Wednesday, April 22, was Earth Day, a decades-old celebration of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle marked by festivals devoted to composting and solar panels. It’s a perennial reminder of the small sacrifices we can make to reduce our personal impact on the environment.
But on the day after and for years to come, we continue to be faced with threats of environmental catastrophes, some of which are as much a consequence of decisions made by the people we elect as they are of our own actions.
If you stroll along St. Pete Beach on a weekend day, just seaward of a string of popular beach bars, you’ll probably see an infuriating amount of plastic cups, straws and other debris left behind by careless beachgoers.
Local green nonprofits like St. Pete-based Chart 411 periodically schedule beach cleanups, but by the time such efforts hit the beach, the tide has already swallowed tons of plastic, which can be detrimental to marine life.
“When they do autopsies on sea turtles, one of the most common things they find are balloons and plastic bottle caps and pieces of straw,” said Howard Johnston, cofounder of Chart 411. “One of the reasons is, turtles eat instinctively … they go through seagrass, and anything that looks like food, they ingest.”
Also dangerous, he said, are balloon releases and ceremonies involving floating luminaries.
“It sounds a little trivial to be talking about balloon releases and stuff like that, but they are really a death sentence for some endangered animals,” Johnston said.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2015.
