10 Paths and More to Green Citizenry

As I spend more and more time in green-dom, I realize there is not just a few, but many, many ways to become a green citizen. Problems arise when we are being forced into a one green-for-all carcan. These are some of the most common types I have observed so far:

1. The extreme greenies, the ones that walk their talk, and some more. I talked about them last week in my post on ‘More Extreme Environmentalists Needed’. They are at the forefront of the green movement, have been for years, and will continue to be, as the need for higher green standards becomes more acute. 
2. The green moms, who cannot get enough of green tips to keep their little ones safe and organic. Last night, some of the green moms in my group were celebrated in a big rahrah event in Washington DC. The green mamas are taking off!  All of a sudden, there are not enough of them to make the rounds of the networks. Who would have thought, even just a year ago?
3. The green intellectuals, who spend their time thinking about strategic solutions to the big environmental problems facing us. They thrive on biodiversity loss, deforestation, climate change, overpopulation, peak oil, water crisis, . . . The bigger the issues, the better. 
4. The clean tech crowd, many of them recovering software guys. They can be found at Cafe Coupa in Palo Alto, scheming their next green venture with their engineering friends, and old VC connections. Many of them are members of Cleantech for Obama. 
5. The green political activists, who are into making sure the next green bill makes it to the floor, and gets signed. They work behind the scenes, are on a first name basis with their congressman and senator, and hassles their fellow citizens with numerous petitions. 
6. The green media people, the bloggers like me, who spend a lot of their time, writing in their own blogs, or commenting on others’ blogs. Up in the stratosphere, are some stars, like Tom Friedman whose words carry so much weight, as in Hot, Flat and Crowded. The good news is, anyone can join. All it takes is a few minute to start a blog and write a post. No geekiness required. 
7. The green scientists, a select bunch who determines what we should really be talking about. They have become the bearers of increasingly more bad news. No wonder, the Bush administration tried to shut them up. The path to green science-dom is a long and arduous one, but not without rewards. The cleantech types are loving them, and salivating over any new bit of research coming out of their labs. 
8. The green watchdogs, most often found in non profit environmental agencies. Smart, and under-payed, they enjoy the privilege from being able to cause much grief to environmental offenders. Funding is still an issue though, and they are spending too much of their time chasing after dollars to keep their organizations afloat. 
9. The green marketers, whose claim to green-ness is met with great suspicion on the part of the green watchdogs, and even ordinary citizens. They live in dread of the greenwashing word, and just want to do good while making a handsome profit. It ain’t easy, but they are getting better.
10. The good green samaritans, who go about their green lives, without great fanfare, and with the satisfaction from knowing that they are just good. They can be found in unlikely places, in poor neighborhoods, where a single mom can surprise you with her green awareness, despite having to worry about so much more. Or a teenager whose green conscience stands out from his or her otherwise clueless family.

To each, his or her green-ness. What is yours?

Read Full Post »

Wal-Mart Classifieds, Green Move or Consumerist Ploy?

Wal-Mart is getting in the online classifieds business. When I heard, I thought of it as maybe another one of their moves towards sustainability. What better than classifieds to encourage people to ‘Reduce-Reuse-Recycle‘! Then I went to the new site,

. . . and wondered if Wal-Mart‘ s intentions are as pure as I was initially led to believe. I understand the idea is in beta testing, and they may not be ready to fully integrate it into their main site. Still, this begs the question of will they? If not, they are lending their name to lure in the classifieds crowd to their main site, where of course, it is all about consuming, consuming, consuming.

For now, I am sticking to Craigslist, where citizens rule!

Read Full Post »

Playing the Money Game with Big Oil

I was catching up on my reading, going through last weekend’s Sunday New York Times, when the following ad caught my eye:

My mind still fresh from the recent media frenzy around rising gas prices, and still pondering what to do about James Hansen‘s call to action, I was not about to let this one go. And went on the Energy Tomorrow‘s website, for more. As I browsed through the site, I couldn’t help but think, boy these guys are good! The Big Oil guys are masters at twisting the truth, and washing their dirty secrets into bright green. That they are swimming in cash does not hurt either. Slick campaigns, slick website, great copy, seductive images, multimedia blitz, nothing is spared.

