Meditation on a Feather

 A single wispy white feather, backlit by the morning sun, caught on a slender stem near the ground. A few crystals of frost glitter along the threadlike barbs. It's a fairly large feather, so I assume from a fairly large bird. Maybe it fluttered to the ground from one of the geese winging overhead?

My brain catalogs it as a down feather, the fluffy white feathers close to a bird's body, under the smooth outer feathers, that help insulate it from the cold outside. A bit of research with the Cornell Lab's Bird Academy introduces me to the seven different types of feathers: wing (or remiges), tail (rectrices), contour, semiplume, down, filoplume, and bristle. 

The first three--wing, tail, and contour feathers--are those we are most familiar with, the feathers we see immediately when looking at a bird. They are used for locomotion and protection from the elements, as well as communication (for example, courtship and territorial displays). They have a central shaft, or rachis, flanked by a series of barbs that are zipped together by interlocking barbules and tiny hooks called barbicels.

Down and semiplume feathers trap heat below the surface feathers; these feathers lack the hooked barbicels so they don't zip together as neatly as the surface feathers. Semiplume feathers have a central rachis, which is reduced or absent in a down feather--so my feather here appears to be a semiplume. 

The other two types of feathers are not easily visible: filoplumes, whiskery feathers with a tuft of barbs at the end, thought to help birds feel or sense what is going on feather-wise (since the feathers themselves don't have nerves in them), and bristles, basically just a threadlike rachis without barbs along most of its length, often found near a bird's eyes or beaks and also thought to provide additional sensory information.

Watching birds preen, carefully drawing a long feather through its bill to zip the barbs together cleanly, I marvel at the efficient and tidy bodily covering, so different from my own lackluster human coat, with its messy mop of hair that snarls and curls and tangles, above a pale and sensitive pink skin that requires a different protective coating for essentially every different condition: winter coats, rain coats, jackets, sweaters, sunscreens, hats.

How convenient it would be to have just a single covering for every condition and every season! When cold, puff up and allow those downy feathers to capture heat close to your body. Rain runs off the sleek, overlapping arrangement of feathers, while feathers shade the tender skin beneath from the sun's damaging rays. I imagine the meditative calm of arranging each feather so it lies perfectly in place, or maybe the irritating discomfort of a broken or misaligned feather. 

I wonder what the birds think, seeing us in our ever-changing array of adornments through the seasons, unable to face the elements without all these accoutrements, unable to compare to the marvel of a single feather. 

Sources/Additional Reading:

• Bird Academy: Everything Your Need to Know About Feathers
• Bird Basics: Six different feather types explained 
•  The Most Mysterious Feather: Filoplumes
  

There Is No "Away"

"Just throw it away."

What a convenient phrase we use for disposing of our unwanted stuff. Don't need it anymore? Just throw it away. That plastic packaging for the item you just bought? Throw it away. Where is this mythical "away" to which things are being thrown? 

For many beverage containers, unfortunately, "away" is along streets and medians, where they eventually wash into the Greenway or through other stormwater systems ending up in our rivers and streams. Spend an hour picking up trash along McCollister Blvd, for example, and make note of all the cans and bottle that have recently been heaved out of vehicles. Busch Light is a favorite along this stretch, as well as a somewhat vile-looking "performance energy drink" called A SHOC. Within the Greenway itself, huge amounts of flimsy plastic water bottles and fast-food beverage cups collect near the stormwater outlets from surrounding neighborhoods.

It's so easy, you see, to simply toss these beverage containers when finished with them. They are often consumed on-the-go, away from home recycle bins or convenient public receptacles. And this is not a new problem: in fact, over 40 years ago Iowa's legislators enacted a Bottle Bill that would help prevent exactly this sort of littering. But it doesn't seem to be working, does it? 

Thus some legislators, backed by an extremely insistent grocery industry, feel it should be scrapped entirely. They argue that recycling is so widespread and convenient that a Bottle Bill is unnecessary. They argue that it places an undue burden on those grocery stores that have to accept the returns. They argue it is a hassle for consumers to properly dispose of the containers. 

But clearly--the first point is obviously untrue. If someone can fill a trash bag full of these containers every month along just one mile of one road, these containers are not being recycled as they should be, even with readily-available programs in our city. Imagine if each of those cans and bottles were worth a quarter--an amount that would be in line with the original nickel forty years ago--would people be so eager to toss them out of their car?

Grocery stores have eagerly seized upon the pandemic as an excuse to scrap their bottle return systems whenever possible. But the Bottle Bill was an early and elegant means of putting responsibility for trash produced back onto the industries that produced it: Distributors and grocers make money selling this trash, while leaving municipal waste systems to clean it up. The deposit system ensures that the trash is collected and recycled by the very industries that produced it. 

We need to move beyond a one-way stream from production to use  to trash, into a modern circular system where the entire lifecycle of a product and its packaging is considered at the time of production, and all costs included in the purchase price. The Bottle Bill is an effective way to internalize the costs of these single-use containers and ensure they are collected and recycled properly.

In fact, Iowa manages to recycle 65% of its deposit containers, twice as much as in states without deposits(1). But far less than the nearly 90% attained by Michigan, with its 10-cent deposits. We can do better.

By no means should we be considering scrapping the Bottle Bill entirely; rather the entire country should enact a National Bottle Bill. It should include a deposit of at least 10 cents, and it should cover not only the limited products currently covered (beer, wine, liquor, soda, etc.) but should be expanded to include the materials that have exploded in usage since the Bottle Bill was first passed in Iowa--particularly water and sports drink bottles. 

A national Bottle Bill is included as part of the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2021, an important piece of legislation that tackles many of the plastic waste problems that our country is facing that are only growing worse with time. You can encourage your members of Congress to support it. 

There simply is no "away" when it comes to our trash.

Resources/Additional Sources:

1. The Ten Cent Incentive to Recycle (PDF)
   
2. Sierra Club Beverage Container Guidance (PDF)