"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"
-Audre Lourde
When I was talking to a friend recently about our efforts in the youth climate movement, she brought up this quote. Granted, in this essay Aurdre Lourde was writing about nothing directly related to global warming or sustainability, but the quote struck me as oddly applicable to one of the more stark contradictions that I find in our consumer culture's adaptation of the "green" movement ...One of the best ways to be sustainable is to live simply, to break from the norm of overconsumption that exists in this country and to buy less. Out of the three R's, it is first about REDUCING, then REUSING, and then recycling. So whether or not a company is environmentally and socially benign or a raging greenwasher, is "green" marketing as an effort to sell more products contradictory to living simply , one of the central themes of sustinability? Can we shape a culture of sustainability using master consumerism's tools of advertising and marketing goods?In some respects, I do think that it is possible. Just because things are heating up in the stratosphere, our water is a little contaminated, and there are workers being mistreated, we're not going to just STOP spending money. Unfortunately, despite all of its externalities, the economic show must go on. So if businesses and corporations are actually working to reduce their environmental impact and to be more socially responsible (see "echoing eco" to find out how to tell whether they are greenwashing or not), we should be supporting those venues as opposed to other ones.
But sustainability is not just about production - a big chunk of a sustainable transformation will have to happen on the consumption side of the market. Is all of the hype about sustainability and "going green" really going to have a substantial impact on reforming the unsustainable way that Americans overconsume?
Green marketing gets the idea out there, it certainly puts some concept of sustainability on the average person's radar - and this is great. But just because it's popular, I don't think that tomorrow, everyone in America is going to wake up and think, "I'm going to go green today." And for those who do decide to hop on the green bandwagon because it is trendy and cool, how does this ensure that these people are living the message of the movement? One of the problems that I see now that the 'green' revolution has reached the tipping point is that it has become so trendy that it's hard to distinguish between those businesses, people and practices that are truly environmentally sustainable and those that are just a part of the fad.
Sure, you can wear a shirt with a recycling symbol on it, you can buy a hybrid car, you can put solar panels on your house; but if you have three closets full of organic cotton clothes, if you drive your hybrid 500 mi each week, or if your McMansion is running on 10% solar power, I don't think that we can really call this a sustainable lifestyle. (For example, above we see Julia Robert's new eco-friendly Mansion - do you see the oxymoron in this?)The truth I think that green marketing, media, and messaging is an effective way of getting this "green" movement started. But these tools alone will not dismantle the master's unsustainable house - they can only make waves to a certain extent. Hopefully, they were serve their purpose of introducing the vague idea of environmental sustainability into the mainstream, so that we can build a truly sustainable culture of simply living and environmental/social consciousness from there.
"Live simply so others may simply live."
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