permaculture

[lbsaltzman@aol.com]

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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