I’m wary of the “50 simple things you can do to save the earth” approach to environmentalism and economic justice. Some things just aren’t that easy to do at the scale we need to do them. And this focus on tiny individual changes distracts us from demanding better environmental or economic decisions and actions from our elected and corporate leaders. The first wave of this easy steps and shopping for a better world movement was in full swing about 20 years ago. It bottomed out in an overload of hype. Like the miraculous health-saving elixirs once touted in newspaper ads, the claims made for these products — both in how good they were for you and how much they’d change the world — were too good to be true. Face it: there is just so much turing an old spaghetti sauce jar into a vase does for saving endangered species or ending poverty. But there are cheering developments in the current wave of consumer interest in things green. For every weird and disheartening instance of hype — as covered recently in The New York Times, Home Depot’s Eco Choices marketing campaign encompasses everything from energy-efficient lightbulbs to electric chainsaws… (more)
(Posted by Emily Gertz in Purchasing Green at 12:19 PM)