Dozens of times each year I have the privilege to find myself at events — theatre opening nights, art walks and receptions, office parties and private gatherings — where food and drink is served. Often enough I am acquainted with the organizers. And because of my own political and environmental leanings, almost no-one in the circles I travel in any way believes that climate change is a “hoax” or that humans are not negatively, perhaps irrevocably impacting the environment through our wanton reliance on oil, including plastics.
Nonetheless, without fail these events glutted with single-use plastics — cups, forks, knives, straws, plates, ramekins, bottled water — even though every last person there (host, staff, guest) knows that eco-friendlier single-use alternatives exist, not to mention perpetually reusable options.
While it’s puzzling enough that anyone refuses to get off the plastic tit where alternatives are readily available, when we’re talking about people who have or want children, grandchildren…. Mom, Father, Papa, Meemaw all know that we’re already suffering from the results of the status quo, and they know it’ll be worse for the young’uns — and a huge part of how much worse depends on how much we persist in our petroleum folly.
It’s a little bit of a “fuck you” to your own flesh and blood, intentionally and knowingly choosing to needlessly contribute to the ruin of the world in which they must live.
In Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, What We Can Know (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), the world of the early 22nd century limps along in the wake of global warming caused by humankind, with a rise in sea levels having claimed the likes of Glasgow, New York, and Lagos. The people of that time have a term for our early-21st-century choice to “do little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed”: the Derangement (capital D, like “the Depression”). “Such liberty and abandon. They were brilliant in their avarice […] and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain” (p. 59).
Truly, we are deranged. To dread the visitation of anthropogenic environmental disaster upon your progeny and yet to do your part to make sure that’s exactly what will come to pass….
And for what?
It’s true that some eco-friendly items are more expensive in the short run. For example, a 500-count package of 8 oz. plastic cups typically runs about 5 cents per cup, while plant-based “plastic” runs about 7 cents and paper (i.e., without a lining that renders them non-compostable) is about 10 cents per. On the other hand, wooden forks can be found for a penny less apiece than plastic, while bamboo and plastic cost roughly the same. And needless to say, it’s far cheaper to provide water for people to fill up their canteens than to give away bottles of water.
Of course, even if single-use plastic is cheaper today, we’re just kicking the costs down the road, saddling our children with far greater bills that must unavoidably come due. A penny saved today is a dollar wasted tomorrow. And while it’s impossible to quantify the financial costs of plastic dependance, a recent study published in Nature extrapolates available data to posit that “emissions associated with the production and use of […] products produced by […] large oil and gas companies” had cost us on the order of $10 trillion as of 2020…and are projected to cost something like an additional $390 trillion by 2100.
But maybe it’s less about money than habit, convenience, and a sense of entitlement. Most of us didn’t grow up environmentally conscious: we were just kids who consumed without thinking about consequences, just like our parents did, a societal norm that was unquestioned in the prevailing zeitgeist. And to be sure, it was a lot nicer to live in ignorance. Who wants to think about fucking product packaging? Who wants to compost? Who wants to take responsibility for my environmental footprint? What a pain in the ass!
But a lot of this shit just ain’t that hard. At Burning Man, they call it Radical Self-Reliance. Going somewhere you might need a cup? Bring a fucking cup. You might want water? Bring some fucking water. Events where bottled water is given away foster bad behavior [see You might want water? Bring some fucking water] — and venues that vend bottled water are literally choosing to profit off keeping that behavior entrenched. If tomorrow everybody stopped giving out or selling bottled water, you know what would happen? Most people would bring canteens, and those who didn’t who got thirsty would go to the restroom sink and cup their hands under the faucet, which wouldn’t be the most satisfying hydrating experience, and so next time they’d bring a canteen.
An argument I’ve heard is: “Hey, I’m just one little person/org/business, what difference do I make, so get off my back.” Sure, and no one vote more or less will sway the election — so why vote, right? It’s the aggregate, dummy. Oil/plastic usage comes down to the cumulative effect of individual decisions made every day. And from the Big Oil exec to the piddling li’l consumer, you shouldn’t contribute to screwing (y)our children over where your contribution to said screwing is easily obviated. Make decisions based on their rightness, not on the magnitude of their impact. If you believe our oil and plastic dependence is wrong, any avoidable contribution to that dependence is clearly wrong. A wrong is a wrong regardless of scale.
As far as it goes, my argumentative friends aren’t wrong: in the Big Picture, this is some lowercase-S small-scale shit. And am I being a bit self-righteous? Well, it’s hard not to be when there’s no argument to be made in favor of persisting in the bad behavior, and when we’re talking about the easy stuff, the obvious stuff, stuff you can do with almost literally no extra effort, just a decision not to keep making the same choice simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it or because you can look around and say, “Well, everybody else is doing it, so it must be okay.”
Yes, we can talk about major corporations and conglomerates and lax government regulations and so forth. But today’s sermon is about what you can do right now. That’s where it’s got to start for everyone.
To be fair, “choice” is not always straightforward. Buying an electric vehicle and retrofitting your house so it’s off the grid may not be pragmatic options for you. But there is nobody who cannot opt for bamboo/wooden utensils over plastic, cardboard/compostable cups over plastic. Bottled water is great for earthquake preparedness and disaster relief, but in everyday life nobody should buy bottled water when they can bring a canteen; nobody should be selling or giving away bottled water instead of providing boxed water or simply a place to fill up. These are the easy things.
In many respects, the most significant way we influence kids is through our behavior. If your parents modeled ignorant, selfish, destructive, myopic behavior for you, it’s nearly certain that you followed their lead until and unless you unlearned their bad lessons (which maybe you still haven’t done? See? Modeling!). So the more our kids watch us make the world worse for them, the more they’ll make the world still worse for themselves and their offspring. Not just fucking the kids, but teaching them to fuck themselves.
This includes fucking up their bodies, like we’re fucking up ours, but more so. As noted in a 2025 Stanford Medicine overview of the current scientific data related to microplastics and health, “particles have been found in multiple organs and tissues, including the brain, testicles, heart, stomach, lymph nodes and placenta,” as well as in “urine, breastmilk, semen and meconium, which is a newborn’s first stool.” And while at present “[a]n estimated 10 to 40 million metric tons of these particles are released into the environment every year, […] if current trends continue, that number could double by 2040.”
“All of us need to stop using plastic as much as we can to protect our health, especially single-use plastics,” says a leading Stanford researcher. “[…] Individuals need to recognize that we have a lot of agency, and we can make choices that actually do change things.”
Some choices are easy, both practically and morally. It seems like that should go double when we’re talking about what’s best for our children.
So what the fuck are we doing, my friends?