May 4th, 2009
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.* * *
My blog got a shout out from a friend of mine's blog (Rena Yung's journal, '04.24.2009 "Environmental Initiatives Have Jumped the Shark"'). Had to return the favour and also snicker at the phrase in it: "steamy tuna vapors". I mean, nothing is more disgustingly evocative than that, short of the real dry-heave-inducing thing.
I've had more than my fair share of push-back from people whenever I call into question individual examples of people using their best intentions to do something really stupid where the environment is concerned. They are so invested with seeing their efforts have some positive effect, that they are willing to suspend normal logical thinking in order to contribute to some collective feel-good global consciousness movement. A lot of people want to do something to help the cause, and that is a good thing. Commendable, even.
But responding to a media-hyped guilty conscience by doing something pointless is abhorrent and worse than doing nothing at all in many cases. Rena's blog cites a few examples, I've cited several in the past. And, really, I'm just repeating myself here since I've said all this over and over again. At the risk of repeating myself, here I go again:
To assuage our guilt, we have started down the road to some pretty ridiculous lengths that only serve to line the pockets of the people who don't care at all about our withering environment.
- Marketing efforts start with the idea: "How do we sell this [crap]?" People stand or sit around for a while, some intern runs off and comes up with a few ideas, then it hits them: "Of course! We'll market it as a 'green' solution!" Example: Some detergent company or another has made its detergent "more concentrated" but sells half as much. Of course, it doesn't cost half as much for the consumer! Then they sell it as a 'green' solution: Less plastic in the bottle (smaller bottle, see) ... erm ... less water to produce it, I suppose ... um ... that's all I can think of. And everybody knows that we all put the same-sized squirt of detergent into our laundry no matter how concentrated it is. So, if everybody uses the same careless squirt as always, that company has just sold us less product for the same price, and tried to make themselves smell oh-so-sweet in the process.
- Or how about this rather nebulous and vaguely-executed notion of carbon offsets: Basically, buy your way to heaven. Um ... except people will gladly take your money and spend -er- only some of it burying carbon in the ground. (By the way, burying it is not nearly as dreadful and desperate as it sounds; we extracted oil out of the ground, might as well put some of its by-products back.) But while we are perfectly happy to pay off these people to offset some carbon for us (which, I know, does not mean burying it all under a mountain), we aren't really all that interested in following up afterwards to ensure our money went where we thought it should—after all, what would we do and how would we feel when we discovered that we were unloading our White Western guilt (in the form of money) onto a pointless, badly-carried-out plan?
- There's also just the plain old Hypocrites: They espouse loud and long the clarion call of how we must all make tiny sacrifices to the Great God of Environmental Decay while they smirk and do nothing themselves. How to raise your relative quality of life:
- Traditional way: Raise your own income/status/station
- New Church of Environmentalism way: Lower everyone else's through lip service to sacrifice (while maintaining your own)
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. All the way down, all from the marginally-honest to the outright cheaters know we feel guilty, and are happy to present their costly ideas as a way for us to alleviate that guilt.
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