Two articles, and a linky (original) (raw)
Human Behavior, Global Warming, and the Ubiquitous Plastic Bag
Human Behavior, Global Warming, and the Ubiquitous Plastic Bag
By PETER APPLEBOME
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.
When she moved to the United States from Germany seven years ago, Angela Neigl brought with her the energy-conscious sensibilities of life in Europe. You drove small cars. You recycled every can, lid and stray bit of household waste. You brought your own reusable bags or crate to the market rather than adding to the billions of plastic bags clogging landfills, killing aquatic creatures on the bottoms of oceans and lakes, and blowing in the wind.
But, alas, there she was Friday morning, lugging her white plastic bags from the Turco’s supermarket, like everyone else, figuring there was no fighting the American way of waste.
“When I was first here, I brought my own bags to the market, but they would stuff the groceries in the plastic bags anyway. Finally, I gave up,” she said. “People are very nice here. It’s more relaxed. But the environmental thing is a little scary.”
You could have learned a lot, I guess, about the politics of global warming from the lukewarm response President Bush received last week from skeptical delegates at his conference on climate change and energy security. But in the most micro of ways, you can learn plenty any day of the week at the Turco’s or the Food Emporium in Yorktown Heights, the Super Stop & Shop in North White Plains, the A.&P. or Mrs. Green’s Natural Market in Mount Kisco or just about anywhere Americans shop in Westchester County and beyond.
And the lesson for now pretty much seems to be that no matter how piddly the effort, no matter how small the bother, well, it’s too much bother.
“I know,” said Vicki Strebel, another Turco’s shopper, when asked about bringing a reusable bag rather than taking home the throwaway plastic. “I should, but I don’t. I’m sorry. I’m too busy. Things are too crazy. If I got the bags, I’d probably forget to put them in the car.”
Plastic bags are not the biggest single issue out there, and no expert on global warming would suggest solutions rest wholly with decisions made by individual consumers. On the other hand, it is estimated that the United States goes through 100 billion plastic bags a year, which take an estimated 12 million barrels of oil to produce and last almost forever. And if individual decisions can’t solve the problem, the wrong ones can certainly compound it.
Once upon a time, the question was plastic or paper, which had its own somewhat uncertain calculus of virtue and waste. Now, it has begun to dawn on people that you don’t need either. Most supermarkets these days sell sturdy, reusable bags for 99 cents that people can use instead of plastic ones.
Except almost no one does. For lots of different reasons. They buy them and forget to use them. (Truth in advertising: Count me among the serial offenders.) They figure they can reuse the plastic bags for garbage and dog-walking duties. They find them unhygienic; we fell in love with the throwaway culture for a reason. One reusable bag can hold the contents of several plastic ones, but that’s too heavy for the elderly or the frail to carry. It’s just not what we do.
Of course, there are exceptions. Trader Joe’s, for example, offers a variety of reusable bags and has raffles for free food or gift certificates for people who bring their own bag, so people use them.
San Francisco banned petroleum-based plastic bags in large supermarkets and pharmacies, which, depending on your mind-set, was visionary leadership or the green nanny state in action.
After Ireland enacted a stiff tax on the bags in 2001, consumption fell by 90 percent.
Mrs. Neigl says when visitors come from Germany, they’re baffled by the local customs, the tolerance of such stupendous, routine waste.
But having lived here for a while she gets it: all that open space, the lustrous green acres just 35 miles from Manhattan. “I guess people aren’t so concerned about the environment because they have so much of it,” she said.
Of course, people are aware it’s not that simple. But all too often awareness changes before behavior does.
At most of the grocers I visited you can find a quite remarkable Time magazine special issue on global warming. On its cover is a heartbreaking picture of a polar bear on a lonely frozen peninsula surrounded by what was once ice and is now water.
It would be a downer for supermarket décor, but in the absence of political leaders from the White House on down hammering home the message that the free ride of endless excess is about to run off the cliff, maybe it takes that kind of image on giant posters next to the cornflakes to get people’s attention.
