Buying Into The Green Movement.

This connects to B's uneasiness with Bono's latest effort to reduce poverty. See the bono conversation. I would like to see a documentary of sorts on how people of color are responding to this latest campaign by westerners to educate us on the prospective dangers of the earth's ecology (i just caught a preview of Leonardo Dicaprio's newest rendition of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth). There is something deeply ironic (and somewhat insulting) about a society that created the current state of affairs now exhorting everyone to "change" their way of life so as to avoid the impending dangers.

Even more ironic is how none of the proposed changes sincerely confront a global economic system that encourages this damage by still raping and destroying the majority of the earth's land and water in the so-called third world to feed the rapacious appetite of industrial countries.

I recall reading an article a couple of months back noting how even with china's recent rise it still has only contributed a meager five percent of toxic gas emissions to the current crises. The majority of it was attributed to the industrialization (based on slavery and colonization) of western countries and their recklessly excessive energy use ever since. So, sorry Gore, this is not simply a moral issue as you glibly claim, it is also a political one and it will take a lot more than turning off the tap water after rinsing utensils or turning off the lights when you leave a room (or selling books that shamelessly profit off this malaise).

Until we address the fact that there is a culture of life destructive in industrialized countries, and this culture is inextricably based on the exploitation of resources, which is destructive to the overall environment, we are simply kidding ourselves. this effort cannot be privatized nor projected onto the rest of the world. Both actions are reminiscent of an immature adolescent attempting to deflect responsibility. In fact, as the leading scientists have already noted, the brunt of these ecological changes are not going to effect first-world countries but those least culpable, africans and other representatives of the larger third-world. So it appears that we are going to have to face the real consequences of this thing anyway, while folk here will continue to be able to sip their coffee (imported from Ethiopia) while nibbling on chocolate (from cote d'ivoire) and pen more books (paper imported from Ghana) on the deep philosophical quandary 'we' are facing...

(NY Times) HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out...." (article)

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