Of course, the first step is to expose their lies to as many people as possible, as in writing this post for instance. Next is to take concrete action, to get at them where it hurts the most, in this case the value of their companies. This is where it gets very interesting. Those tens of millions of Americans with a stake in the oil and natural gas industry, that the ad talks to, . . . imagine a campaign asking them to switch to ‘less risky stocks’, stocks that bank on the bright future of renewable energies for instance.

What do you think?

Read Full Post »

Let’s Declare Earth Day a No Shopping Day

Earth Day is approaching, and with it, waves of unease in the blogosphere. Echoing one of my earlier posts, ‘Green Festival or Celebration of Green Consumption?‘, an article in Ad Age this morning, raises the question of ‘Is Earth Day the New Christmas?‘.

Consumerism pervades our entire culture, we know that. And Earth Day is not exception. In the absence, still, of strict FTC guidelines, marketers are going to go wild with greenwashing on April 22nd. Newsweek, Target, Banana Republic, Macy’s, Toys’R’Us, Sweet Leaf Tea, Fairmont Hotels, Barbie dolls, Wal-Mart, Clorox, are amongst some of the companies that will ‘celebrate’ green, according to the Ad Age article.

I say, we go back to the original spirit of Earth Day, and we use the day as another ‘no shopping day‘ instead. Will you join me?

Read Full Post »

What Bloggers Are Saying About Sustainability

More details came out on the recent Nielsen Online report on, ‘Sustainability through the Eyes and Megaphones of the Blogosphere‘, leading to some important conclusions about the state of the conversations amongst consumers regarding all green things:

#1 The buzz around sustainability continues to increase -50% in 2007.

#2 The kind of topics bloggers are interested in, is shifting away from global environmental wellness to personal health and practical solutions:

#3 The top greenwashing sins from consumers’ perspective show a concern for consistency, authenticity, and transparency from companies:

This may give us some clues as to the media’s seeming lack of sustained interest in global warming and other global environmental issues. It may be that the conversation is continuing, but under a different form. People like to talk about tangible things, that they have a power on.

Read Full Post »

Nielsen Report Says Green Marketers Better Be Authentic and Transparent

All green marketers would do well to take note of Nielsen Online‘s new report just mentioned in Ad Age this morning. According to Jessica Hogue, research director at Nielsen Online, and author of the report, “Corporations can’t do everything in one feel swoop, but need to be authentic and transparent about the steps they are taking,” She also suggests brands, study Footprint Chronicles, Patagonia‘s recent interactive online campaign, that discloses the company’s both environmental good works and sins.

It’s time brands understand that they are in a relationship with their citizen customers.

Read Full Post »

Romancing the Eco-Hero or Greenwashing?

Jeff Huggins suggested I take a look at the new, ‘Clearing the Air‘ video from Shell Oil:

My first reaction was, how sweet and clever! What a great way to get people engaged in some otherwise boring, ‘clean’ tech story. The guy looks like Hugh Grant, and frankly, I am always a sucker for good old fashioned romance, complete with intrigue, exotic settings, and candlelight dinners. The entire 7′ film went by very fast, and I could have endured a lot more . . .

Still, I could smell greenwashing, and decided to do a bit of investigation. I did not have to go very far. One can always count on readers to surface the truth. Here, for your enjoyment, are some comments on a recent post on Green Car Congress, that featured Shell GTL technology:

‘GTL is a nightmare in CO2 terms as it wastes so much energy in making it. Don’t go there!!!‘

‘Yes it is a nightmare, but it requires no worries when using the fuel so a company can pretend they are researching alternative fuel uses while using it. If airbus were trying out bio fuels that would be a different matter. Then they would have to worry about compatibility and other problems. Thus GTL is the safe, easy way to pretend you are doing something.’

