Amazing!  China has banned the manufacture, sale, AND use of plastic bags.  The Chinese people use some 3 billion plastic bags DAILY.  China refines 37 MILLION BARRELS of crude oil EVERY YEAR just to manufacture plastics used in packaging.

China’s cabinet said their decision to ban plastic bags was necessary because the production and use of bags wastes valuable resources and creates a huge litter problem (some of China’s garbage dumps are 5 stories high!).

In the last 30 years I've never hiked a trail in the U.S. without finding some plastic bags - usually food packages - left by careless hikers.   Open the bag, eat, throw the bag on the ground.  Mindless behavior.  

Signs are posted.  Warnings given.  “Don’t feed the animals.”  People still feed the animals anyway.  Unthinking, unfeeling, immature, stupid, what else is there to say.  Over 200 years ago a man named Thomas Malthus warned that man would reproduce exponentially.  And that population would become the major player in world affairs.  This warning in the midst of the ecstasy of the American Revolution.  His point, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”  Everywhere on earth today, even in the wealthiest countries, people are going hungry; people are homeless; people are eating cat food; people are unable to cope with modern life.  And the reason is clear: as populations grow, needs grow, the earth is further stressed out, and people are dying like flies (albeit without much notoriety).

Malthus introduced the concept of birth control by suggesting that people have less sex.  The obvious reaction to that suggestion was to make him into a Scrooge-like character - and of course willfully ignore him.   Poets like Wordsworth and Blake spoke out against the machine in the garden.  The consequences of over-population would  produce vast mountains of waste.  Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and many others wrote about the destruction of nature - of man’s aggressiveness (Freud's "self-destructive instinct") toward his fellow, toward nature, gone mad - of the complete lack of awareness regarding the importance of the environment to man's existence here at all.  Emerson tried repeatedly in his writing and lectures to get to people to understand their own need of nature.  To destroy nature was to destroy oneself.  Madness!

Yet here we are in 2008 and people race to the remaining wild places and willfully pollute them.  One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, who began the process of getting land protected by law with the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico in 1924 said, “When I submit these thoughts to a printing press, I am helping cut down the woods.  When I pour cream in my coffee, I am helping to drain a marsh for cows to graze, and to exterminate the birds of Brazil.  When I go birding or hunting in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field, and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber.  Nay more: when I father more than two children I am creating an insatiable need for more printing presses, more cows, more coffee, and more flowers will either be killed, or...evicted from their several environments.”

Some of this writing helped start the conservation movement in America and that movement has spread.  Our contribution is the Packit Toilet kit and the Digger.   With the Digger you can bury your own poop and keep it away from the creatures that live in the wild.  Pack out EVERYTHING plastic!  Come to terms with what’s happening out there.  As you hike along the trail if you see a plastic bag - pick it up and pack it out.  Those who do this tell us it produces a wonderful feeling.  Don’t worry about diseases on the plastic or the AIDs virus or “germs."  Just be a good steward and think about the OTHERS that share this planet with us and in many ways make it even possible to exist here - the next time you throw on a backpack and head out into the trees.