THE LAST STRAW: How a Celebrity Sea Turtle May Just Be the Last Straw... by heidi siegmund cuda (originally published in part Nov. 2015)
Philosopher Alain de Botton, author of “Is the News Driving Us Crazy,” said it best when he told a packed crowd at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles: “We need better celebrities.”
The great Swiss-born thinker doesn’t eschew celebrity culture; he just thinks the anointed ones are a pretty shoddy lot.
Enter a Costa Rican olive ridley sea turtle, now seen by about eight million people on YouTube, a trail of blood draining from its nose as two researchers ultimately extract a four-inch plastic straw from its nostril.
And just as with the tragic disfigurement-by-milk-jug ring of the turtle known as Mae West, a star is born to help shed light on the war to end the use of single use plastic straws.
“Is it a straw? Don’t tell me it’s a frickin straw,” can be heard the voice of Christine Figgener, a sea turtle expert at Texas A & M University in College Station, who shot the painful video and whose German-accented narration you hear throughout the filming.
“We have been talking about straws for years, but seeing that video as horrible as it was, this is what we needed to wake people up,” said Figgener in an interview. “We are grown ups; we can drink out of a bottle.”
She said after the incidence, she spent two hours driving back from the Costa Rican coast in silence.
“We had no words. We just knew we had to get the video out to the public.”
She said they were out in the middle of nowhere and ended up having to leach WiFi from a restaurant, taking eight hours to get the video uploaded to YouTube and in the truest sense, it went viral.
“It was two weeks of craziness out in the jungle,” she said. “This video had so much impact it scared people out of their oblivion.”
Figgener is critically optimist the momentum will continue because she says the star of the film isn’t alone.
“I’m a marine biologist and we stumble across plastic and fishing hooks all the time,” she said. “This is my life, it’s my whole life.
“I usually walk the beaches at night, and at least a turtle per night has some kind of incident with ocean pollution. I had a turtle that had a piece of plastic sticking out when she was dropping her eggs. She’d ingested a plastic bag, and it was tangled in her intestines. When we find dead turtles, we dissect them and every single turtle has some kind of plastic.”
Long known as “bad actors” for the environment, straws represent a culture of convenience that’s really not that convenient.
“It’s like people are so worried about their afterlife, but I’m worried about my ecological footprint now in this lifetime,” she said. “I think that’s what we need to be worried about. Sustainability is actually just that. You want to make things better for the next generation.”
She says despite what she finds is a general malaise of indifference in most of America, she’s inspired by a call she received from Wisconsin, where a group of fourth graders are polarizing to get rid of plastic straws.
“If something like that inspires young kids, then there is genuine hope we can do this. That’s the generation that’s going to make the changes.”
Heidi Siegmund Cuda is a veteran investigative producer, who’s been documenting the plastic pollution awareness movement for the past two years.
