[R-G] Eco-junk: Green consumerism will not save the biosphere

[Anthony Fenton]

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Eco-junk: Green consumerism will not save the biosphere August 20, 2007
By George  Monbiot

It wasn't meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told us  
that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I  
can't claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or are  
even consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas yet  
to come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world we'll  
inhabit if we don't sort ourselves out.

With rising sea levels and more winter rain (and remember that when  
the trees are dormant and the soils saturated there are fewer places  
for the rain to go) all it will take is a freshwater flood to  
coincide with a high spring tide and we have a formula for full-blown  
disaster. We have now seen how localised floods can wipe out  
essential services and overwhelm emergency workers. But this month's  
events don't even register beside some of the predictions now  
circulating in learned journals(1). Our primary political struggle  
must be to prevent the break-up of the Greenland and West Antarctic  
ice sheets. The only question now worth asking about climate change  
is how.

Dozens of new books appear to provide an answer: we can save the  
world by embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for  
example, the Guardian published an extract of the new book by  
Sheherazade Goldsmith, who is married to the very rich  
environmentalist Zac, in which she teaches us "to live within  
nature's limits"(2). It's easy: just make your own bread, butter,  
cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs,  
goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well,  
what are you waiting for?

Her book also contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across  
as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political  
change, there is not a word: you can save the planet in your own  
kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was  
reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take  
a look. He flicked through it for a moment then summed up the problem  
in seven words. "This is for people who don't work."

None of this would matter, if the Guardian hadn't put her photo on  
the masthead last week, with the promise that she could teach us to  
go green. The media's obsession with beauty, wealth and fame blights  
every issue it touches, but none more so than green politics. There  
is an inherent conflict between the aspirational lifestyle journalism  
which makes readers feel better about themselves and sells country  
kitchens and the central demand of environmentalism: that we should  
consume less. "None of these changes represents a sacrifice",  
Sheherazade tells us. "Being more conscientious isn't about giving up  
things." But it is: if, like her, you own more than one home when  
others have none.

Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers,  
giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section  
on ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic,  
buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says  
nothing about buying less.

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely  
swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would  
champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for  
unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of  
the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now  
drowning in a tide of ecojunk. Over the past six months, our coatpegs  
have become clogged with organic cotton bags, which - filled with  
packets of ginseng tea and jojoba oil bath salts - are now the  
obligatory gift at every environmental event. I have several  
lifetimes' supply of ballpoint pens made with recycled paper and  
about half a dozen miniature solar chargers for gadgets I don't possess.

Last week the Telegraph told its readers not to abandon the fight to  
save the planet. "There is still hope, and the middle classes, with  
their composters and eco-gadgets, will be leading the way."(3) It  
made some helpful suggestions, such as a "hydrogen-powered model  
racing car", which, for £74.99, comes with a solar panel, an  
electrolyser and a fuel cell(4). God knows what rare metals and  
energy-intensive processes were used to manufacture it. In the name  
of environmental consciousness, we have simply created new  
opportunities for surplus capital.

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social  
status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind  
turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they  
love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see  
how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that  
buying such products encourages us to think more widely about  
environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be  
depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation - a  
substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met  
by shopping.

The middle classes rebrand their lives, congratulate themselves on  
going green, and carry on buying and flying as much as ever before.  
It is easy to picture a situation in which the whole world  
religiously buys green products, and its carbon emissions continue to  
soar.

It is true, as the green consumerists argue, that most people find  
aspirational green living more attractive than dour puritanism. But  
it can also be alienating. I have met plenty of farm labourers and  
tenants who are desperate to start a small farm of their own, but  
have been excluded by what they call "horsiculture": small parcels of  
agricultural land being bought up for pony paddocks and hobby farms.  
In places like Surrey and the New Forest, farmland is now fetching up  
to £30,000 an acre as city bonuses are used to buy organic lifestyles 
(5). When the new owners dress up as milkmaids then tell the excluded  
how to make butter, they run the risk of turning environmentalism  
into the whim of the elite.

Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party  
pooper, the spectre at the feast, the ghost of Christmas yet to come.  
Against the shiny new world of organic aspirations you are forced to  
raise drab and boringly equitable restraints: carbon rationing,  
contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations, coach  
lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article about  
that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.

But such measures, and the long hard political battle required to  
bring them about, are, unfortunately, required to prevent the  
catastrophe these floods predict, rather than merely to play at being  
green. Only when they have been applied does green consumerism become  
a substitute for current spending rather than a supplement to it.  
They are harder to sell, not least because they cannot be bought from  
mail order catalogues. Hard political choices will have to be made,  
and the economic elite and its spending habits must be challenged,  
rather than groomed and flattered. The multi-millionaires who have  
embraced the green agenda might suddenly discover another urgent cause.

George Monbiot has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the  
University of Essex and an honorary fellowship by Cardiff University.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Eg James Hansen et al, 2007. Climate Change and Trace Gases.  
Philiosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - A. Vol 365, pp  
1925-1954. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2052. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ 
docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf

2. Sheherazade Goldsmith (Editor in chief), 2007. A Slice of Organic  
Life. Dorling Kindersley, London.

3. Sarah Lonsdale, 19th July 2007. Take the online test to find out  
your footprint. Daily Telegraph.

4. See http://shop.tangogroup.net/PDF/H-Racer%20002.pdf

5. See http://www.lawsonfairbank.co.uk/pony-paddocks.asp

  By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 24th July 2007

--> If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not  
repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to  
Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult  
ZNet at http://www.zmag.org

--> Sustainer Forums Login:
https://www.zmag.org/sustainers/forums

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/20monbiot.cfm