nose after a wild night of partying in whatever the Costa Rican undersea version of Studio 54 is and we all end up suffering. Even those of us who prefer not to use straws are not immune. I once went to a luncheon of some sort with wooden utensils. If you’ve not experienced these marvels of modern innovation, be grateful. Be very grateful. If we’re going to go prehistoric, we’d be better off eating with our hands or stone-carved bones. With bone, we wouldn’t even have to worry about production or recycling, plus carving bones into utensils might provide a new trade for those displaced should the AI apocalypse come to fruition. (It’s not going to come to fruition.)

Loving animals and nature is important. While we may live thoroughly modern lives, flora and fauna play critical roles in our continuing survival as a species. Mosquitoes and ticks can go, as can Canada geese, but the rest should be treasured and protected. But maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t make our lives worse when we really don’t understand what we’re messing with or how it all comes together. 

Take the Great Barrier Reef. Mankind was supposed to have killed it by now. Despite our prowess as apex predators, though, we failed. The Great Barrier Reef is doing great. Maybe we can chalk that one up to the fact that the ocean isn’t our natural habitat. Back on land, we’re pretty good at causing massive destruction via fire, right?  

Yes, actually! There was a time when we weren’t, but then we stopped managing forests, leaving lots of kindling and other combustible matter on the forest floor, both of which are the lighter fluid of the natural world, just waiting for a firebug or lightning strike to set them ablaze. Why do we refuse to manage forests while trying to manage coral reefs? It’s best not to ask. 

But, also, it is sometimes best not to act. The Brdy region of the Czech Republic, an area known for its lack of vowels, needed a dam. Local officials spent seven years arguing about permits for the dam, which they expected to cost $1.2 million. While the humans argued, a group of beavers built the dams. Surprisingly, local officials didn’t demolish them despite the fact that the beavers didn’t get the necessary permits, and now the problem is gone. Beavers are also better than humans at building dams that filter out pollutants. 

Which is all to say, it’s a complex world out there. Sometimes nature needs an assist to keep man safe, as is the case with forests. Despite their reputation as mere stewards of the land, Native Americans cultivated the land to maximize its utility and also lessen the likelihood it would catch on fire. We can continue to do the same and call it natural as the practice has indigenous heritage backing it up. 

What we don’t need to do is waste time, money, and energy on superficial, simplistic solutions designed to fight imaginary problems. Sometimes, we need to just trust the beavers and let them do their thing.

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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4.

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