Laughter and Tears

Our family just returned from a week at Disney World's Animal Kingdom Lodge. Our 5-year-old's first trip to Disney -- and for her a truly magical week. For me, sitting on the balcony with her watching the sun set over a savanna of fairly wild zebras, giraffes, antelopes, and colorful exotic birds -- well, that's magic too.

A good day

Of course, the real world is always around us, even in Disney's 40-square-mile "Girdle of Melian." And I learned long ago that the Flotsam Diaries isn't something I just turn off for a week. So what does Disney look like through the lens of a Flotsam Diarist?

In a word: Schizophrenic.

Walt Disney World heavily touts its green credentials. And given that it's set off 1/3 of its acreage as protected habitat, and was an early adopter of waste-to-energy and zero-emission vehicles, it's at least made an effort to earn them. In fact, Disney holds the State of Florida's "Green Lodging Certification" for all of its resorts.

But a grain of salt is needed. Walt Disney World made Central Florida's economy, and supports it still. Florida has no state income tax. Its coffers depend on tourism, largely Disney tourism. So if the latest buzzword is "green," it behooves the State to shower Disney with green accolades.

This isn't to say that Disney isn't actually trying. It's just that the signs I saw this past week never added up to a coherent story. Take the Mara cafe right at the Lodge. They offer reusable mugs to Lodge guests, and stock paper straws, not plastic.

Both an excellent start

But everything else in the whole cafe is wrapped in single-use plastic. This is what a meal there looks like:

Would you like polymers with that?

Plastic salad, plastic fruit cup, plastic cutlery, plastic coated paper plates, plastic candies. Even the apples were individually plastic-wrapped -- only the bananas & oranges were spared. We tried to cut back, but with limited success;* the healthiest foods were the most plasticized.

And look at that reusable mug. Way too big & bulky to lug through theme parks. In our week I never saw one of them used outside of the Lodge. Instead, vendors were hawking 20oz bottles of Dasani water at $2.75 each. That translates into $17.60/gallon, whereas well-monitored & regulated tap costs about $0.01/gallon! A company that really wants to promote & protect the environment would chill & filter water fountains and encourage re-use of visitors' bottles. But what for-profit entity would turn its back on such a cash cow?

Next, there was the hot & cold with recycling. Some parts of the parks offered obvious recycling bins next to the trash cans, some didn't. Some restaurants used care with their resources (the "Lunching Pad" in Tomorrowland offered cardboard trays and well-marked signs on where to recycle those trays); most didn't. It was literally the luck of the draw. In 2010 Disney claimed that it recycled a full 60% of all the 303,000 tons of waste produced on its properties. From what I saw, I don't know how they get to that number. Perhaps, like Europe, they consider burning trash for energy to be "recycling"?

I ran into still more schizophrenia at the shops. On the one hand, Disney has done something truly impressive -- and rare. Their shopping bags are made of 100% recycled plastic.

This is uneconomic with current technology; a real money loser. But it's good PR. On the other hand, about 0% of these bags will actually get recycled again into anything, so it's dubiously-green good PR. Worse, where were the reusable totes? I don't recall seeing reusable totes at any of the stores we visited; if they were there, they weren't being promoted.

Lastly, a poignant note of self-awareness in the Animal Kingdom Lodge literature. The Lodge is a special place. They've carved a functioning savanna out of the Central Florida jungle, populated it with untamed African animals of grace & beauty, and are very protective of them. As here:

Balloons -- of any kind -- are forbidden at the Lodge. Disney knows that balloons kill animals. They know that balloons escape, and it's usually impossible to track where they've gone until it's too late.

Yet just 3 miles away, vendors sells helium balloons to young, wide-eyed visitors by the hundreds (thousands?). The great folks at Balloons Blow have found Disney balloons on their beach 130 miles away. Who really thinks there are no Disney balloons lurking in the undergrowth on Animal Kingdom property? Disney knows they're there, they have to. But kids love balloons, balloons make money, so balloons are still sold in droves.

