MORFORD: You Cannot Save The Earth

[Matsubara]

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/


You Cannot Save The Earth
Does buying that cute recycled organic lip balm really do any good? Your government snickers

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

It's the great painful bitch-slapping soul-stabbing environmental conundrum du jour:
Say you've been reading up and doing your eco-homework and watching the appropriate inconvenient documentaries and you finally get yourself a little excited to go green, and so you buy your compact fluorescents and turn off all your power strips at night and recycle and reuse and compost and go organic and local and grass-fed and everything's just orgasmically sustainably delicious.
And maybe all this good eco-vibration spurs you on even further, and you decide to green up the whole house, get into gray water and solar and reclaimed wood and non-VOC paints and all the rest, and fill the joint with organic cotton sheets and chem-free cleansers and passive heating systems and non-phthalates dildos and you sit back in your ethically farmed chair and sigh and say, Well, there ya go, did what I could, the world is a better place, maybe just a tiny bit -- I mean, isn't it?
And then it happens. You decide to take a break, take a load off, and maybe you go for nice drive in the hybrid or out in the Mini, just to get out, see the sights, enjoy the sunshine before it gets too hot and burns up all the ice caps, and if you live anywhere near the Bay Area it's incredibly easy to split the dense urban environment and head out into the "real" California, to the burning gauzy central slab of the state that seems, when you drive down it, as large as Europe and as foreign as Pluto, and wham, oh my God, it feels as though you've driven into a massive pile of makeshift concrete manure.


(SNIP)

I remember reading, years back, about McDonald's and the enviro movement's long-standing attacks on the junk-food titan's noxious use of those old Styrofoam burger containers. After years of screaming and protests, the eco-dudes finally realized it would be better to actually work with the toxic junk-food giant to help them figure out a way to employ recyclable cardboard boxes and still make a profit.
It worked. McDonald's eventually dumped the Styrofoam. But here's the story's big kicker: Just that one simple shift, that one tiny change in corporate behavior affected an enormous industry all the way down the line, so much so that they figured it was the environmental equivalent of something like 50 million people deciding to recycle plastic bottles. It was at once staggering and humbling.


This is a good read. As for me, I'll keep recycling my cans and glass and milk cartons and meat trays. What can I say, it helps me sleep at night...

[wtmusic]

1. The cynical POV is just an excuse for laziness

When the the ability to sustain life on earth comes crumbling down, it's not my fault. It would have happened anyway.

[Psephos]

7. No offense, but your POV seems the cynical one to me

Here's why: we recycle, etc., for two reasons. One, to actually decrease our resource footprint. Two, to feel better about the effect we have on Earth's resources.

It seems that the second one is more important than the first for a lot of people.

This article points out that while our feelings may be admirable, our actions are inefficient, and if we spent the same mental energy on different targets, the outcome could be much better.

Implicit in the article is that vilification of corporate offenders is less useful than positive pressure and partnership. Some corporations, like some people, are greedy and beyond the pale, and deserve condemnation. But not all of them, or even most of them. With the right kind of pressure and persuasion (especially, that which shows them how resource awareness can help their image and bottom line), they can be brought into the fold.

I like the humorous writing style of this article, too. We have to be able to laugh a little at ourselves. I know a few of the author's descriptions made me wince a little. :-)

I'm all for making an *actual* difference, and if that requires some modification of beliefs, so be it.

Peace.

[wtmusic]

9. No offense, but when a reply starts with "no offense"...

Maybe I should have included the sarcasm "smiley".

There is really only one reason why people recycle. Those who feel better about the effect they have on the environment do so because they are convinced (sometimes unjustifiably) that they are decreasing their resource footprint. No doubt their self-satisfaction is not always proportional to the actual effect they're having.

Case in point: an exchange on DU some months back discussed a travel consortium selling green "points", which were little more than eco-salve to encourage those who jet around the world dumping tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere to continue their actions. That does a lot more harm than good, and cynically plays on our good intentions.

Any article that begins with "You Cannot Save The Earth" conveys a message of resignation, which IMO also does a lot of harm.

[Psephos]

11. I see your point

It's tough to keep the feelings separated from the actions, even when sometimes they are at odds. I suppose it's really not so surprising that feeling good often trumps actually doing good.

I took a different read from the article's beginning ("You Cannot Save The Earth"), namely, that pop notions of how to "save the Earth" are not the answer, and that we should look a little deeper. This style of writing (hip-ironic, pointing out foolish assumptions) is the grass of modern opinion journalism, and I factor that right in without even thinking about it.

All in all, your post made me think, wt - what more can I ask? :-)

[jwirr]

2. So we should just lay down and die? or eat drink and be merry as

they did during the Black Plaque? No thanks.

[Matsubara]

4. That's not really the gist of the article.

The point is that our little individual gestures are nice, but it's not REALLY going to get better until we get corporate America seriously on the bandwagon. I didn't find it cynical or discouraging. In fact the McDonald's anecdote speaks volumes about the potential we have yet to realize.

Living in Japan, I sometimes order American food etc. through a service called the Foreign buyers club. The last box I got was HONESTLY HALF FULL of those stupid styrofoam peanuts. We pay for trash collection by buying trash bags that have the tax built in, so I was none too happy to have to dispose of all those stupid peanuts, but being Japan, I don't have the space to store them.

I'm going to make a point of calling them and asking them to find a more eco-friendly way to pack boxes. Wadded up newspapers would do the trick, and would take much less space in the trash bag if I fletten them and fold them.

[RoseMead]

5. Is that what you get when you don't brush or floss for a year?

The Black Plaque? :rofl:

Sorry, it just struck me as funny.

[jwirr]

8. I knew it was spelled wrong but spell check does not work when a

word is spelled. It is funny!

[jeffreyi]

3. interesting link about Wal-Mart

Attention Wal-Mart shoppers!

It is hard to over-estimate the magnitude of their potential leverage. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the 20th biggest in the world. Previously one of the most reviled companies; it has become the poster child example of a company in profound transformation.....

(snip)

Then the Wal-Mart marketing folk got up to say how they have studied the Wal-Mart demographic (and you’ve got to believe that they have. . .) There turns out, they reported, to be a very significant correlation especially between their female shoppers, the dominant demographic, and a desire for sustainability. Lee Scott stood up to state that: “Working class people should not have to choose between affordability and sustainability.” Wal-Mart will re-brand itself as “affordable sustainability.”

(snip)

Again, it is hard to overstate the magnitude of this transformation. Wal-Mart has moved the debate from whether there is a business case for sustainability to how to integrate the social issues, and just how fast can you implement everything that Natural Capitalism teaches. As Wal-Mart begins to send their environmental scorecard out to their 90,000 suppliers, the entire field of sustainability had better grab a whole new gear. Gives a whole new twist to Pogo’s observation that “We have met the enemy and he is us.”


More at
http://www.natcapsolutions.org/e-lert/elert_2007V5.htm#WM

[Holly_Hobby]

6. I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but

I think Nature will wipe out humans well before Earth dies. Nature always fights back. Take drug resistant bacteria for an example.

[wtmusic]

10. That's ok, none of us know what we're talking about

shhh, don't tell anyone. ;-)