Green in the mainstream

Business

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09 Oct 2009

Great. But is it that great? Do all these things just help us to ease our conscience without having to change the way we think or behave? We want to have all the coffee and chocolate we ever had but we don't want to feel guilty for it, so we choose fairtrade. The truth is that fairtrade plantations now have to produce so much to supply western needs that they've come to look more like the industrial plantations they were meant to replace. That means the ethics of helping small-farmers make a decent living are disappearing. When you think about it, we could just have a bit less chocolate and coffee - but the massive new green and ethical economy means we don't have to change our lifestyles at all.
It's the same with carbon offsetting; we can go on producing and consuming whatever we like so long as we buy our way out of it - but, even if offsetting is proved to work, carbon is just part of the problem - other parts of the problem are over-consumption, finite resources, waste . . The same with driving - getting a hybrid car does something to address the problem of emissions, but it doesn't really encourage us to drive less, produce fewer cars or change (in any meaningful way) the way we get around.
While we definitely need the mainstream to wake up to the environment challenge, and business to start getting greener, maybe we need to make a bigger mental leap too. In a way the real green movement is still a fringe one - the movement occupied by people passionate enough about saving the world to change their lifestyles in some fundamental way. While fairtrade, for example, has woken us up to a really pressing problem, it provides as many excuses to be lazy about the problem as it does reasons to try solving it.
Before you buy the fairtrade coffee from Brazil or the organic tomatoes from Spain, or before you offset the emissions from your 4-wheel-drive or flight to Peru, it's always worth asking the question: do I even need this? That's the question we've forgotten to ask.