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Greenwashing is a gateway drug

In Amy Westervelt's recent Sustainable Industries interview with L. Hunter Lovins, Lovins makes the case that greenwashing is good. "Hypocrisy is the first step to real change." I'm inclined to agree.

Greenwashing is a symptom of the business community's recognition that the public is demanding that they do better, and prepared to reward those that do. The quickest response is simply to re-brand / spin your company to make it look greener (greenwash). Lovins cites General Electric's "ecomagination" ad campaign as an example of profound greenwashing, with GE basically taking their existing products and slapping an 'eco' label on them (remember the dancing elephant?).

This is rampant in the building products market as well. A roofing product manufacturer recently asked me how they could make their product "look more green." Their marketing materials touted the environmental attributes of their product (greenwash), and he wanted input on whether they got the spin right for architects. I resisted the urge to choke him, and instead encouraged him to deliberately asses the environmental impacts of their current operations and identify strategies for reducing/improving that impact. Identify some areas for improvement (less toxic materials, reduce waste, etc.), make improvements, and then tout those improvements once there is a story to tell.

The greenwashing is free, but once you hold yourself up as 'green(er)', increased scrutiny follows. Plus, no one likes to be a hypocrite. Once you say you're doing it, there's a tendency to start doing it. In GE's case, Lovins points out that once GE saw their 'eco' products had twice the sales volume of the regular products, "all of a sudden a company without a green bone in its body has one--attached to its wallet."

• April 5, 2008 by Jim Nicolow
• 1 comments

• tags: architecture building GE Lovins marketing

Does green travel offset emissions.... or just your guilt?

Travel to an eco-resort abroad and mitigate guilt over the GHG emissions used to get there all at the same time! Ah, the confusing lexicon of ecotourism and green travel might be just enough to get me to visit this website on environmentally-friendly hotelsbut I sure wouldn't rely on it. I'll get to that shortly.

Regardless of where we travel, environmental impacts follow our every step. Common sense says the farther you jet from home, the greater the impact. This impact may include impact on the climate not just from all air travel, but from the jet YOU are flying on. (This report (PDF) explains how jets impact climate change through something called "radiative forcing.") Now that's scary. Ecotourism and green travel are implicitly about impacts, opportunity and action related to SCALE and DIMENSIONS of responsibility.

--GHG Emissions: Greenhouse gas emissions from any mode of travel (an issue of policy, particularly that of the airlines where industry analysts recommend a separate surcharge that can be paid voluntarily by the traveler and if not, 100% of the tab is picked up by the airline itself)

--Site Specific Impacts: This is where credible conservation efforts in lodging can make a difference (water, energy, landscaping, material use and disposal)

--Site Location and Culture: Implications of the lodging site and how we interact with the local community (with respect or with bare chested plunder?)

You can stay in a spiffy lodging that has undertaken scores of environmental initiatives but how does this balance play out if it's located in a place where raw sewage is dumped into tropical waters and toxic trash is burned? It's not just the eco-lodge that matters but the implicit values, plans and actions of the host community and country. Regardless of what you find, speak up and reward good lodges and contact local/regional tourism agencies if you don't like you see -- the industry is acutely sensitive to guest opinion.

In many ways it doesn't matter what label you put on lodgings that are adopting a continuum of green programs as long as they are doing something and are not overstating its accomplishments. The problems with a site like environmentallyfriendlyhotels.com are many:

1. The definitions bear no resemblance to any credible standard (Green Seal, Green Leaf, Green Globe 21, ASEAN Green Hotel Standard, ISO14001/4) and are vague enough to open the door wide open for greenwashing: the research is based on standard web searches from what I can see and I know from my own work that most lodgings do not disclose the nitty-gritty of their engineering and other progress for a few reasons (time, don't think guests care, not considered their core mission in many cases or not practiced in explaining what their programs mean); and

2. The properties are not audited and end up on the site with mere self-congratulation on a worst case basis- you say so and I believe it.

