Being Green Isn't Cool Anymore. Was it Ever?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 08. 7.08
Back in the day five years ago when Graham was dreaming up TreeHugger, the idea was to take the concept of "green" away from the hippie imagery and make it cool and mainstream. However, after crisis piled on after crisis, it quickly became apparent that it isn't about being cool, it is about survival. It also became obvious that there is no point going on about "oh my god we're all gonna die" if we want anyone to bother reading us, but that we have to be upbeat and positive about the things that we have to do and that individuals CAN do to move forward. So we talk a lot less about bamboo skivvies and a lot more about vegetable gardens.
Five years later, Alice Thomson of the London Times looks around and suggests that the green movement is dead, because Conservative leader David Cameron is no longer nailing a wind turbine to his roof, but "grows his own vegetables and holidays barefoot in Britain because it is less extravagant, not because he is trying to reduce his global footprint."
She contines :
"But paradoxically, just as Britain is turning its back on the environment, the country is finally becoming greener. Fewer people are moving house so they are buying fewer new white goods such as washing machines and fridges. They may not be queueing up for £9 organic Poilâne bread, but for the first time in a decade they are discarding less food. They buy less impulsively and think more carefully before their weekly shop. Children are wearing hand-me-down uniforms rather than new ones made in sweatshops.
Bottled water sales have fallen. Garden centres have reported a 10 per cent rise in the sales of vegetable seeds in the past 12 months. People are saving money by growing their own potatoes and carrots. They are turning off their central heating for a few more months of the year and ditching their second car rather than buying an electric runaround. And instead of carbon-offsetting their holidays, they are simply going on fewer of them."
She says that it is the economy, stupid, not the green movement. Commenters trot out the usual "environmentalism is fundamentally elitist and is driven by pious snobs who can't bear the thought of the proletariat enjoying similar lifestyle choices. In response, an "alternative" lifestyle has been invented which conveniently is only available to the affluent few."
In fact, I think it proves that we are actually succeeding brilliantly. Environmentalism is hardly elitist if everyone is doing it.
It is a dumb article in a dumb paper, but it is worth reading, as it represents the last gasp of the right-wing anti-green in Britain, as they try to co-opt the changes happening and call them their own. Coming to America soon. ::Times of London
Going Green Just Makes Cents. Read our guides for How to Go Green, updated for Planet Green
Why to Go Green
Water
Pets
Lighting
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Book Review: Ten Technologies to Save the Planet
- Rechargable Foot Warmers - Green Idea, or Green Lame?
- 5 Android Apps that are Eco-Fun
- New Carbon Footprint Standard Launched in the UK
An Eco-Fashion Party Alert, Inhabitots Launches, the Seattle Art Museum Gets Urban, and More
|
TreeHugger Tip: Max Gladwell on Using Ustream
|
I'm going to go hug a tree now. In victory. Of the green movement becoming mainstream.
It's about standards, really. :-D
Agreed. Sometimes I feel like right-wingers oppose green practices (or anything that could be considered liberal) simply because they hate the people that come up with these ideas. For a right-winger to accept an idea, it somehow has to be spun into their own first (or at least coming from another right winger). I don't know what that is. It's certainly petty and annoying (probably has something to do with not being able to admit when they're wrong). But if that's what it takes to get people to accept green practices then so be it. I'm big enough to let them claim it as a victory for themselves as long as the end result is the same.
I really couldn't care for what reason people make the actions, as long as it's positive. I do it partially for the environmental aspect and partially for the financial aspect. The only way I could convince my husband to take any action was to remind him we'd be saving money.
The impulse to reject an idea because of who thought of it is hardly confined to any one party, stradric.
If you spend all your time and rhetoric labeling one group of people as good and wise another as foolish and evil, you start to believe it yourself, even if anyone more detached and with half a brain would realize that each group was made up of individuals with unique, nuanced ideas and positions.
I'm still not sure if greenness is spreading because people actually care and are more aware or because of present economic conditions. As long as energy and other resource prices remain high, we will continue to improve our efficiency and reduce consumption, But if we want the trend to survive the next economic upswing, either the importance of sustainability needs to become truly ingrained or green still needs to be cool.
Another self-glorifying article. Didn't TH invent the internet too?
About David Cameron - it's stupid to claim he grows his vegetables and stays in UK for holidays because of financial crisis. He is super-rich. Give him 10 more financial crises straight one after another, he will still be easily able to fly every destination he would like to enjoy.
It turned trendy to announce environmentalism is dead. I hear this like every year since 2000 or somewhat. Yet all those environmental funds seem to collect record tons of money.
The idea that "right-wingers oppose green practices", and the corollary that green practices are the prerogative of left-wingers, are curious. The Nazis were ardently green: Claude Lanzmann's film 'Shoah' interviews an administrator of the Warsaw Ghetto who speaks dreamily of his love for nature and the Alps. Hitler himself was a vegetarian and devotee of alternative medicine, and his vision of an empire of Germanic peasant farmers in the East was quintessentially green. The Nazis would never have dreamt of saying that they wanted to wage war on nature. But that's just what they did say in Stalin's Russia. There they boasted of making rivers flow against their natural courses, and (in Brezhnev's day) of building energy-intensive cities in the Arctic. Waging war on nature was an actual Stalinist slogan. Likewise, when Mao came to power in China, he told the city planners of Beijing that he wanted to be able to look out through the Tiananmen Gate and see only smokestacks - and that's what he got.
