At home in an ashtray
Even our wild birds, it seems, don’t like being under the 24-7 surveillance of CCTV. Unlike most human beings living in Britain, however, a couple of Great Tits have proven themselves willing to take action, and have chosen fag butts over the cameras: they have chosen to nest in a cigarette bin outside Vane Farm’s visitor centre in Kinross, Scotland. The farm has several CCTV cameras on nests around the site beaming images straight into the coffee shop but staff are unable to view this one family because the box is sealed up and made of metal.
I jest, of course. It’s a true story but birds aren’t aware of how the no-wing giants are watched most everywhere they go, all of the time. Since the smoking ban was introduced—and it came in earlier in Scotland than England—many places have installed bins outside for smokers to dispose of their cigarette ends in the absence of ashtrays, and this is not the first time wild birds have seen the new bins as having been put in place for their use. They are perfect for raising nests of chicks: one small entrance, easily defended, and firmly fixed in place.
So you could say one good thing has come from the smoking ban. It has, of course, had little effect on numbers smoking or taking the habit up. Pubs around the UK have either shut down or struggle to stay in business because of the ban. The reason why is simple. Smokers and their friends buy in cans and bottles and drink at home, the only place where nobody tuts if someone lights up or, worse, decides to lecture using a script entirely composed of stock phrases lifted from the Daily Mail. Inside your own four walls is also the only place, besides remote countryside areas, that you can guarantee cameras aren’t recording every move you make.
Those smokers who do attempt to socialise in public risk catching colds or worse when huddled together outside in pouring rain and less than comfortable temperatures. This misery, often on display now that we’ve turned smokers into public spectacles like zoo animals, makes the virtuous minority feel very good about themselves. It’s the same sadistic trait that leads to extensive traffic jams on motorways, when twistedly curious rubber-neckers slow down their cars to have a good long nosey at crash sites in the hope of seeing some real-world carnage to go home and tell their friends and family all about.
Sometimes smokers are provided with shelters, sometimes not. Most pubs you visit of an evening are empty apart from when people go to the bar to buy drinks. The rest of the time, smokers and their non-smoker friends are all outside chatting, meaning there’s next to nobody actually inside the venues. Ironically, the most virulent anti-smoking campaigners, who’d like an all-out ban on smoking and the sale of tobacco, are such astonishingly miserable, hardline, one-issue-bores that they have no friends and don’t go to pubs. They stay at home writing letters to the editor, filling in crossword puzzles, and maintaining perfect bowling-green lawns in their gardens.
A majority of people still believe smoking and non-smoking areas, properly set up and honoured by all, with substantial on-the-spot fines for transgressors, would have been the civilised way to move forward. Instead, smokers are pariahs and yet few raise eyebrows at people using toxic chemicals in their gardens, using plastic bags and then only once before binning them, buying Big Macs, or driving the car five minutes up the road to buy a pint of milk. It’s a funny old world, eh?
If only the people who complain about passive smoking, which nobody disputes is a real threat to anyone who doesn’t smoke and spends considerable time around smokers, were as vocal and active in doggedly pursuing other, arguably far more pressing, environmental issues. We still drive cars that belch out large quantities of greenhouse gases; a third of the world’s life-forms are on the edge of extinction, if not there already; our commercially available foodstuffs are routinely, and with government sanction and approval, polluted and loaded with salt and sugar; and, people are starving, not because there isn’t enough food to go round but because it’s too expensive and getting more so with each passing day.
That’s just a few things that push smoking well out of the Top 10 of stuff we need to urgently tackle before we all, smokers and non-smokers alike, find ourselves irreversibly screwed. The smoking ban was an easy option by which our leaders could show to those who don’t dig deeper that they’re doing something ‘green’. It’s a smokescreen (pun intended).
Don’t get me wrong. Smoking and tobacco production are both serious environmental issues in themselves. Tobacco crops suck all the life out of the land, leaving behind dust that blows away and exposes rock on which we can’t grow anything useful. Cigarette butts take many, many years to break down in the environment and even then leave behind decidedly unnatural chemicals in the soil and water table (but on this score, the same is true of every manufactured drug from aspirin to Prozac to the contraceptive pill). And then there’s the harm tobacco products cause to the human body (again, though, aspartame is far more widely consumed than tobacco and frankly it’s at least as toxic).
Still, the birds have new places to nest. Given that we continue to destroy their natural habitats, and will do so at an even faster rate when the first deceptively-named eco-towns are built on formerly unspoiled countryside, we can only see the Great Tit’s appropriation of cigarette bins as a Good Thing. Assuming they aren’t sparking up in them, of course: it’s an enclosed space, damn it, think of the children! It’s always about the poor little children. Children make great excuses for all sorts of grown-up behaviour, don’t they?
Now, where’s my metal box of safety and seclusion for when all the shit we do comes home to roost?
tags: birds, cigarettes, environment, Great Tits, hypocrisy, priorities, smoking ban, wildlife
5 comments on “At home in an ashtray”
May 29th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Thanks for a well-thought out analysis of the situation. On the other side of the pond, we’ve had ever more intrusive smoking bans (some cities won’t allow one to smoke inside one’s own car, for instance) and it’s set a horrible legal precedent for government intrusion into other aspects of one’s life. It seems to me that simple courtesy might be an alternative to legislation on such matters.
Meanwhile, the petrochemical companies continue to enjoy special tax breaks as they increase the public’s addiction to their far more toxic, more impacting, more widespread poisons.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Yeah, but you know many cigarettes today are made with all-natural, organic tobacco. That’s good, right? Right?
May 29th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Jami » *chuckle* Now that’d be a marketing ploy-and-a-half: ‘fair trade baccy’ and ‘made with tobacco from managed sustainable plantations”… We should not jest. They may try it one day.
I read recently that 90 per cent of organic food in the UK is flown in from afar. Only 10 per cent is locally or nationally grown. It annoys because it undermines the organic is good argument, because that argument only applies if the number of food miles don’t run to many hundreds or thousands. Essentially the supermarkets con us on everything. No surprise there. And people focus on the tobacco companies. All big companies are evil! And yes, even Google despite its strapline.. x
May 31st, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Can’t even smoke inside your own car Hermit!!! That is doing far too nanny, hope our lot don’t hear of it or that’ll be next
I did have a laugh at this Spicy but there is the much more serious side you bring along with the laughter, if only the governmentals could be persuaded to let us be. *sigh*
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:19 am
Beautifu1 » Well, we will shortly see cars in the UK stopped and drivers prosecuted if their passengers throw anything out of the window. I agree we should not litter, but the way we’re seeing legislation used to attack individual behaviour of all kinds is more than worrying. x
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