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  • From: lbsaltzman@aol.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org, eco-economics-and-finance@googlegroups.com
  • Subject: [permaculture] Green Washing
  • Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:09:03 -0400

Here is an article my wife and I just wrote for HopeDance a wonderful
magazine.

http://www.hopedance.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=344&Itemid=98





Greenwashing, Green Rackets and Green Clueless











by Larry Saltzman and Linda Buzzell

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Green is the new red, white and blue


Attempts to cash in on current environmental crises and the sustainability
revolution are occurring on both the local and national levels.  They
threaten to overwhelm the ethical efforts by many sincere individuals and
organizations (including some businesses) to move towards a sustainable
future.

For example:



A local newspaper lauds a “green” building project that used boards milled
from old railroad ties from Thailand, seemingly unaware of the ecological
costs of shipping the lumber.




A “green building” tour includes a newly McMansionized tear-down/rebuild of a
perfectly sound but modest home that nearly doubled the square footage of the
house but used a few green elements like solar panels on the roof.




Is milk “organic” when it comes from factory farms where the animals are
confined but the government lets the corporations say that they have “access
to open air?”




Is soy milk “green” when made from soybeans shipped from China with dubious
organic credentials?




Does buying carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange really justify
flying at will all over the planet?


These days you almost have to be a detective to determine the truth about
what’s genuinely green and sustainable, what’s the result of public naivete
and what’s outright greenwashing and fraud.

A big part of the “what’s really green?” problem is our ongoing love affair
with  consumerism.  Greenwashing is simply the latest way for corporations
and businesses to convince the public to keep consuming.  The inconvenient
truth is that we won’t have a sustainable lifestyle until we all learn to
consume a lot less and get more use out of what we already have rather than
buying or building something new.  If we continue to feel compelled to buy
the latest and most trendy stuff (feeling less guilty if it’s labeled
“green”) and if we are unwilling to make do with functional possessions that
don’t follow fashion, then we are part of the problem rather than the
solution. 

But how can we tell the difference between true green, naive green,
greenwashing and outright green fraud?

Greenwashing

Welcome to the age of greenwashing, folks!  Green is in this year. 
Everybody’s going green (well, sort of) or they’re trying to make you think
they’re going green.

Some of this may be sincere, but a lot is pure calculation.  Big corporations
like to make their customers think they’re good guys even when they’re not. 
So we’re seeing lots of Sierra Club look-alike ads with nice wilderness
scenery in front of that gas-guzzling car or on an oil ad.

We get their game, don’t we?  And we need to call them out on their deception.

There are resources on the Internet that can really help us figure out what’s
real and what’s a con.  Source Watch (www.sourcewatch.org )  does a great job
of exposing corporate greenwashing, fraud and lies.  The Organic Consumers
Association (www.organicconsumers.org ) also exposes attempts by the FDA and
various corporations to subvert the national organics standards.  The
corporate “organic” labels wash themselves in green-looking containers while
selling food that skirts everything that organic should stand for. Currently
the Organic Consumers Association is conducting boycotts against Dean Food’s
Silk soy and Horizon milk and Aurora’s brands of dairy products. 

www.treehugger.com is another great site that exposes many different kinds of
greenwashing.

We also need to be wary of trade associations thinly disguised as
environmental groups. For example, the building industry is getting very
shrewd about creating organizations with nice names so they can tout their
“green” efforts in order to drum up business and promote themselves. How much
unnecessary and unsustainable home remodeling, using up precious lumber and
energy resources, has been done on the Central Coast recently by construction
firms who are self-designated “green builders”?

Green Fraud

Large corporations sometimes try to make themselves look green by supporting
genuine environmental groups’ efforts.  Recently an office supply chain was
exposed for lying about the recycled content of their paper.  They had been
co-sponsoring a large, genuinely green recycling day effort as cover, but
their fraud was uncovered by anti-greenwashing activists.