The 'green' mentality we see today actually combines two of the principal characteristics of nations that succumbed to fascism: utopianism and what the Germans call "catastrophe-mindedness". Its progenitors are the Germans, with their emphasis on purity laws and biodynamic agriculture, not to mention the first Green political party. The roots of greendom lie in the right, not in the left.
Stradric, let me change up what you wrote a little because I agree with Anthony.
Sometimes I feel like left-wingers oppose anything that could be considered conservative simply because they hate the people that come up with these ideas.
Get my point?
I don't know about the U.K., but I think "green" is still cool in the U.S.. I also believe that most Americans that are cutting their gas consumption are doing so because gas is more expensive, not because they saw An Inconvenient Truth. I don't believe that environmentalism is fundamentally elitist, but it can be elitist at times. Look at all the celebrities driving hybrids. It's great they use their fame to promote green practices, but your average family can't or won't go out and buy a new car just because Leonardo DiCaprio shows up to the Academy Awards in one.
As a right-wing environmentalist, I am excited that green is now cool, but I am more excited that green is finally starting to make sense economically.
Progress in the UK on green issues is paralysed but I wouldn't agree with the reasons put forward in this article.
There are two problems: one is a perception that the government has hijacked the green label as a mechanism for raising taxes. Retrospective taxes on flights and cars were sudden, nasty taxes that did not fund any green schemes. Another unpopular example is that home-sellers now have to spend £500 on a new survey that tells them to use green lightbulbs whilst the government pockets £100 in tax on this survey; enough to buy new lightbulbs for a whole street. The end result is that taxation as a mechanism for change will never be met with public approval.
Secondly, the UK now has a very socialist outlook. The government cannot be seen to do anything that can be presented in the press as harming low-income families. Taxes on older cars for instance hurt low income earners more that others (it's claimed - maybe they don't have a car at all). Similarly it is dificult to promote schemes that are seen as middle class. Grants for green schemes such as domestic wind-power would be taken up by the middle class whereas the poor would continue to face higher energy bills.
The government cannot take any risks as it is currently as popular as a bad case of genital warts. Therefore neither carrots nor sticks will be used for fear of alienating voters
I think this is 80% economic. Middle class people can't afford as nice a vacation as they used to, and this is now applying to celebrities and politicians because it alienates people to see figures in the public eye continue to live extravagantly in hard times. This is especially important for a democratically elected official, as he lives and dies by public opinion of him.
This is a net good thing for the environment, but the thing I worry is that people will go back to their old ways once the economy improves and fuel gets cheap again. Back in the 70's, people were talking an awful lot about living greener and reducing dependence on foreign oil, but those things dropped off once fuel prices improved. This is why we need the green movement, in good times and bad.
I agree!
As a left-wing environmentalist, I am excited that green is now cool, but I am more excited that green is finally starting to make sense economically.
AND seen more as a 'normal' way of life, rather than just a life-style for treehuggers.
Keith, as a German your comment blew my mind.
It has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with education.
Sustainability is taught here at kindergardens where we first learn how to compost.
Going against sustainability is political suicide as it is widely regarded as matter of common sense and not politics.
Watch less History Channel and travel more!
Allie,
My point was that the roots of green consciousness lie with the right, not with the left. And by 'the right', I mean the right tradition in Germany, because that is where the Romantic movement originated. Romanticism, the Wandervogel movement, and the 'healthy' outdoor activities of the Hitler Youth and the BDM form a continuum based on a highly idealised respect, amounting to worship, of nature. The latter-day manifestation of this cult, which you so rightly point out is inculcated from kindergarten on in Germany, is the contemporary obsession with all things green. Witness: solar panels on the churches in Marburg! By decree! (Admittedly, the authorities had to back down on this one).
I have a lot of respect for Germans, and may I say my knowledge of them does not come from the History Channel. At the same time, I think it shows a certain amount of doublethink on your part to maintain simultaneously that in Germany 'sustainability' has 'nothing to do with politics', but to oppose it is political suicide! Surely that means it has everything to do with politics.
The Germans have many virtues: I recall Tolkien writing to his son that we must remember 'that the Teutonic virtues are in fact virtues.' However, I also bear in mind Sebastian Haffner's observation in 'Geschichte eines Deutschen' of his countrymen's capacity for mass hysteria. I'm afraid the comment that in Germany 'going against sustainability is political suicide' appears to me only to lend weight to his view.
The environmental movement was subverted for a time by greedy green marketing schemes... but now that green has jumped the shark, the environmental movement is free to return to its roots, the anti-nuclear movement, where it first got its start in the 60's and 70's. Back then it was about pollution, all kinds of pollution, not just the ones Al Gore wants us paying attention to while they gear up a nuclear relapse to keep control of centralized energ! The next trend is No Nukes, Power To The People all over again, because in fashion, what goes around, comes around, everything old is new again, and it's going to make for some really fab t-shirts slogans!