You would be better off going to the venerable Ecotourism Society or the research site intute: social sciences which has a smorgasbord of legitimate sustainable tourism links such as Planeta and Sustainable Travel International.

Happy Trails!

• April 10, 2008 by Heidi Siegelbaum
• 8 comments

• tags: certifications ecotourism green travel sustainable tourism

It's not just salmon: take a fresh look at our fishing & eating habits

I was saddened to see today's news that West Coast salmon fishing had to be abruptly halted due to a 93% freefall in the number of spawning fish over the last six years. Just like I've urged a deep look at how our short-term energy decisions have us on the road to a dangerous climate future, near-sighted fishing choices are dooming more species (and the fishermen that depend on them) toward collapse every year.

I just read much of Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean, which is a moving exploration of the world's fishing industry. Safina describes many amazing creatures that land-dwellers like myself only get to see when we're looking down, fork-in-hand, at our dinner plates. The focus of the book is on the bluefin tuna, their dwindling numbers, and the powerful industries from Japan to New England that exacerbate the situation.

The behavior he describes of overfishing until fishery collapse is nothing new. Even Cape Cod couldn't prevent the destruction of its namesake. The National Marine Fisheries Service is mostly led by industry interests who set annual quotas that are too high (and often unenforced) to allow fish to recover from the overfishing of the last few decades.

With a world human population still on the rise, the strain on natural resources continues to increase. Now that food prices are causing riots throughout the developing world, it is clear to see that these strains seriously threaten both the health of the world's poor and the security of home countries. This situation may not get under control unless we quickly stop the growth of current food-to-fuels programs like corn ethanol in the US and we become educated food consumers - lowering our consumption of fish that are not responsibly caught and of meat since it's so much more efficient for us to get energy directly from vegetables (notice I didn't say everyone has to be vegetarian - but lowering consumption is a great strategy to help the poor not have to compete with so many cows and pigs for basic foods).

While part of the recent decline in Sacramento is due to natural variations, I hope any West Coast fishing interests that lobbied for high salmon quotas these past few years take their folly to heart. If they had lowered their hauls they probably wouldn't have had to completely halt their operations this year (and now taxpayers are gonna have to bail them out). So, what's best for jobs? A sustainable environment that breeds abundance and fishermen (or loggers -- you name it) who are patient enough to understand our world's natural limits.

We didn't learn enough from the tragedies of the bison and the passenger pigeon. We haven't yet learned enough from the collapse of most of the predatory fish of our wild oceans to set up the policies and consumer habits that foster recovery for those that haven't yet fully collapsed.

The question is, are we smart enough as a nation and a global community to finally take this story of the Chinook salmon's collapse to heart and lower the quotas for fishing across the board to levels that allow a recovery in populations and a larger yield for the fishermen of tomorrow?

• April 11, 2008 by Dennis Markatos
• 2 comments

• tags: energy fishing oceans salmon sustainability

Buying green to avert global warming is like #%*&ing for chastity

Michael Pollan's latest piece in the New York Times Magazine, "Why Bother?" tells us why we should bother.

Pollan parallels Wendell Berry's premise from the 70's that the environmental crisis was essentially a crisis of character. While Berry bemoaned people who were quick to write a check to an environmental organization but slow to reduce their own squandering of fossil fuels, Pollan highlights our current equivalent of "people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos."

The same could be said about our fascination with buying green. Whether greenwash or legitimate environmental claims, I worry that buying our way out of our problems, simply by buying more of the right stuff, is fundamentally flawed.

Pollan instead imagines the sort of nonlinear, unpredictable viral social change that brought down the Eastern bloc, calling for readers to "find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or voting." For Pollan, it's planting a garden.

"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."

Zucchini, anyone?

• April 22, 2008 by Jim Nicolow
• 7 comments

• tags: buying green gardening Michael Pollan