Category | Arts & Living

What it means to be GREEN

Published on August 26, 2008 by The Sentinel

     In recent years, we have all been inundated with news stories, Web
sites, public service announcements, advertisements and countless other
media bearing the message, “Go green.”

    But what does going green really mean? Is it a social movement or an industry buzzword, a marketing ploy or a way of life? Should you pay close attention, or is all this green stuff a fad that will fade as fast as the Discman and Classmates.com?

    Honestly, yes, going green is a trend. But the green movement is a bandwagon worth jumping on for a number of reasons, even if you do not believe in melting polar ice caps and feel okay shelling out a fiver for a gallon of gas.

    The green movement is all about differences of degree, or shades of green, if you will. An urbanite who takes MARTA to work one day a week instead of driving alone could be called a nice light shade, while a college student who drops out, moves to a cave, and subsists on locally grown vegetables would be a deep forest green.

    Though there are more definitions of the word than there are shades of green, at its heart, the idea behind going green is to find ways to tread more lightly on the earth.

    One of the best ways to go green is with your greenbacks. While setting your thermostat two degrees higher during the summer and carpooling do make a positive impact on the environment, businesses and governments have the potential to make a greater impact on a larger scale.

    Refusing to buy from polluters, from companies that exploit workers, or from agribusinesses that treat animals inhumanely hits producers where it hurts and is the surest way to draw attention to the fact that we want a greener, healthier global society. Take the current price of oil, for example. 

    Sure we can blame everyone from foreign dictators to oil speculators to anti-drilling environmentalists (nobody’s perfect, right?) for the high price of our favorite petroleum product, but the fact remains that oil is so high because there is a great demand for it.

    When you show producers you mean business by opening your wallet only for cleanly produced, fairly traded, reusable products, their bottom lines will suffer, and they will start to listen.

    We think of green as an idealistic movement, right? But being green actually involves quite a bit of skepticism, too. Anyone who seriously attempts to go green will sooner or later run into the dreaded practice of greenwashing. Greenwashing is an attempt by some unscrupulous businesspeople to cast a product or service in an environmentally friendly light when, in reality, it is not; in some cases, the product or service is not appreciably different from others on the market. In other words, more time and money are spent greening up the image than greening up the product line. A common way to greenwash is to emblazon products with a logo like “Certified by the Eco-Friendly Council”. Upon investigation, it turns out that the Eco-Friendly Council is an in-house department and so its certification is essentially meaningless. As with any purchase in the marketplace, be wary when the green value of a product seems too good to be true.

    The process of going green can be overwhelming for even the crunchiest granolas out there. Even if you walk everywhere, buy only local products, and power your home entirely on solar energy, there are always ways to be greener.

    But if you choose your steps with care, spend your hard earned money on eco-friendly products, and make the health of the earth and your fellow human beings a top priority, you will get there.

    Just do not let your new green-consciousness end up in the landfill with your Discman. Mother Nature is counting on you to stay green long after going green loses its appeal.