Bags are bad for the environment, but can we live without them? DDT was bad, but people die without it. In fifteen years, the use of DDT was enough to drop malaria cases in Sri Lanka from 2.8 million cases and 7,300 deaths per year, to 17 cases and no deaths. That was 1963. But thanks to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book which is now acknowledged to be filled with junk science and alarmist claims, DDT was banned worldwide, the same world wherein today up to half a billion cases of malaria are reported per year, and over a million die, mostly third world children. Yet no actors on the latest Oscar red carpet were wearing ribbons to raise awareness of the fact.

Now, not having a plastic bag handy is certainly less dire than the agues and pains of malaria. But the once-innocuous plastic bag is not as lethal as DDT, either. The larger point is that radical environmentalism, like radical anything, can hurt more than it helps, and is never as beneficial as carefully planned, gradual reform.

China’s ban on plastic bags, to commence June 1st, is certainly not as knee jerk as, say, sending millions of city-dwelling adolescents to the countryside indefinitely, but it still smacks of radicalism, a decision made with fear weighing heavy in the balance. “White pollution”, the glut of discarded bags and foam containers that blots China’s landscape, is the target of the ban. But the fear stems from the ever-looming bogeyman whose name may not be uttered [Olympic loss of face].

“What could possibly be the downside to banning plastic bags?” the logical, environmentally friendly reader asks. To answer from a personal standpoint – where on earth do we put our baozi? In a cloth tote bag? Maybe they can save some of the cardboard boxes they chop up for the filling *wink wink*.

From a less solipsistic perspective, consider the 20,000 people in Hebei that suddenly don’t have jobs now that Huaqiang Plastic, one of the country’s biggest bag producers, must shut down. True, they hold as little media clout as an African child dying from malaria, but that’s the crux: pro-environment too often equates to anti-human being. And therein lies the greatest danger in accepting any drastic measure touted as good for the environment.