What goes up must come down, consequences vary
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- February 28, 2023
- 506
Seldom do I delve into world events in my writing, but last week the overlap of global and local events seemed so ironic I just couldn’t leave the subject alone.
In our little corner of the world, it’s not always a given folks are aware of the latest national headlines. Twitter isn’t a daily staple for a good portion of my readership here in Ohio’s Amish Country, so I’ll just take a moment to bring folks up to speed on one of the more unusual goings-on of the past couple of weeks: Balloons were all over the news. Yes, that’s right — balloons.
The giant “weather balloon” that dominated the news cycle from the time the water-tower-sized monstrosity was spotted over Montana until it was shot down just off the coast of South Carolina piqued the interest of millions of Americans, and rightfully so.
While its owners haven’t fully fessed up to just exactly what their intent was, it seems clear they weren’t merely interested in the amount of snow cover on our western mountains. Dubious or not, the U.S. military dropped it in the pond, and it was “duly retrieved and reduced to possession” as we say in the duck hunting world. Kudos to the retrievers. Balloons launched by Americans are almost never retrieved and instead go on to create problems for our nonhuman neighbors all across the planet.
If you’re wondering how I ever landed on this comparison of a high-altitude spy balloon and the toy balloons we love to float at birthdays, weddings, football games and just about any other occasion one can think of, I can tell you I literally stumbled upon the idea.
One of the things my wife and I do at this time of year is pick up litter as we hike. It’s easy to spot and comparatively easy to get to with the undergrowth of the forest at its lowest annual ebb. This weekend it seemed one of the more visibly dominant items of trash were those fancy Mylar balloons that outlast the holiday for which they were intended by about a thousand lifetimes.
We retrieved the few we could, but another tangled in a high tree top is likely to be there for as long as the tree. Mylar balloons, made from nylon plastic with a metallic coating, never degrade. Latex balloons, made from rubber, may fall to dust after four years or so but carry the potential in the meantime to do an awful lot of damage as well.
Balloons are the No. 1 plastic hazard to seabirds, which mistake the colorful, deflated carcasses for food. After ingesting them, the birds either slowly starve or become entangled in the ribbon or string to which the balloon was tethered. Marine mammals and fish are similarly imperiled by wayward balloons. Here in Central Ohio, song birds in search of nest-building materials, small mammals, and various critters of forest and farm can die in just as cruel of a manner.
In addition to the mortal danger to wildlife, thousands of Americans find themselves left temporarily in the dark each year when someone’s celebration flown awry ends up short-circuiting power lines. That shiny metallic coating turns out to be a wonderful conductor of electricity and can tangle in power lines, causing a fault or even float into a substation to wreak havoc on a much greater level.
Beyond potential catastrophe, “free range” balloons rank right up there with single-use plastic grocery bags as one of the most visible forms of pollution across the countryside. I won’t begrudge a kid his toy balloon, but please make sure it doesn’t sail off into the world to cause an incident — international or otherwise.