Earth Day, Inc. - NYT

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Welcome to Earth Day 2004, brought to you by petroleum powers, big-box developers, old-growth loggers and chemically dependent coffee companies trying to paint their public image green.

Let's start with Sierra Pacific, a benefactor of northern Nevada's celebration of Earth Day. The timber company is involved in a lawsuit aimed at weakening the Sierra Nevada Framework, which protects the region's forests. Marathon Oil is Earth Day's sponsor down in Houston. Behind closed doors in Texas, Marathon worked on voluntary emissions regulations that have helped give Houston some of the worst air quality in the country.

The Earth Day cleanup and restoration program held by the California State Parks Foundation is financed by corporations with poor environmental records in the state: ChevronTexaco, which recently agreed to a $275 million settlement over air pollution from five of its California refineries; Wal-Mart, which lobbied unsuccessfully for a ballot initiative in Inglewood to exempt a proposed supercenter from environmental restrictions; and Pacific Gas and Electric, whose illegal dumping of carcinogenic chemicals near the town of Hinkley was memorialized in the movie "Erin Brockovich."

EDIT

Earth Day events are select venues for greenwashers, allowing them to communicate with their target audience of green consumers. They also amount to a public relations bargain. BP spent $200 million rebranding itself from British Petroleum to "beyond petroleum." Major corporations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for environmentally themed advertisements in high-circulation magazines like National Geographic and Time. In contrast, at most Earth Day festivities, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars will get a company marquee exhibition space and a prominent place for its logo on publicity materials."

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/opinion/22JOHN.html