On the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, Let’s ... Go Shopping!
Buying green and changing personal behavior won't save the planet.
By Sharon Begley | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Apr 21, 2010...
Shopping for the planet is just one manifestation of how green activism has gone seriously off course as it has spread a gospel of personal change rather than collective action. Of the Nature Conservancy's five recommendations for Earth Day, four—figure out your carbon footprint here, time your shower, go for a walk (!), and find a farmers’ market—involve individual behavior. Only a single suggestion, "speak up on climate change" by letting lawmakers know you support the energy and climate bill that Sens. Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham plan to introduce this week, gets at the only kind of change that has been shown in the 40 years since the first Earth Day to make a difference.
As my colleague Ian Yarett documents in his progress report on the environment, every example of major environmental progress—reducing acid rain, improving air quality, restoring the ozone layer—has been the result of national legislation or a global treaty. We reduced acid rain by restricting industry's sulfur emissions, not by all going out and sprinkling bicarb on sensitive forests and lakes. Leaded gasoline was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996, not by everyone choosing to buy cars that run on unleaded. Ozone-chomping CFCs were banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol, not by everyone deciding to forgo spray cans and air conditioning.
The gases had to be banned, people. All environmental progress has come through national- and international-level regulation—to be blunt, by forcing people and industry to stop doing environmentally bad things and start doing environmentally good things, not by relying on individuals' green good will or even the power of the marketplace.
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There's much more to that article. Hit that newsweek.com link above to read it all.
Food for thought for sure. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that the reporter is right--corporations will use what ever nasty chemicals they want to until there's a law banning them (and the ban better have fines big enough to make it cost prohibitive to break the ban, because they'll do that, too).
Of course, what the reporter doesn't come out and say is that corporations are lazy, amoral entities that don't give a shit about humans or our health.
Once we accept the truth about corporations, regulating them and reducing their rights also becomes a no-brainer. Too bad nobody in government or even pop culture is willing to just come out and speak the truth. Also too bad that both our governmental leaders and our cultural "leaders" are all in cahoots with corporations.
In short, we're kinda screwed.
But hey, you use compact fluorescent bulbs, right? You recycle, right? You use a reusable bag when you shop, right? You drive a hybrid?
That's good because that's about all that we, as individuals, *can* do. The rest is up to the super-entities (corporations) and the governments that regulate them (or don't regulate them, as the case often is).
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