Out once again for my daily constitutional and communion–another long morning walk–I blow slowly down this country road like the breeze in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, like so many other wisps of Earth’s breath from time immemorial, like a ghost haunting some sacred ground.

With my every organ of sensory input wide open and on full alert, it is pretty much impossible for my eyes to miss the decidedly unnatural clutter of colorlessness that, like the natural things surrounding and hiding it (as if with embarrassment, perhaps), glistens with early morning dew in the roadside ditch: a plastic bag.

And within and scattered around that bag, like a litter of critters not completely born quite yet, a plastic soda bottle, a few empty plastic food wrappers, a Styrofoam cup with plastic lid and straw, a plastic spork….

Did some mad biochemist create and sow seeds of plastic that have finally sprouted? Pondering this, my eyes sort of glaze over as my mind’s eye starts to ramble off and my body rambles on via autopilot. And I hear in my mind’s ear, drowning out the birdsong and the breeze, a voice intoning ominously that America (and so by default the world) is addicted to oil.

And suddenly, as the country road loses its hard, firm reality, a vast plain of plastic stretches out before me…like terra firma comprised of solidified oil instead of soil, rocks, and stones. And like Dante stepping on the faces of the submerged dead in Hell, I tread upon countless plastic items that go along with daily human existence. Not just plastic soda bottles and sporks. Not just plastic bags and Saran Wrap.

Read more of this story »