When Saving the Environment Makes
Everyday Life, A Little Worse
The environment matters because people matter. All of them. Including the ones you don’t think about.
And before anything else, I want to be clear: I care about the environment. I actually do. I recycle. I think about my footprint. I’ve taught climate change courses. I shouldn’t — and personally refuse to — be the villain in this story.
Picture this: You just got off a closing shift. It’s 10pm. You’re exhausted. You’re on foot because you live in a walkable city and don’t own a car. And you need groceries. You needed them yesterday, but life happened. You finally have time — barely — if you move. The store closes at 11.
Where’s your reusable bag?
At home. Obviously. Because you came from work. You weren’t planning this. You were just living your life.
And here’s the thing: It wasn’t catastrophic, but it wasn’t nothing — it was something a regular, just‑another‑Tuesday just didn’t need!
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People love to say “Just remember your bag!” Sure. Add it to the list. Right next to the umbrella, the bus pass, the thing that needed dropping off, the store hours, the weather, the weight of the groceries. And the fact that it’s all coming home on foot, with actual human arms. Your arms.
The plastic bag wasn’t noble. They were just at every checkout, every afterthought, every errand, no thought required. A small, tangible, and free convenience that you could find everywhere; never needing to be remembered, packed, or planned for. And I was one of the lucky ones. I lived in Salem. A walkable city with a grocery store nearby. I took pride in not needing a car. In being able to handle my day on foot, on my own terms.
And that matters more than anyone likes to admit. Especially when you consider the people who don’t live near a grocery store at all. As food deserts are real: Whole neighborhoods, often poor, often minority, where fresh and affordable food simply doesn’t exist without traveling considerable distance to find it. Without a car, that means no real food, or the wrong food — the kind that keeps the quiet cycle of poverty and illness spinning in the background of lives already stretched thin. Diabetes. Heart disease. Consequences that are happening right now, to living people, in cities and towns people don’t think about when they’re feeling good about a policy. For them, the plastic bag wasn’t a convenience. It was simply how each individual shouldered food from the one place they could reach it, back to where they lived.
And I felt a tiny version of that reality one day when my groceries spilled into a busy street on my way home in the rain. Across three lanes, I scrambled about: Blocking traffic in an absolute spectacle. Scurrying about to collect my scattered groceries, which included a can of tomato sauce making a slow, determined escape. I made it home eventually, but of course after everything was gathered, I still had to coordinate several trips without my paper bags — essentially at that point, brown shreds of mush. That was the plastic bag ban in its most honest expression. It was never a stock photo of a sea turtle, but just me, on my knees in the street and in the rain, just trying to get my food home so I could cook a meal and move on with my life.
I’m not asking for pity. I’m not claiming my life fell apart because of a bag ban. Life moved on. I have a car now. Things are easier. I’m not saying the bag ban drove me to the dealership. Life is more complicated than that.
But here’s what I do know: every time a carless Tuesday got a little harder than it needed to be — every torn bag, every rain‑soaked walk home, every moment of standing in a checkout line stressed about something that used to just… solve itself. It just added up. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it wasn’t nothing. Quietly, in the background, all this policy did was make the idea of having a car feel like relief. A trunk full of reusable bags. No more juggling groceries in the rain. No more mental math about whether paper can survive the walk home.
And I’m not alone. There are quieter voices this policy never considered. People in neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store requires a bus ride, where every bag matters because there might not be an easy backup plan. These people without cars didn’t contribute to the feel‑good moment when the ban passed. While still helping the environment, they simultaneously were quietly being given an incentive to burn more fossil fuels, to emit more CO2 into the environment; an environment at least absent of excess discarded plastic grocery bags. They didn’t get a say in losing something that genuinely made their lives a little easier, while half the store remains wrapped in plastic anyway.
The plastic bag was a small thing. I know that. But small things that remove friction from daily life matter more than we admit. If the goal is a world with fewer cars, making life without one just a little more miserable every grocery run is a strange way to get there. The environment matters because people matter. All of them. Including the ones you don’t think about.
