We are all Good People, we're just trying to get buy*, we've Worked Hard for our stuff, we deserve our luxury vacation in an impoverished nation!
Right?
No.
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I don't need to sit here and type about how everyone and their Hummer-hawking mother is trying to get on the Green bandwagon. It's obvious. What's apparently isn't so obvious is that said bandwagon is running on non-renewables.
The current mix of American identity-crisis, or need for a label to subscribe to (Red or Blue? Do I believe in God? Well, my priest says that abortion is bad so I hate the gays too, and don't believe in climate change because that guy on TV who likes God too says it's fake) and self-obsessed, misguided "philanthropy" (I send cheap factory-made crap to orphans in Cambodia who make cheap crap in factories! I'm a good person!) has opened the market for "green" consumption, perfect for the smug and misinformed in your life this holiday season.
We like to believe that believe that "change" can begin at the mall, that we can give ourselves a pat on the back for buying organic produce at Wal-Mart. We want the self-satisfaction of knowing that we've done a good thing, without actually having to go through the trouble of changing anything in our lives at all. That way, we can sleep easily on our NEW!! 300-count ORGANIC!! Egyptian cotton sheets from Bloomies!! Forget that the cotton was grown in a desert climate and used massive amounts of fresh water, harvested by poor laborers (who have no fresh water to drink) for next to no money, the cotton was flown thousands of miles to the department store chain in the suburban mall that replaced a forest and paved over a pond for parking, and the old sheets will probably go to a landfill after no one buys them at the Goodwill.
This feature from American Public Media poses the question "Is our consumer society sustainable?" The fact that this question apparently still needs to be asked really only answers the question of why we're on the fast track to a human-designed ecological collapse: we refuse to acknowledge that our addiction to convenience and crap is not only slowly devouring us as individual humans, but extends far outside the realms of ignorance that our suburban enclaves have afforded us. (What? My actions affect other people and things? What are other people and things?)
But ignorance can be fixed; knowledge can be imparted upon the uniformed. The real threat here is the smug, "conscious consumer" whose Prius cupholder is always stocked with a Starbucks double-espresso-nonfat-peppermint-latte-extra hot-extra foam-two splenda in two cardboard cups and a 10% recycled material coffee cup cosies. Six hundred dollar organic Italian free-trade leather boots made from the happy hides of New Zealish cows that have fully realized their existential potential usually factor in somewhere, along with $59 organic face moisturizer, and another family Prius sitting in the garage at home next to the Explorer, which is only used for long family car trips. To the mall.
A new store just opened up in Burlington that bills itself as a store for "natural parenting." Since when did "nature" involve a huge plush giraffe from China? This is more of a vehical for the parents' own sense of self-worth than effective in alleviating any ecological destruction that we've had so much fun in causing.
Don't buy the color-coded hype. "Green" is a brand. Consumption is consumption: always effective in degrading the environment in one way or another. Toyota is a business; they did not create the Prius to save the world. They wanted to make money. Used is usually better than "green." Progress and paradigm shift are not for sale at the mall, and neither is self-fulfillment. Just don't ask me where to find them.
*whoa, subconscious.
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5 comments:
Well said. I think you would really like "Cradle to Cradle" by William McDonough & Michael Braungart. These are two really smart guys that are all about a diversion from consumerism and they see recycling as downcycling and a whole bunch of other good stuff. Werd.
it's freaky that an H2 and a $4 organically grown tomato signify the same thing: status=power=control!!!
(fraud=incinserity=control!!!)
leftist white liberals will always say they want things to change...what they don't say is that they want change as long as they don't have to sacrifice anything for that change. where do we stand?
we have to stand for true sustainability and change, i.e. that which is not primarily concerned with the self, image and status. I think we have a long way to go. But hypocritical upper-middle class liberals are as a "bad" as conservatives in that it's still very self-satisfying. Even those labels were invented to help us sleep at night: "at least I'm not like THEM, I'm THIS way." Insofar as the self is involved, we have to re-imagine the environment AS the self, not "other" in order to really act in its best interest. Nature, the environment, does not want organic leather boots or hothouse organic tomatoes.
And thanks for the book rec, will check out!
Retailers love the "green" movement for jacked up prices and premium market it created
It seems older --employed-- people tend to be opposed to scaling down consumption because it would harm the economy. As a college student I often feel like I'm viewing this problem from the outside in. I would love to think that the world can be scaled down to a sustainable level, but who is willing to bear the cost?
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