Green is lost. It is dazed and confused. Despite the good and noble intentions behind it, the attribution and its related movements generally have fallen short of any depth of meaning for sound environmental practice.
To have a “green” attitude or a “green” position has become misleading and down right false to a very wide spectrum of users. As a result, many of the nobler businesses and efforts are thus affected.
This is a trend that has developed over the years and is picked up even by global media. In a Business Week article published early this year titled, Is the Green Movement a Passing Fancy?, the author, Ursula M. Burns, writes in the lead sentence: “Please tell me that green isn’t a fad.” Well, all things point to the fact that it is not only just an overplayed fad whose time is spent, but it is becoming more of a scarlet letter for true environmental progress and practice being made and will be made in our global society.
The general world population does not see “green” as the end-all for environmental practices and products. I had never really heard of green being the moniker for conservation and sustainability until the late 1980s and early 1990s when green marketing became the current best mechanism for a company to sell its products. This green-washing had a vastly negative effect on many companies — not to mention public trust. Losing public confidence is never good.
Everything Green?
Today, green-washing has come back, albeit in many different forms. According to Scot Case, the executive director of EcoLogo, an environmental certification and standards company, companies are using green to market their goods in response to the recently growing public interest in buying green products. “A lot of people have just started calling everything green,” he says.
History tells us that the Green Revolution started as a renovation of agricultural practices around the late 1940s and early 1950s. The word green has its roots in the Old English verb “growan” which means “to grow.” So the Green Revolution made sense, but today’s use is mostly disjointed from that.
Today’s True Green Power
Unfortunately, the true green power underlying and even undermining the very health of our global society today is money. That power, both sadly and inherently, makes all things happen and determines what products and technologies remain and even thrive in business.
Just take the energy industry for instance. Fossil fuels, a non-renewable energy source, are where the money is and cannot be done without because they supply roughly 86% of global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, tidal, etc., including nuclear — make up the rest. With today’s total energy demand at about 500 quadrillion BTUs and projected to increase another 44% over the next two decades (International Energy Annual 2009, Energy Information Administration), fossil fuels will remain the major money machine.
Green never can and never will be an industry.
Yet, there is a new green emerging from this pandemonium. People and businesses worldwide know that only sound, practical and compatible environmental practice in business and living is essential to societal health and, believe it or not, the health of our global economy.
The world’s population is growing at increasingly exponential rates, and non-renewable sources for basic human needs – like fossil fuels — are absolutely running out. Provisions of even the most basic human needs — like potable water, power, food production — will fail to enable survival of the human species without smart management and intelligent progress. Naturally, that wisdom means adhering to the basic principles of working with what we have in sustainable and healthy ways.
A new, silent green is evolving today where people just do it and do not misuse it, exploit it or make and claim “the new best thing.” It is not a fad, but a vitally important and permanent fixture of our society. It is the continuum of value systems of life humankind has strived for throughout its existence, but now with a greater knowledge of how things work and how people work together. It is all the spectrum colors of the planet as it clicks in with the rest of the universe. It is, simply, ecology, the term whose literal meaning is the study and consideration of our home, the place where we live.
There is no right or wrong in this new green. At its core is a collaborative effort among all parties to make it work to the health and economic benefit of all. It is ushering in, slowly but surely, a new system of values where human rights, health, pursuit of happiness, productivity, business, politics, civil rights, consumerism, education and all other aspects of life are on the same page with the same objective of sustainability. The one point everyone can understand and agree on today is that sustainability means survivability.
Perhaps the slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” is the perfect example for all walks of life. Add to that innovation, education, and foresight, and everyone prospers.
Just don’t tell us you’re green.
– Eric McLamb
————————
What do you think?
Do you think that there is a tendency for people and businesses to talk about being “green” without actually following important environmental practices? Is the title of “green” a good choice, or should environmental practice and sustainability be commonplace as to not require a label? Should all businesses’ standings and approvals inherently be judged by their environmental and sustainable practices? Weigh in with your comments!