The line between greenwashing and outright green fraud is a thin one.  Do the
corporations and local companies that are perverting our sustainable future
do it naively or are they consciously trying to cheat the future by lying? 
In a sense it doesn’t matter what their motives are. We as consumers have to
distinguish between what is sustainable and what is phony. 
 
Congress, the Executive Branch, and parts of the Federal and State
bureaucracies have also become masters of deception and outright lying,
creating laws that sound green while destroying rational organic standards. 
They will call a bill the National Clean Air legislation while it contains
language to destroy current environmental standards.  They are being egged on
by unscrupulous corporations, In the name of profit, trying to subvert every
environmental law ever passed.

Some energy industry corporations are reluctantly admitting that global
warming is real while behind our backs they fund “think tanks” and pay
scientists to produce results that “prove” that global warming is not caused
by human activity. Whether their lies and trickery meet the criminal
definition of fraud or not, this is an immoral and dreadful thing to do.

While we certainly want to support genuine efforts by large corporations to
“go green,” we have to be vigilant in monitoring the genuineness of these
efforts.  Every corporation has as its sole reason for existence the
generation of profit for shareholders and this prime directive makes it
extremely difficult for many to resist the idea of bringing in more customers
merely by putting some pistachio-colored whipped cream on the same old
products and services.  However the truly intelligently-run corporations are
beginning to listen to people like William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle) about
the possibility of gaining even more profit by becoming entirely sustainable.

Green clueless

But it isn’t only corporate deceivers we have to watch out for. We also have
to address the sincere but naive folks who aren’t quite getting it yet. 

For example, news reporters who don’t know the difference between a genuine
green building project and a tract house with a few solar panels on the roof
are a particular concern because they inform public opinion.  Their
uninformed enthusiasm convinces many naive readers and viewers that they’ll
be doing their bit to save the planet by spending their money on such
fraudulent efforts.
 
Another problem is the well-meaning home owners who read glossy house and
garden magazines and become convinced they’ll be green if they take out
second mortgages to pay for ripping out their perfectly serviceable kitchens,
sending them to the landfill and replacing them with so-called “green”
components from Asia or dumping their supposedly unfashionable old furniture
and linens for trendy new “green” stuff as shown in some celeb’s house or
ripping up their yard to put in a whole second house’s worth of imported
outdoor “green” furniture, “energy saving” stoves or barbecue pits.  These
happy folks unknowingly cause millions of dollars of environmental damage. 
And the people who run the local home box store are more than happy to import
all of these “green” goodies for their pleasure. 

This is all just the same old all-American consumerism in a new green
disguise.

What’s needed here is education, so that the general public and the media
begin to understand the true meaning of green and sustainable.

We also need to applaud genuinely green efforts wherever we find them,
pointing out exactly why they deserve our praise and support.  This is part
of the overall educational effort to train ourselves and others to tell the
difference between the genuinely sustainable and the merely greenwashed.

The solution lies with all of us.  We each need to do everything possible to
reduce consumption.  We need to de-condition our brains from the onslaught of
consumer advertising designed to keep the unsustainable, planet-destroying
economy in full boom.  We need to question whether we are purchasing out of
real need or because the constant brainwashing we are all subjected to has
created another endless “want” and “must have.” 

We need to understand that we’ve been shopping ourselves into extinction. 

Ultimately the responsibility is ours to use the resources of the planet
wisely. We can resist conning ourselves or being conned by consumerism
masking as green consumerism.  And when we do need to buy a genuinely useful
item, we can choose to support local businesses that are honestly green or
moving towards green and shun the wolves that merely wrap themselves in
verdant sheep’s clothing.

Larry Saltzman and Linda Buzzell are Fellows at For the Future
(www.forthefuture.org ), a sustainability think tank based in Santa Barbara,
where they initiated the Relocalizing Food Circle and listserv.  They have
just started a new listserv on eco-economics and eco-finance to facilitate
discussion of the post-peak-oil economy and the development of True Value
accounting and finance. They can be reached at lbsaltzman@aol.com and
lbuzzell@aol.com .





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