Disney's motto is "We Create Happiness." Today, happiness equals convenience. So for all the green talk, Disney caters to a modern throwaway culture, and doesn't do much to curb that culture. It makes nods, it makes efforts. But in the end, it doesn't make waves.

Which, in a way, makes it even worse. Disney property is kept fastidiously clean. But its budget & grounds crew would be the envy of any city treasury in the world. Disney has resources that few places can boast. If people get the belief that they can generate countless tons of waste and it all magically goes "away," what lesson is brought back home? How many visitors see this one sign tucked away in the Animal Kingdom Safari, and remember it two seconds later?

When the millions of tourists leave Disney's carefully crafted fairy tale and return to their lives, wouldn't it be nice if this idea was part of the top tier of good memories & inspiration going forward?

It is a small world, after all.

---

* The water bottle wasn't my choice. Florida's groundwater runs through soluble limestone -- tap tastes minerally, and can be unpleasant, albeit safe. I'm fine with the taste, my daughter called it "Daddy's gross water."

An Interlude

Before moving ahead, there's a little housecleaning to do, stuff that I've come across that deserves a place in the diaries.

To be honest, a couple of my recent trips to Ocean Park didn't seem so enlightening at first. When you go to the beach one morning in mid-May and find:

...there's not a whole lot to add. Midnight party, cheap booze, story of mankind for at least 5,000 years.

And when you go a couple days after Memorial Day weekend and find:

...it's hardly surprising.

Still, as I've learned, sometimes those cases you'd normally dismiss are exactly the ones you should look at. Take picture number two -- there's actually something there to work with. For one thing, there's context. This isn't old trash that randomly arrived over months or years. This was as crisp and fresh as if it were dropped a day or two before, because it was. It's a time capsule of Memorial Day Weekend 2010. There are stories here: dates, families, friends, kicking off the beginning of Maine summer in traditional fashion. And leaving evidence strewn across the sand in their wake.

A nosh, or pick-me-up, or maybe part of lunch:

Maybe a burst of fresh breath, or a treat for a well-behaved kid:

A beach game, possibly bought that very morning at the local store:

My favorite - an apparently unsuccessful attempt at a love connection:

And of course, cigarette butts:

How'd each of these things get left behind? Thoughtlessness? Ignorance? Spite? Blown out of reach by a gust of wind? Picked out of a trash can by a scavenging seagull? Don't know. Maybe all of the above.

What I do know is that only two of the things I picked up would actually biodegrade over the next several months/years: the notecard, and the wooden popsicle sticks.

What about the others? Well, a couple examples:

* Cigarette filters: made of thousands of fibers of cellulose acetate (a plastic). Breakdown time, about 10 years (many of the toxins trapped in them persist in the ground much longer). Total number of cigarettes smoked in 1998: 5.6 trillion; total weight of disposed filters in 1998: 2.1 billion lbs. Number of littered cigarette butts picked up worldwide by Ocean Conservancy Clean-up Day Volunteers, one day -- September 19, 2009: 2,189,252.

* Cape Cod chip bag: made up of two layers of #5 plastic with bonding layer of #4 plastic, inner film aluminum-metalized (found this info by e-mailing Cape Cod customer service; yes, really!). Non-recyclable. Breakdown time: centuries, possibly millennia. Annual retail sales of potato chips just in the U.S.: $6 billion. At an average of $1 per bag, # of these bags thrown out each year in the U.S. alone: 6 billion.

The peanut butter bag, Kit-Kat bag, candy wrappers, game bag -- all are also made of plastics or plastic composites that will persist for centuries, or longer, if not disposed of or recycled.

Plastics are cheap to produce & convenient. The flipside is that trillions of single-use bags & containers -- and cigarette filters -- are made every year. Plastics can be made very thin & lightweight. The flipside is that they blow away down a windy beachfront very easily. Plastics are durable & impermeable and good at keeping food fresh. The flipside is that once a piece gets lost in the sand, or blown out of a car window, or dragged from a trash bin by a scavenger, it doesn't go away.

So really, if I don't have all the answers about it now, not to worry. There's plenty of time to figure it out.

My photojournalist daughter hard at work