‘In addition to wasting energy producing it, if it’s from natural gas, it’s both a fossil fuel (not renewable), and not carbon neutral (so it does nothing about global warming).

Unless they are serious about sourcing second generation biofuels it does look like greenwashing. Funny because the A380 must use immense volumes of fuel.’

You get the picture . . .

Content set aside, the ‘Clearing the Air‘ video taps into an important psychological opportunity for climate fight messaging, and green communication in general. The eco-hero archetype is emerging from our collective unconscious, and elevating the climate fight to new heights, turning it into the mythical adventure of the 21st century.

Al Gore, speaking at the recent TED talks: ‘What we need is a hero generation’

 

Read Full Post »

Randy Cohen, on Why It’s Wrong to Drive in New York City

A wind of morality has been blowing all over, from the greenwashing watchddogs at Greenwashingindex, to companies broadcasting their good deeds in corporate citizenship reports, to the buzz about sustainability in the blogosphere. It is happening. JWT calls it the ‘emerging new spirit of good-citizen ethics’. Like the EcoMoms phenomenon, however, it is a movement, still confined to a fringe of the American culture.

The good citizen ethics certainly has not made its way through the streets of our cities. From The Open Planning Project in New York City, here is a very thought-provoking video on the ethics of urban automobility, featuring Randy Cohen, The Ethicist from the New York Times – thanks Kyle, for sending the video my way:

I agree with Randy Cohen that ethics cannot be left to individual moral choice. Instead ethics need to be embedded in wise policies, to be decided democratically by informed citizens. The problem of the individual car is just one example of the many environmental villains that are threatening our very existence. One precursor of ethics is consciousness. The more we watch and engage in discussions such as the one in the video, the more aware we become and the more ready we will be to define and accept a new code of ethics. That new code will make room for the consequences of our personal actions when we pollute our environment.

I am really curious to hear your thoughts on that one!

Read Full Post »

2008 Environmental Trends: Blue is In, Green is Out

Coming from JWT, my old place of work, the Ten Trends for 2008 Report has declared, ‘Blue Is the New Green‘ as one of the most significant trends for 2008:

From the 1980s onward, green has symbolized the embrace of jungles and wetlands and owls and dolphins as well as people. But even green has started to feel too limited. It’s now a subset of blue, which is coming to denote the much larger emerging new spirit of good-citizen ethics.

Environmentally, blue (denoting water) is becoming as big an issue as green (forests). The era of apparently limitless clean water supplies is ending. All over the world groundwater aquifers are getting depleted or becoming salinated. Rivers are facing overexploitation, pollution and silting. Oil spills, floating garbage, industrial pollution and algae blooms are impacting seas everywhere.

A recent report from the International Water Management Institute says that if today’s food production and environmental trends continue, water crises are likely to crop up in many parts of the world. Craig Donohue, chief executive of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, predicts that water could become a commodity on futures exchanges in much the same way as carbon emissions are traded today.

As it stands, hundreds of millions in the developing world have no clean water. Soon millions more in the developed world won’t be able to take clean water for granted either. Water management and conservation will rise up the agendas of governments and corporations around the world.

Water just might become the next oil. Yet there’s one key difference between the two precious commodities: While there are some alternatives to oil, there’s no alternative to water.

Beyond the water crisis, “blue” is becoming more prevalent in our consciousness. Take nature documentaries, the consumer agenda-setters of environmentalism. One of the first notable natural history series of the 21st century was The Blue Planet, produced by the BBC in conjunction with the Discovery Channel. It explored the oceans, which cover two-thirds of the planet, and put the notion of “environment” into a broad context for viewers. It played to audiences that were becoming increasingly familiar with satellite images of weather systems sweeping in from the blue of the seas.

Then in August 2005, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in the United States got more people thinking about the environment on a big scale. Politicians and programmers started taking a serious interest in far-off glaciers and ice sheets, and the media was filled with images of blue-white ice framed by clear blue skies and icy blue sea.

