Suffolk Closeup: The right side of history

Hooray for the Towns of Southampton and East Hampton for instituting bans on those single-use plastic bags that litter our landscape and impact on wildlife.

Birds get entangled in the bags and sea life can die from ingesting them, mistaking them for food. Now it’s high time for Suffolk County — indeed, all of Long Island as well as New York State — to do the right thing.

For more than three years, there have been bans in the villages of Southampton (the first municipality in the state to enact one) and East Hampton. Other municipalities on the East End and in western Suffolk are mulling actions, too, including Shelter Island.

The Southampton Town ban will take effect on, appropriately, Earth Day, April 22, 2015. The East Hampton ban will kick in five months later.

“I’m hoping the other towns that have taken a wait-and-see approach to this will jump on board now,” said Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst. She believes a regional approach is important. “I think everyone agrees that eliminating single-use plastic bags as a form of litter is an excellent goal, and working together to enact legislation on a regional basis provides an opportunity to achieve the greatest results and send a coordinated and non-partisan message about the measure’s environmental significance, while ensuring a level playing field for East End businesses.”

Said East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell: “I think East Hampton and Southampton are making a statement that single-use plastic bags are bad for the environment, and at the same time I call on the county and the state to ban single-use plastic bags.”

The two towns, and earlier the villages, moved in the face of intense plastic industry lobbying and pressure applied in Suffolk County, the state and across the nation.

As that line to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1967 movie, “The Graduate,” went: “Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”

What has that future turned out to be? Mess.

The award-winning 2013 documentary, “Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” exposes one big part of the mess: a vortex of plastic debris, covering an area as large as Texas, floating in the Pacific Ocean.

But the plastics industry, with its vested interest, keeps pushing the product aggressively.

Most recently on the county level, resolutions authored by then Legislator Vivian Viloria-Fisher of East Setauket aimed at single-use plastic bags got nowhere after intense industry lobbying.

Meanwhile, despite Ms. Throne-Holst’s hope for a “non-partisan message” in Southampton and East Hampton, politics played a role. In Southampton, the town board vote was 3-2 with Ms. Throne-Holst and Brad Bender, Independence Party members who run with Democratic Party cross-endorsement, voting for the ban. The board’s two Republican members balloted against it. GOPer Christine Scalera said, “I believe the ban to be overreaching government.”

Councilman Bender spoke about the plastic bags littering his home hamlet of Northampton. You don’t have to go to the Pacific to see a mess plastics have made, he said. “We can help clean up this community by banning these. I’ve never seen a paper bag stuck in a tree, but I’ve seen plenty of plastic bags stuck in trees,” he added. “This also keeps them out of the stomachs of wildlife and fish.”

In East Hampton the vote was 4-1 with that town board’s lone Republican, Fred Overton, balloting against.

If the GOP thinks there’s an advantage in opposing a ban on the single-use plastic bags, it should think again. The initiative — here and elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world — largely involves strong grassroots action.

“The whole movement is really a bottom-up movement,” said Dieter von Lehsten, co-chair of Sustainable Southampton Green Advisory Committee, at an East Hampton Town Board meeting as he supported joint action. It “will give a big impetus for Suffolk County” and possibly New York City, too, he added.

Considering the positions being taken by the new heavily GOP-dominated Congress in its first weeks, being staunchly anti-environmental might be what the party wants.

If so, watch the pendulum swing back again.