Every month I participate in a Green Moms Blogging Carnival. This time, we are to blog about the commercialization of holidays. At first, I thought of recycling the Halloween post I wrote for Groovy Green last year. That would have been too easy, and also I have a subversive idea I want to put out to all green mommy bloggers during this holiday season.
I have played before with the “Green Drop” idea, a green twist on artist Ryan Watkins-Hughes‘ original shopdrop concept:
shopdrop: to covertly place merchandise on display in a store; a form of “culture jamming”, reverse shoplift.
For the “Mommy Green Drop” Initiative we will only shopdrop green things. Imagine for instance, going to a Target store before Halloween, and taping subversive flyers on the back of items in the costume section. These would be flyers you would have prepared ahead of time and brought with you into the store. Or you could create almost identical replica of costumes sold in the store, with your own green twist of course! Part of the fun, is performing the shopdropping unnoticed, while documenting with your camera – video or still -, and then reporting in your blog. There are no limits to what you can do, really.
To keep track of your participation in the project, I have created a “greendrop” Twitter account, where you can input your “greendrop” performances, with links to documenting posts in your blog. All you need is to email me for the password. If you do not have a blog, you can upload your videos on YouTube, or your photos on Flickr, again using the Twitter account as a central log.
I am feeling excited just writing about this project. If enough of us get involved, we can create a big green ripple in the holiday shopping frenzy.
La Marguerite 
This is most humorous. You should get all the creative crafty folks like the indy Etsy shops involved somehow.
To Green Moms,
If you drop anything at a store near my house, please let me know, or better yet please just drop it on my doorstep, and please make it one of these:
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/
These little (well, big) gadgets are about as green as you can get, and I’d like to have just one to generate electricity and experiment with. PLEASE!
You need not wrap it. And, I promise to tell all the neighbors and try my best to create a green wave in my area. Or, if you drop it at a retail shop nearby, you’ll be sure to cause a big stir among all the retailers.
If any generous Green Mom out there would like my address, please let me know.
Cheers,
Jeff
Marguerite (and other readers here):
Here’s another project which may be of interest to you. Lot of courageous people are putting in lot of time in raising consumer awareness about environmental issues but it is still considered a fringe concern and most people tend to frown on people with a ‘green’ message, if you will. I think they still think of it as either a tree-hugger or Green-peace disruptive action mode activist or as overblown hype. That’s the reason for the lack of concern, as expressed by Marguerite’s friends over dinner (as narrated by her in previous post) or many others who we all run into. Individual choices and decisions is where it all begins… and that takes effort and a little sacrifice. Unfortunately, not everyone is ready for that!
But equally there are many who are concerned but may not know where to get the information or what to do about it.
Anyways, let me stop preaching to the converted. Here’s the link I came by to share!
—
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
The Story of Stuff… with Annie Leonard.
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
If you live in the middle of the desert and have lots of space, you perhaps do need one of those solar concentrator troughs, Jeff.
Great suggestion, MamaBird. I will take it to the Etsy folks.
Sanjeev, yes, Story of Stuff is a great video. I shared it on this blog last year. Thanks for bringing it up again.
Jeff, I am afraid I have some much much smaller things in mind. 🙂
I picked up your link at Green Beans. I love this idea. My mind is spinning on how it could be done in the grocery store to bring awareness to what’s actually on the shelves. I’ll let you know if I actually get it together to do something and I hope you write if you do too.