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These days, it's hard to find the real thing
By Carl Heintze
Last week, I went out to sit on the lawn in an Adirondack chair. You remember Adirondack chairs. They're those immensely comfortable, slanted, slat-back wooden chairs which grace many a verandah in the eastern United States. They're just the thing in which to lounge on a summer's evening.
So I did, only to receive a rude shock. The chair, which I had assumed to be traditional wood, wasn't. Instead it was green plastic. No less comfortable, to be sure, but still not the old wooden chair I remember.
Sitting there, it came to me that the plastic chair was like so much of our modern world: man-made substances like plastic have come to replace the real things of nature. It's no longer real, it's man-made.
My shock was reinforced upon reading the most recent edition of Smithsonian magazine. It informs me that turquoise jewelry, particularly turquoise Indian jewelry, is no longer certain to be made of blue stones.
In all likelihood, the "stones" may be plastic, blue plastic so cleverly made that even Indian jewelry experts are sometimes fooled. They can't tell the real thing from the fake either.
All this is somehow deeply disturbing. Plastics, even as the television commercial says, have remade the world. Plastics are particularly rampant in children's toys. No more Erector sets, once made of real steel, no more cast-iron automobile models and electric trains. Much or all of them are plastic.
I suppose one should think of plastics with the same fervor as was displayed by Benjamin's counselor in the movie The Graduate:: "I've got one word of advice for you, Benjy--plastics."
Plastics, mostly the product of combining petroleum by-products, have come to rule the world.
Why? Well, one reason is that it is so easy to form into objects. Plastics, like cement, can be shaped in almost any configuration, from computer parts to automobiles. Another is cost. On the whole, plastics appear cheaper than the real thing.
Coincidentally, the substitution of plastic stuff for real stuff sometimes appears to benefit conservation. Using plastic instead of wood in Adirondack chairs saves trees--and in all likelihood the chair itself is made of recycled plastic.
Plastic also lasts longer. Indeed, it last too long. Most plastic is difficult to destroy. Doing so usually requires the expenditure of as much or more energy than it took to make it in the first place.
You can burn plastic, you can break it up, you can even recycle it with some difficulty.(Saturn automobiles, for instance, are reputed to be made of recycled pieces of old Saturns with flaws.)
But, generally speaking, plastic hangs around unrepentant for a long time. I can think of no better example of this than the beaches of my favorite Hawaiian isle, Kauai.
A decade ago most were pristine, nothing much but sand, broken coral and shells. Not any more. Garden Isle beaches now are, alas, like beaches everywhere, littered with broken plastic bottles, plastic caps from broken bottles, bits and pieces of plastic impossible to identify.
Plastic is becoming the predominant flotsam. But Hawaii's not the worst example. In the Atlantic, so I am told, minute bits of plastic are everywhere and often turn up in fish. Presumably, from the fish they get into the food chain and so into us.
We're becoming plastic, too, little by little. Some of our plastic world is good, I suppose. I have friends who would not be alive today without the artificial plastic heart valves which keep them going. And clearly, had we used natural materials in our automobiles for the last 20 years, they would have become even more expensive than they are.
But I remain uncomfortable in the plastic world. Somehow it doesn't seem right to try to fool Mother Nature. Somehow it seems we have become prisoners of our own technology; we have come to accept not only the use of plastics for everything, but their residual threat to our natural world. At the same time, we're the demons in this plasticizing of America. As the late cartoonist Walt Kelly used to say in Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Obviously, the enemy is us. We accept an artificial world, even as we long for the natural one of old. Even as I sit in my artificial Adirondack chair and contemplate the real sun setting.
The plastic chair, alas, is just as comfortable as the wooden one of old. And it never has any splinters.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