Plastic bags are a small part of the picture. (Sport utility vehicles, McMansions, long commutes, anyone?) But you think, if we can’t change our behavior to deal with this one, we can’t change our behavior to deal with anything.
Gay Iranians claim they exist, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Despite Denials, Gays Insist They Exist, if Quietly, in Iran
By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, Sept. 29 — When Reza, a 29-year-old Iranian, heard that his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had denied in New York that homosexuals were in Iran, he was shocked but not surprised. Reza knows the truth. He is gay.
Leaning back in his black leather desk chair at home in Tehran, he said there were, in fact, plenty of gay men and women in Iran. The difference between their lives and those of gays in Europe and North America is one of recognition and legitimacy.
“You can have a secret gay life as long you don’t become an activist and start demanding rights,” he said, speaking on the condition that his family name not be used because he feared retribution.
Reza, who shaves his head and often wears an earring in his left ear, has lived in Europe extensively. Gay life in Iran, he said, “is just complicated in the same way that it is for other groups, like workers and feminists, who don’t have many rights.”
Since Mr. Ahmadinejad uttered his words at Columbia University last Monday, discussion of homosexuality has been stifled here. Sociologists and other analysts normally willing to discuss such issues on the record with a reporter suddenly were not.
But, speaking anonymously, several said that the president had clearly been caught off guard by the question because no one at an Iranian university would have dared to ask him such a thing. They also argued that it was probably better for Iranian gays that Mr. Ahmadinejad denied their existence since that made it likelier that they would be ignored and let alone.
For a country that is said to have no homosexuality, Iran goes to great lengths to ban it. Gays are punished by lashing or death if it is proved that they have had homosexual relations. Two gay teenagers were executed in 2005 in Mashad, a northeastern city.
Fear of persecution is so strong that some gay men and lesbians have sought and received asylum in Western countries.
The Iranian Student News Agency reported in 2005 that a lesbian had been killed in prison by other inmates whom, it was alleged, she had forced to have sex with her. Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, said in May in an interview on state-run television that the police were looking for men who dressed and looked like homosexuals.
But Iran has also taken the unusual step of encouraging sex change operations for those with homosexual tendencies. While religious authorities here view homosexuality a clear sin, transsexuals are considered ill and in need of the help that such an operation can provide.
Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, a midranking cleric and university professor at Mam Khomeini University in Qum, who wrote his doctoral thesis on transsexuals in Iran, said Muslim clerics could not show leniency or forgiveness for homosexuals because the Koran explicitly labels sodomy sinful.
“There is a thick wall between homosexuals and transsexuals,” Mr. Kariminia said. “Transsexuals are sick because they are not happy with their sexuality, and so they should be treated. But homosexuality is considered a deviant act.”
But the gays interviewed said that they did not believe the wall was that thick.
Reza said he knew of gay men who had changed their sex so that they could be recognized by the government as transsexual and mingle with men more easily.
The Internet has made socializing easier for gays in the past several years, according to those interviewed, who said they had found many gay friends online.
There are dozens of gay and lesbian Web sites and chat rooms, which the authorities monitor and block. But ways around the bans are found, and new Web sites are opened. Hamjens.com invites gays to find their “Iranian dream date.”
Gays say the key to living in Iran without government interference, even as couples, is keeping a low profile. Some have been arrested for looking “too feminine” but are generally fined and released.
Tehran has several famous areas, like Karim-Khan Street, or Mellat, Laleh and Daneshjoo parks, where gays meet and where gay prostitutes seek customers. “It does not take them even 10 minutes to get picked up,” said Amir, 24, a graphic designer who is gay. “There are men from every class,” he said. “Some of them are bisexual and call it being naughty.”
But most gays are driven underground also for fear of being shunned or rejected by relatives.
Shahin, 27, a chemist, has kept his gay life secret from his parents. “I don’t want to upset them,” he said. “Maybe they will consider me sick and feel sorry for me.”
Shahin said a gay friend was disowned when his family learned of his sexual orientation. He said he had many friends who married as a cover for their gay lives.
Tags: articles, environment, gay rights, global warming, middle east
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