That Great Lake

For those of you who are urbanites like I am, which I know is most of you since statistics say something like 80% of the nation lives on roughly 20% of the land in the US, spending time in the downtown area of your closest big city is often something we take for granted. I live a whopping 20 minutes from the heart of Chicago (which actually becomes 2 hours in Friday traffic). It’s a great city but one that I sort of slough off on most days. You see, I’m a suburban gal. I’m nestled all safe in my little burb with parks and pools and a safe distance from all those inner-city unknowns like traffic jams or homeless folks or even diversity. This is not necessarily a good buffer, there are many reasons we should ditch this suburban/inner-city buffer, but for now, it is the buffer.

So us suburban moms, we want to be trendy and all cutesy and want to talk about great little restaurants and clubs in the city. We want to drink a glass of Merlot at some she she bistro and chat away about how urban we are. We want to take the subway or the Metra or the El when it suits us as city savvy to do so. But really, most of us do not know our way around the city the way we should and we get lost more than we want to admit. We’re really suburbanites that want to be cool like those people that live “downtown,” but we’re really not. We just mostly know how to get to Target.

So this past Monday I was invited to a brunch with a bunch of other suburban ladies. The woman hosting was a marvelous urban friend who lived on the 20th floor of a high rise on Lake Shore Drive. From her window you can see out across Lake Michigan and Navy Pier. We navigated the city streets and landed in her parking garage without much fuss. Moments later I was standing on her deck overlooking the city of Chicago and Lake Michigan. It was breathtaking. I grew up here (in the suburbs “here” that is). I can see the skyline every day from the end of the street that is just three blocks away. But I don’t get to see this every day, the city skyline and the Lake. It was great. I was a tourist in my own town.

For those of you who read this from a place other than the midwest, you may not know that Lake Michigan looks more like the ocean than a lake. That you cannot see across it, and once or twice a year a storm moves in that swells up waves that are big enough to surf. If you weave through it and head East, you can dip into Lake Huron and then Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and finally into the St. Lawrence Seaway, you can drop yourself right out into the Atlantic Ocean. Not too shabby for a “lake.”

So anyway, this is how my mind works. I was basically star struck by my own backyard on Monday. I thought about the city and the lake all day. Thought about those mighty waters and how a simple glimpse of them on Monday morning stirred up my soul for the better part of the past two days. And as I was washing dishes with my hands managing soap and water I kept thinking of someday sailing from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean. And in the middle of my daydream at the sink my son, who was sitting on the couch watching TV, starting yelling to me “mommy, mommy, come quick.” There was a Transformers commercial on. His birthday is coming. He wanted some creepy Transformer thing for his birthday.

In my mind I was thinking “oh, I so wish you wanted organic broccoli or to give all your birthday presents to a charity.” But he’s going to be 6. So I nodded and said “mmmm,” and “hmmmmm” and then walked back to the sink. Now I was thinking about Transformers and this started me thinking about plastic packaging. 

Are you tired yet? Tired of following my train of thought? This is how I get from point A to point B in my mind. Why I have to take you along for the ride I am not sure. But this is what blogging is I suppose. So anyway, from a view of Navy Pier to plastic packaging in a few hours. And this is where something green emerges. My desire to sail to an ocean collided with an upcoming 6 year old birthday party. 

Did you know that in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a mass of floating plastic that weighs an estimated 3.5 million tons? It’s been called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Others call it an oceanic desert. Nothing lives there, the sea life near this area sees all these floating plastic things like bags and bottles and caps and Transformer packaging, and thinks that this stuff is food, so they ingest it and die. The most conservative estimates say that this floating mass is the size of Texas. Many say it is the size of 2-3 Texases. Ugh. And honestly, isn’t one Texas is enough (sorry to my Austin friends)?

This patch moves and swells and grows with the ocean currents. It’s waste that gets dropped off ships and ocean vessels, it’s waste that gets pulled off the beach and into the ocean. It’s waste from our own bottles and bags that misses the landfills. Sometimes on purpose, other times on accident. And the sun beats down on this plastic and some of it disintegrates into our water and makes us sick and other stuff just floats there, where it will stay for hundreds of years. And you don’t need to be in this particular spot to see the damage of plastic in the ocean. In 2006, the UN estimated that for every square mile of ocean there were 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it!

Plastic is killing us. It is floating into our oceans from every corner of the world. Sometimes purposefully and many times innocently. But each time, inexcusably. So what can we do?

We’ve got to ruthlessly monitor our dependence on plastic. We must be hyper-aggressive in riding our lives of simple every day things like plastic garbage bags and water bottles. We’ve got to look for products that are not packaged with a plastic clamshell or wrapper. We need to go to our stores and ask them to consider offering products with less waste. We also don’t need things like plastic cutlery or cups. We can wash the good stuff can’t we? And we also need to do our best to pick up plastic trash we see in places like parking lots. Because it is possible for that smashed up bottle in the parking lot, the one that four cars rolled over, to end up in a creek or a river after the next thunderstorm carries it from the parking lot to the stream. And from there it floats and meanders to Lake Michigan and on it goes into the Atlantic and into the ocean.

Sure, that may seem like a stretch when you are looking out over the lake from 20 stories up, but this is more than pure hyperbole. Plastic seems to live a sort of eternal life. It can make it to the ocean. And if yours does not make it, your kid’s will or your neighbor’s will or the next time you visit the ocean on vacation, the plastic cup from your Pina Colada on the lido deck will end up in the ocean. Someone’s waste will be there, swirling in an oceanic desert the size of Texas+

So Green Mamas (and green dads and students and friends), we can make a difference. As depressing as a growing mass of plastic with no place to go (because where do you put 3.5 million tons of trash – “not in my backyard, this is why I moved to the suburbs”) we can do something! Ditch the bottle, ditch the plastic bag, ditch the plastic spoon. It’s not that hard, it just takes a few tweaks and you are on your way. Give it a try this week. Try one week of freedom from three basic plastic things: 1. plastic bags, 2. plastic water bottles 3. plastic utensils. Just try it for a week and see how it goes. And then try it for another, and another, and another.