Shelter Island Editorials: Welcome home
No place like home
Congratulations to the Shelter Island School cross country teams for finding a home course on Goat Hill.
Special kudos go to the coaches of the team, Toby Green, Bryan Gallagher and Bryan Knipfing, for revitalizing a long dormant running program on the Island last year. The Island runners immediately opened eyes with fine showings all year long, and are continuing their winning ways with the first league match against Stony Brook.
Also, the community owes a debt of gratitude to the Board of Directors of the Shelter Island Country Club — and especially Chairman Ron Lucas — for providing their site for the teams.
Ban the bags
Does Shelter Island want to walk the walk of banning plastic bags, or do we just want to keep talking “maybe,” “we’ll see” or “let’s study it.”
Southampton and East Hampton towns have both instituted a ban on the single-use plastic bag seen in grocery stores, retail outfits and on our streets, roads and fields, clogging drains and floating in our bays and creeks.
Tim Purtell, chairman of the town’s Green Options Advisory Committee, proposed giving Islanders a choice in April to shop with reusable, non-plastic bags that will either be sold or given away on the Island. But there has been no momentum behind the idea and the status quo rules.
Research has shown that 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away annually in the United States and that they don’t bio-degrade, but travel through ecosystems where they cause irreparable damage. Ospreys and other birds are harmed or killed locally, by either eating the plastic, feeding it to their chicks or using plastic bags as part of their nests. On a worldwide level, there are ocean “gyres,” or huge islands of plastic trash in the Pacific and Atlantic that have flowed from all over the planet, including Shelter Island.
Close to 200 municipalities across the country have banned the bags. A statewide law banning bags in California was slated to begin in July, but a well-organized campaign by the plastics industry secured enough petitions to put the issue to a public referendum that will take place in November 2016.
When Southampton Village instituted a ban three years ago, it was commended by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for “environmental excellence.” According to the DEC, the ordinance achieved a 98 percent compliance rate and eliminated about 110,000 plastic bags in a year.
Scientific American has reported that when Ireland banned bags more than a decade ago, there was a 95 percent reduction in plastic bag litter, and a study done in San Jose, California found that litter was reduced by 85 percent on land and 60 percent in creeks and rivers.
What are we waiting for?
