“Council to weigh plastic bag options,” said the headline over Sunday’s front-pager by Tom Sakash, who must be wondering what he did in a previous life to be required to cover the comings and goings of the Davis City Council in his current incarnation.

“As requested,” Sakash’s story begins, “city public works staff will hand the City Council on Tuesday a menu of potential ordinances that could curb or entirely eliminate the distribution of single-use carry-out plastic bags in Davis.”

If it’s a take-out menu the council will be presented, rest assured the food won’t be carried home by council members in a plastic bag.

All this ordinance nonsense, of course, is based on the myth that the streets, gutters, sidewalks and beautiful urban forest of Davis are awash in runaway plastic bags with no purpose and no conscience.

In the front-page color photo that accompanies Sakash’s story, we see a twig of a leafless tree almost entirely covered by what the caption notes is “A discarded plastic shopping bag” that “is caught in the branches of a young tree.”

Being on a first-name basis with most young trees in Davis, I have to admit I didn’t recognize this poor fella that was being swallowed up by what was either a plastic bag or maybe Grandma McGillicuddy’s pure white underwear.

Also, having never actually encountered a plastic bag stuck in a tree on my many walks over the years through out city’s streets and neighborhoods, I found it curious that the caption did not identify where exactly in town this poor naked tree resides.

Looking closer at the fine print immediately under the photo but above the caption, I noted the photo credit went to an online outfit called “CanStock Photo.”
So, I was left to surmise, this was most likely not a Davis plastic bag since the spindly embarrassment of a tree it was attached to was most certainly not a Davis tree. Truly, Tree Davis would never stand for such a specimen in our town.

So here’s the deal. At The Davis Enterprise we have a crack, award-winning photography staff whose time is precious. Rather than sending all members of the staff out on a futile, all-day attempt to find an actual Davis plastic bag stuck in an actual Davis tree, it makes much more sense to run a stock photo of what a generic plastic bag stuck in a generic young tree might look like, should our readers be in need of visual assistance.

Now, if this were truly a major problem requiring thousands and thousands of dollars of staff time, years of study by the Natural Resources Commission and months of debate by the Davis City Council, you’d think it would be a simple task for a trained photographer to find at least a slight bit of evidence of the crime somewhere within the Davis city limits. Put simply, no such evidence exists.

CanStock Photo, which is a service virtually every newspaper in America avails itself of, refers to the tree in this specific picture as a “sapling,” which is exactly what we all are for falling for this nonsense about a plastic bag problem in the first place.

Davis is already the most environmentally conscious small city in America, populated as we are by people who care about the look and feel of our streets and sidewalks and greenbelts and ball fields and lawns and yes, even saplings. We do not have plastic bags blowing in the wind or getting hung up on the branches of our several hundred thousand trees.

If an occasional errant bag skips through town, it most likely originated in the county seat to our north, not from a local merchant.
The proposed ordinance the council will debate tonight is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem.

— Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

Comments

comments