Filed under: General Environment
Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, claimed the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.
A recent study showed that 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly. So what is the problem, you ask?
The problem is that the common mindset right now holds that all we’re going to need to do to avert a large-scale planetary catastrophe is make slightly different shopping decisions, when in fact, our consumption culture is the real problem. Consumers assume that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the global warming problem. This belief is a misperception, and does not have any effect on our consumption habits.
Americans in particular are notorious consumers. Did you know that Americans consume 24% of the world’s energy but constitute only 5% of the world’s population? I guess you can say that we are hogging all the resources, literally. Where is the focus on consumption? We cannot buy our way into global cooling. The fact is; we need to consume less, period. For instance, instead of buying five pairs of organic hemp jeans, we could just as easily learn to buy one pair of regular jeans and be happy.
The fact is, climate change is more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior; it has nothing to do with what we buy, it has to do with how much we buy, as well as things like mass transit, housing density, the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry. Therefore, it is understandable why some critics hold that trendy green consumption is a distraction from the real problem.
But what about awareness, isn’t that important? I, for one, believe that we need to move in baby steps. I think it’s great that ‘green’ is fashionable. The more people that dress the proverbial part, the more likely they are to learn and act on the real issues.
Do you agree with these opinions, do you think green trends with no focus on consumption cuts is a good start, or merely a distraction?
Taken from: The New York Times
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By Joshua Levitt
E-Commerce Sales and Marketing Manager for UsedCisco.com
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I think anyone that has been concerned with the limits of natural resources for a long time, recognize green consumerism as a false prophet. At best it is a slight improvement on more of the same and at worse it represents a shadow movement that threatens to hijack our language and ideas to insulate itself from criticism.
One resource citizens can rely on for honest and accurate information about how to lower their footprint is civil society – the millions of organizations that spend day after day working to address environmental degradation and social injustice around the world. Without any direct or tangible benefits to themselves, these groups are discovering solutions and sharing them with the world. As a result of Paul’s research, his staff at NCI created WiserEarth, an online tool to allow more discovery and sharing by anyone concerned with social and environmental justice. If this part of civil society is analogous to the immune system, as Paul suggests, then its success depends on the quality of its connections. WiserEarth is a platform to improve the quality of connections geographically and topically.
The knowledge contained within the growing community at WiserEarth will set the standard for which future market forces will respond. All citizens need to recognize the role the government has to play: there is no such thing as a “free” market and the massive amount of hidden subsidies in the market today, make it next to impossible for truly sustainable market solutions to emerge. Our role at the voting booth will always be more important than our role at the cash register.
Comment by spaldingmichael July 6, 2007 @ 12:55 pm