It's Easy Being Green: Unintended Consequences Revisited
On Mondays, Michael explores the world of environmentalism and its intersection with queer culture in the column It’s Easy Being Green, despite what Kermit says.
Technically, I’m on vacation, so this might end up being short. However, since I forgot to tell our managing editor that I wasn’t going to have anything for noon today, well, here I am putting something together at the last minute.
I wanted to spend another minute discussing the realms of responsibility for environmentalism. I mentioned earlier that corporate America could be doing more to help in the cause. A recent article in the NY Times that I can’t seem to find any longer also lamented the lack of environmental leadership from our corporate and industrial higher-ups, and even went to far as to say that the small things that people do every day to green their lives puts up a facade of progress that might actually prevent real progress from occurring.
All of this also intersects with my post last week, where I tried to acknowledge a perceived lack of forethought by the DC City Council when enacting a $0.05 tax on both paper and plastic bags under the auspices of cleaning up the woefully filthy Anacostia river. The purpose of my post was to express that there are other uses for plastic and paper bags, and that the city council might not have fully thought through the ramifications of their actions. I offered that the recent uptick in unscooped dog poop around my neighborhood could be an unintended consenquence of placing a value on the previously free plastic grocery bag.
However, I wasn’t trying to say that the tax was unnecessary. I wasn’t suggesting that these people have a right to be lazy about poop scooping. What I was trying to say is that a full policy analysis of the law might have resulted in a different outcome. Why not, perhaps, a fund for purchasing and filling poop bag dispensers that could be maintained by neighbors in highly unscooped areas? Paid for by the bag tax, residents could receive and maintain caches of poop bags to make it oh so easy for dog owners and walkers to do the right thing.
This point was missed by most of those who reacted to my post, online or via email. Many said that the bag tax wasn’t the cause of this increase in poop, but lazy dog owners were. To that I say this: If a tax on grocery bags is necessary to modify DC citizens’ behavior to prevent pollution via improperly disposed of plastic bags, why is it that we assume that those same citizens should have the wherewithal to go the extra mile and now purchase plastic bags to clean up their doggies’ stoolies. There is the right thing to do, and the easy thing to do, and humans have shown time and again that they’ll almost always choose the easy one. Why should this situation be any different? If there were easier and more effective ways to change people’s behavior, such as education, enforcement or, heck, even public humiliation, don’t you think they would have been successful by now at reducing pollution, dog poop or otherwise?
My example above, of supplying free poop bags in highly unscooped areas, is very similar to what some cities do when it comes to other types of “plastic bags.” Namely, condoms. While living in San Francisco, I never bought condoms. I didn’t need to. I’d just walk down the block and stop into a gay bar, reach into the dispenser and pull out a handful. It was important enough for the city of San Francisco to decrease the barriers to safer sex that they (or a non-profit likely receiving city funds) reduced the cost of safer sex to zero. A group in DC is working in a similar effort, and turning heads while doing it.
I’m not advocating for the total abdication of personal responsibility. I’m taking a realistic approach to problem solving, factoring unintended consequences and human behavior into the mix. Idealists do a good job of painting visions for the future, but you also need realists like me to help pave the road to that future.
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yes and yes. I fully support using some of the bag tax funds to place more waste baskets around the city and little stands with plastic bags for owners to clean up their dogs waste. I also fully support the city bag tax, not only because it will inevitably (hopefully) go to cleaning up the very polluted anacostia river, but also because inevitably it will get people to think about being environmentally conscious on some level. The less bags produced is a better thing, though not for the producers of the bags. Working first hand at the point of sale the reaction to the bag tax has been mixed though mostly in favor and I must say we have seen a quantifiable reduction in the distribution of non-reusable bags in the store. We went from 15 bales of bags a day to about 7. I imagine this will decrease further as people continue to become more accustomed to the practice. Things take time.
I must also say that dog owners are responsible for their pets and those little plastic bags are relatively inexpensive at target or rite aid. There is really no excuse for leaving your dog waste on the ground, that’s just disrespectful and lazy.
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