Climate change has quickly become the driver of environmentalism 2.0, and consumers all over the world understand that climate is all about the seas and the sky—both blue. Environmentalism 2.0 is already a much bigger political and consumer issue than the 1.0 version, which was largely about issues such as deforestation, the ozone layer, pollution and biodiversity. And in some ways it is more immediate: While many people have never seen a rainforest, water is everywhere and conservation is more immediately actionable.

Almost unconsciously it seems, organizations and tastemakers have been tuning in to the shift from green to blue. Mercedes-Benz has patented its latest emissions-reducing technology for diesel as “Bluetec“. In the U.K., environmental specialists are favoring blue graphics and terminology, such as Level Blue Limited, a sustainability and environmental management services provider. In France, the “Pavillon Bleu” (blue flag) is awarded to towns and pleasure ports that meet all-around environmental standards, and the Blue Plan is a French-based project working toward a sustainable future for the Mediterranean.

Somehow, “blue” terminology and graphics suggest environmental responsibility in a more contemporary and credible way than “green.” It’s as if “green” became too strongly associated with “tree huggers” and the “beards and sandals” ethos of earlier environmentalism and with brands going through the motions of environmentalism (greenwashing). Now corporations embracing environmentalism can adopt “blue” without looking as though they’re jumping on the green bandwagon.

I agree with the report. Our blue planet is ill with a high fever, and there is more to saving it than plain old environmentalism. It is going to take a worldwide movement involving the whole citizenry to heal it. The good news is, all over we can see signs of citizens rising and starting to take action. Blue citizens – I just made up that word – from all walks of life. Lee Prescott at Wal-Mart, Al Gore, the Episcopal Church, eco-geeks all over the Internet, as in Do the Green Thing, U.S. Mayors, . . . All standing up for the planet, and the human race.

Read Full Post »

Super Bowl 2008 Ads Environmental Scorecard

According to Nielsen Media Research, this Super Bowl was the most-watched ever, with a record 97.5 million viewers. This kind of audience does not get lost on advertisers, of course, and explains their readiness to spend $2.7 million dollars for a 30 seconds spot. Fox tried to maintain a semblance of objectivity and declared early on that it would decline ads from political candidates. It should be noted however that about 15 to 20 percent of Super Bowl ads go towards promoting the network’s own programs, or an equivalent of $46 million in ad spending. . .

In true Super Bowl tradition, I thought I would join the lineup of ad reviewers here and here and here, and provide my own rating of Super Bowl 2008 ads, based on an environmental scorecard. The results are not pretty. I was looking for heroes, but found villains mostly, and only one hero. Here is the list, nine altogether, of the Super Bowl 2008 Ads Environmental Villains:

• Bridgestone: When is driving fast good for the environment? Where is the 55 mph recommended speed limit?

• Audi: Power, speed, money, shoudn’t car manufacturers start selling something else?

• SobeLife Water: The Pepsi folks should know better than to sell bottled water masquerading as vitamins.

• Hyundai Genesis: More horsepower, macho advertising; you would not know global warming is happening.

• Toshiba HD DVD: No reason to cheer on my book. Does the world need yet another big toy?

• Toyota Al New 2008 Sequoia: What happens when only one person drives the thing? I am sorry but I can’t stand seeing one more SUV commercial, even from Toyota.

• GM Yukon: It’s a hybrid, but it’s still an SUV

• Shaq Vitamin Water: Coke, you are no better than Pepsi.

• Ford: Of course, you are part of the big guys’ club . . . Tough, your car can take anything.

The file for the Not So Green Exposure Project keeps getting fatter and fatter.

As for the hero, I would like to compliment Barack Obama for making the environment a prominent part of his Super Bowl ad:

The Obama ad did not appear on Fox network, but in television markets serving the 24 markets that are in play on Super Tuesday and beyond.

If you were to rate the Super Bowl ads would your scorecard look any different?

 

Read Full Post »