If you’ve picked up a newspaper or magazine in the last three or four days, you will have inevitably noticed (if not on the front page then prominently featured inside) the word “green” in the title of the edition/main article/theme of entire issue. As I sit typing this, there is a magazine on the table in front of me (one of those supplemental magazines that the Globe and Mail throws in for free every week or so…you know, the type of magazine – either fashion-oriented, vacation-oriented, guys-who-like-cars-oriented – that you’d be hard pressed to have ever remembered seeing in a retail store, even one which boasts a million magazines). It’s called Green Living and the front page trumpets “CANADA’S GREENEST CITIES OF TOMORROW” (with an asterisk at the bottom ” * Is yours on the list?”). The Sunday New York Times Magazine was dedicated to this colour also. As were the entrails of most newspapers.
You see, this Wednesday (April 22, 2009) is Earth Day. Get it? Earth Day? Green? Ohhhhh!, I’m sure you’re exclaiming, perhaps even tapping your noggin for foolishly neglecting to remember. Not that it’s a holiday or anything. No, Earth Day is not a holiday. Not even the banks get it off (though I would’ve expected them to sneakily insert an Earth Day Eve into their schedules). It is, however, that time of year – like Poetry Month – when, for 5 minutes, we try to give a shit about something we do a much better job of conceptualizing when it’s not being shoved down our throats by people who hold diplomas in Event Management.
Expect between now (Monday) and then (Wednesday) to be inundated with the environment, Mother Earth, drowning polar bears and the like. This is not to say that I’m one of those Ayn Rand-ian right-wing troglodytes who thinks climate change is a socialist scheme. That is not my point (and I’m happy it’s not my point today because it’s extremely convoluted and I did poorly in math). My point is that, in the same breath that these newspapers and magazines (and websites!) roll-out the green, there are hundreds of articles about how to “buy” green. Getting back to Green Living, the sad little magazine in front of me, some other articles listed on the front are “WHERE TO PUT YOUR ECO DOLLARS” and “20 Budget Smart Enviro-Tips” [sic?!]. Even in the otherwise lefty (rather Jeckyll/Hyde lefty, if you ask me) Toronto weekly, NOW Magazine, the emphasis is almost as enthusiastically consumerist as it is on scaring the shit out of the reader about our imminent ecopocalypsetm.
In other words, legitimate environmental concerns aside, with every Earth Day I feel as if we are facing a new Y2K (i.e. a semi-manufactured crisis that wasn’t entirely invented to make money, yet, hey, why should we stop ourselves from making a buck, hell, wouldn’t you, let’s see how long this lasts). Of course, there are substantial differences between Y2K and Earth Day: the latter is borne from a need to undo and/or mitigate the effects of society’s footprint on the earth, the former was borne from a need to undo and/or mitigate the effects of a bit of coding corner-cutting. There are (and were) legitimate concerns in either scenario. There were (and are) also people who would do anything to cash-in on a fear-based trend which increasingly loses its reason due to the insatiable North American need – even in our present economic situation – to commodify e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Basically: isn’t getting people to buy a lot of stuff, green or not, counter-intuitive to the philosophy of reduce, re-use, and recycle? Furthermore – and this is me – I worry when a word (outside of religion) gets so stretched, mistook, mythologized, and appropriated that its meaning eventually loses all efficacy (see: sustainability).
I do not argue with the want or wish to use the word green, or to associate it with legitimate environmental concerns (because they are legion). I just wish it – and by virtue, Earth Day – did not seem like a St. Patrick’s Day Parade where everyone – Irish or not – wraps themselves in the colour without really caring to know why, so long as there is the remote promise of an unrelated happiness (this goes for Valentine’s as well, sad to say). The thing is – and I hope my father isn’t reading this – we as a society can afford to misinterpret (or forget) what St. Patrick’s Day means, but allowing our concerns over the environment to be cynically co-opted by purely commercial interests – whose concern for the environment is more or less a marketing strategy – is more disconcerting to this writer.
I’ll take the Earth. You keep the green.
[P.S. Just as I was about to upload this, I received an email from a local limo company who fancies I am interested in their services. The subject: “Join Us at the Green Living Show”. A limo company!]
