Naive environmental blogging

All this talk about plastic grocery bags has me thinking once again about the issue. I'm coming around overall to the idea of totes, not just generally but personally - I mostly use them for groceries now, and still have quite the backlog of plastic ones. But if the plastic bags were to disappear entirely, I'd probably waste more plastic, since I sort of have to take the non-recycling (i.e. food) trash out daily (to avoid pests/bad smells in my studio apt), and store-bought bags would likely be more than necessary for the job. But it's not about me! It's about The American Consumer, who's throwing out plastic bags just for the heck of it, perhaps even buying plastic bags for the express purpose of doing so. Whatever it is, I'd prefer a 'refund' for bringing your own bag (as at Whole Foods) to a 'tax' on not doing so, even if the amounts add up to the same.

One thing I'm struck by is that if we're talking about pollution as it relates to grocery shopping, there's a far more visible angle, if not in Manhattan: cars. A switch from driving to walking would certainly be more difficult to institute than tossing a rolled up tote in one's purse, but if obesity's also an issue, two birds and all that.

Confession: I secretly envy people who do their grocery shopping by car. Because of this, I must condemn driving to the store. It helps me remember the upside of all this shlepping.

My (limited) sense of why people drive to the store is that it can be about living ten miles from the nearest one, without decent public transportation between, but that often enough, it's a matter of convenience. Not only does it speed up each trip, but it means, I would think, being able to buy enough for the week in one go, depending the size of your household. That, and driving gives you more choice in where you shop. There might be a supermarket within walking distance, but not a cheap/expensive/hippie one, and that's the one you want. When I lived next to the Park Slope Food Co-op, I'd always see people loading their nicely non-plastic-bagged groceries into their cars. The Co-op takes pride in its clientele extending beyond Park Slope yuppies ("Our members come from all over Brooklyn as well as the rest of New York - some even come from out of state!"), but what this adds up to is a whole lot of driving to the grocery store. Some are no doubt driving from areas without good grocery options, but all? Is The Cause worth the driving?

In other words, there's a spectrum of how necessary it is for people in different situations to drive to get groceries. So before anyone gets all, 'But you live in New York, you know nothing about how people shop elsewhere,' allow me to point out that I admitted as much in the paragraph above. A spectrum. If those who could shop locally began doing so, this would (would it? am I making this up?) potentially matter more than the plastic-bag issue. (Not that it's either-or, but the smug legions placing canvas totes into their minivans in front of the Co-op keep coming to mind.) And... once people began frequenting stores near them, those stores would improve,* and perhaps new ones would open. And we'd all get our exercise in. Yay! Of course, this would also mean distribution to stores would be less efficient - local or not, stuff's got to be getting trucked in from somewhere. In other words, I really don't know what I'm talking about, but if I have to carry and carry and carry some more, surely we must all.

*This is a variant of my argument, years ago, that if UChicago stopped forcing students in dorms to have meal plans, or perhaps eliminated dining halls altogether, everyone would have to shop at the then-lousy supermarket, thus improving the supermarket, and thus teaching students some Basic Life Skills (budgeting, cooking, shopping efficiently) that the dining hall system is designed to protect the undergrads from acquiring.