(Panelists, above, from left: Laura Martin, Judith Enck, Rosemary Wessel, Mehernosh Kahn and Sage Bohl)
PITTSFIELD, Mass. -- A new national project seeking to curb the explosive growth of polluting consumer plastics in the oceans, streams and landfills of the United States has launched in the region and the founder, a former Obama-administration Envirionmental Protection Administration (EPA) official, spoke about it on Saturday at a Pittsfield panel discussion.
"We can't recycle our way out of this problem," warned Judith Enck, former EPA Region 2 administrator and founder of Beyond Plastics.org, a nonprofit that is currently housed in space donated by Bennington College. "It's about personal responsibility." Enck is a senior fellow at the college's Center for Advanced Political Action who lives in rural New York just over the Vermont border from Bennington. Besides delivering a keynot speach at the Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, Enck joined a panel moderated by Williams College Prof. Laura J. Martin. Personal responsibility, Enck said, means figuring out how to reduce personal use of plastic in consumer packaging and goods, she said.
The Aug. 17 free panel discussion, "Environmental Challenges in the Berkshires", dovetailed with Barrington Stage's original musical-comedy production, "Fall Springs," (additional review) which deals with natural-gas hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" -- a rapidly growing method for extracting fossil fuel from deep rock formations which only became technology feasible in the last decade. The theater show runs through Aug. 31.
The panel -- hosted by Barrington Stage -- focused on a key point made by Enck -- as the use of fossil fuels in transportation and electric-power generation plateaus or declines because of hybrid cars and renewalble energy sources, the oil-and-gas industry is trying to ramp up the use of plastics as an expanding market. "The fossil-fuel industry is starting to panic and they are turning to plastics as their next growth area," said Enck. She said they are particularly seeking to convince young consumers of the alleged benefits of plastic over less packaging or natural packaging, she said. "The more you read about it the more overwhelming it gets."
One focus of Beyond Plastics, is to encourage the banning of the three biggest sources of single-use plastic pollution all at once. They are plastic bags, white polystyrene packaging and fast-food containers, and plastics straws. She calls this the "plastic trifecta." The plastics problem is not solveable with changes in consumer choice alone, says Enck. "That is helpful but not nearly enough," she says. "We need to enact laws to reduce plastic packaging, such as the Plastic Trifecta which was recently adopted by the state of Vermont."
Beyond Plastics (logo to right) received initial funding from the Park Foundation of Ithaca, N.Y., through Bennington College.
Increasing plastic use will be a disaster for the earth and everything that lives on it, Enck said. Each year, she said, some 3 million tons of non-biodegradable plastic is ending up in the world's oceans. Even though a plastic bottle, for example, may by wave action be turned into "microplastics," those tiny pieces are ingested by birds, fish and sea mammals, causing death or threatening humans who eat fish. In her slide deck before the Barrington Stage audience of perhaps 100 people, Enck projected a future in which there is more plastic in the oceans than fish, by weight. That's because only plastics labeled 1, 2 or 5 are truely recyclable. Even green plastics bags obtained at stores and touted as "biodegradable" are only decomposed at limited and special recycling centers, she said, and don't degrade if just buried in a landfill.
The idea that youth might buy into industry arguments for more plastic use was seen as unlikely by Sage Bohl, a recent Mount Greylock Regional High School graduate now enrolled at Wheaton College (class of 2023). Bohl, also on the Barrington Stage panel, was a member of Greylock's Youth Environmental Squad (YES), and became engaged only in her senior year at the urging of friends.
Citizen efforts to delay or defeat gas-industry initiatives to build new pipelines and compressor stations in Massachusetts were chronicled by panelist Rosemary Wessel, of Cummington, program director of the activist group No Fracked Gas in Mass., a program of the non-profit, Pittsfield-based Berkshire Environmental Action Team. Wssel, who spent much of her career as a graphic designer before devoting time to fracking activism, said the oil-and-gas industry "is really starting to get aggressive" about developing deep-shale formations in Pennsylvania and upstate New York for gas production. She said she worries there are also smaller deposits in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts woulc come some day be targetted for extraction.
Wessel said more than one thousand people submitted papers to courts hearing pipeline cases in Massachsusetts to obtain legal status as "intervenors" in the cases, requiring the pipeline proponents to send legal notices to each one every time they filed arguments in court or scheduled hearings. She said typically such matters might have a few dozen intervenors. She characterized this as the sort of "non-violent direct action" which can have impact on the regulatory process. Yet the big challenge to the spread of citizen action is our modern economic structure which leaves parents and especially young adults struggling economically, working multiple jobs, and therefore unable to exercise their right to be active in public policy.
"People need to struggle just to get by," she told the Barrington Stage audience.
Martin, the Williams College Center for Environmental Studies professor, asked the audience to think about the power of humor -- such as the current "Fall Springs" production, to affect public policy. Both Martin and Enck spoke about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) contamination of water supplies near Bennington, in Hoosick Falls and Petersburgh, N.Y., as illustrating the challenge of mitigating the envirionmental effects of production for Teflon, Gore-Tex and other plastic-base materials. Martin began her undergraduate work as a ecologist at Brown University but has focused her Ph.D. and post-doctoral work (at Harvard) on the history of environmental regulation.
Also joining the panel was Mehernosh P. Khan, M.D., a Berkshire Medical Center family doctor practicing in Lenox. He described a 25-year-career in the Pittsburgh, Penn., area which came to an end in part because his family became concerned about the health-effects of fracking development to the north and east of the city. He pointed to a BMC executive he said he saw in the audience, and asked, rhetorically, what the health system was doing to curb plastic consumption where possible, such as in a cafeteria where most the food served is in plastic.
Recent Comments