Bag in the Wind

Bag in the Wind

Picture book
Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Ted Kooser, and his wife, Kathleen,
are serious about recycling. For quite awhile until he found thrift
shops that would reuse them he had scads of plastic bags no one
wanted. Luckily he found a story, Bag in the Wind, in his experiences.
The story has a very unusual main character. "It was a bag for
carrying groceries, just the color of the skin of a yellow onion, and
it had two holes for handles. It was a perfectly good bag, but
someone had thrown it away." The bag is blown out of a landfill and
sent on a series of adventures. A little girl uses it to collect cans
to cash in. A storeowner stuffs in under a door to keep drafts out.
It's rescued from a river by a homeless woman...
A note at the end tells us how many plastic bags Americans use
each year (100 billion), how long it will take each one to decompose
(fifteen to one thousand years), and how many animals are killed each
year by ingesting or getting caught in them (a million birds and
100,000 other creatures). Ways to recycle them or never use them in
the first place are discussed. Bag in the Wind is an excellent way
for children and parents to become mindful of the dangers these
ubiquitous carriers pose to our planet and the need to do something
about it.
On a personal note, one of the things that really aggravates me about
the hubby buying groceries in a certain big box store is that when it
comes to bags they have no paper option. He brings home scads of
plastic ones. I scoop them up before he can throw them into the
trash. I give many to the thrift shop and Black Bear Exchange. I
have also found that libraries find that they come in handy for
patrons who get lucky finding must read books.
A great big shout out goes out to all who work to teach us that
mindless disposal of plastic anything is not as harmless as we might
want to believe.
Julia Emily Hathaway



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