Battle of the Bag IT'S NOT ALWAYS easy to see when a relationship is in trouble. People have been known to cut down their forests, exhaust their local water supplies, and deplete their soil, failing to recognize or understand the natural foundation for human existence. Plastics seemed to promise a new foundation for human life: food comes sliced and diced and packaged in plastic; sports are played on grass made of plastic; homes are wrapped in plastic; and every year brings new time-saving devices and electronic miracles encased in plastic. Now we've begun to acknowledge there is trouble in this relationship, perhaps deep trouble. But we've been together so long it's difficult to imagine a different world, one in which people determined the fate of plastic, rather than the other way around. And yet a small but determined group have begun to imagine that world. They've realized that the best way to prevent the oceans from choking on plastic debris is to better manage that debris on land, which means, among other things, curbing human reliance on throwaways.
