Question: What do you call something that starts off amazing and disintegrates into a hot mess?

Answer: A Ryan Murphy show.

Glee, American Horror Story, Ratched – all Murphy projects, all suffering the same fate of fantastic set-ups and cumbersome plots that fall apart somewhere around the middle. However, there is one that soars above the rest like an eagle, despite its soap opera levels of disbelievability: The Politician. In this Murphy-produced Netflix series, there are a lot of intersecting storylines and most of them are pretty silly. Everyone is sleeping with everyone, and affluent teenagers at a mostly-white high school are hellbent on dismantling their opponent’s public images in a race to be crowned Class President. It’s all fun and games until someone gets poisoned. 

While it is certainly campy and eye-rolly, it’s also good fun. The center holds because of Ben Platt who plays the main character Payton Hobart with conviction, self-awareness, vulnerability, and a heaping dose of pathos. Payton, believing from childhood that he would one day become President of the United States, shapes his entire life along those lines. Yet, he is not without moments of unbound compassion, which temper his ambitions. As the connective tissue of the show – all roads lead to Payton – he is tasked with being tremendously conniving and tremendously sympathetic. It works.

I watched the second season in lockdown, wearing a path from my bed to the couch in a half-shocked shuffle. Surprisingly uplifting, and doubly-entertaining with the introduction of Bette Midler as the political advisor to a conniving Senator (by season 2, Payton has entered the Senate race in New York City), The Politician’s main platform is tackling climate change. In order to gain the support of Gen Z and Millennials, Payton enlists the aid of his former political rival Infinity Jackson (Zoey Deutch), who has transformed from a teenage victim of Munchausen-by-Proxy to a beloved climate change influencer, ala Greta Thunberg. Infinity demands that Payton support environmental causes by personally committing to living a life that generates zero waste. “You’ve taken on this issue, possibly in good faith, but your actions don’t match your rhetoric,” she argues in the episode “Cancel Culture”. She delivers a checklist of 15 steps toward zeroing out waste and reducing carbon waste to an absolute minimum that Payton must abide by, or lose the support of her and her millions of social media followers.

Payton complies, going vegan, eliminating single use plastic, switching to all reusable containers, and donating to IATA to offset the carbon emissions of every flight he’s ever taken. However, he refuses the toughest bullet point: taking cold showers only, and using the leftover water for cleaning, cooking, and, yes, drinking.

It’s an engaging plot device, but it got me thinking. The UAE is one of the most wasteful countries in the GCC. According to the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water, over 11 billion plastic bags are disposed of per year, and the average resident uses 450 plastic water bottles a year – the fourth highest level in the world. The more I researched, the more devastating the statistics became. The Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi reports that 50 percent of camel deaths are the result of accidentally consuming plastic waste. Globally, plastic is destroying our oceans, with eight million tons of plastic waste threatening the livelihood of our aquatic habitats.

And it’s not just plastic that’s a culprit. Emissions are devastating air quality in the UAE (and the planet), toxic chemicals are killing coral reefs worldwide, fast fashion is polluting the globe and is the cause of vast human rights violations in the third world, and the list goes on ad nauseum. The UAE, for its part, is well aware of the issue, and has enacted a plan to divert 75 percent of waste away from landfills by 2021, and has enacted strident measures to protect and nurture the environment via the “The Vision 2021 National Agenda”. 

As much as individuals have embraced modern convenience to the detriment of the environment, the reality is 100 mega-sized corporations are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions. The bigger they get the more pollution they cause. However, as Infinity Jackson astutely observes in The Politician, “the problem didn’t exist outside of me, I was part of it.” Reader, I felt that. 

During the lockdown days in 2020, I had become acutely aware of how much waste I was contributing to landfills. At the office, if the team ordered in, I would carry my garbage to the chute, ignoring the prick of doubt that said, “this doesn’t feel right”. But still, out of sight, out of mind. At home, afforded the leisure time of contemplation, I was analyzing my consumption more. Were my husband and I really filling up a 30 gallon garbage can every three days? That couldn’t be right. And yet, the evidence was in front of me. I was struck by a thought, what right did I have to callously discard items that were permanent, that wouldn’t break down for long after I was gone (it takes plastic 1,000 years to decompose). I pictured myself standing next to a mountain of self-generated trash, like Wall-E on his ruined planet. The image disgusted me. 

Unexpectedly galvanized by a single episode of television, and decades of liminal concern about climate change, I decided it was well within my power to tackle the issue in my personal life. Of all of the “unprecedented” outcomes of the recent years, it was radically transforming into a more sustainable citizen that surprised me the most. These are the steps I took.