[Dryerase] The Alarm!--Green Consumerism

[The Alarm!Newswire]

Shopping our way to a better world?
Can “green consumerism” save the planet while ensuring social justice?
 
By Fhar Miess
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective

As Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin, founders of Global Exchange, are 
quick to point out, it’s not often that you’ll find multinational 
automobile manufacturer Toyota Motor Corporation sharing an exhibition 
hall with the radical environmental group Earth First!, but this is 
precisely the scenario produced by the organizers of the Green Festival 
in San Francisco this last weekend (November 9–10).

The festival was meant to highlight the movement for sustainable 
economies, ecological balance and social justice and was jointly 
organized by Global Exchange, Co-op America and Bioneers, mainstays of 
that movement establishment in the US.  Organizers brought together an 
eclectic mix of purveyors of fair trade coffee, fair trade and 
“eco-friendly” textiles and crafts, solar panels, “sustainable” lumber 
and building materials, “clean” transportation solutions and health 
foods, along with environmental foundations, “sustainable” investment 
advocates, consumer and worker cooperatives, social justice groups, 
body workers and spiritual healers.

While the majority of the exhibition hall was devoted to the buying and 
selling of merchandise—with the typical trade fair noisy ambiance of 
industry folk talking shop, PA system interruptions and offers of free 
samples—the festival also featured a line-up of speakers, including 
such vehement anti-corporate voices as Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now,” 
and Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of CounterPunch.

Several of the featured “partners” of the event were large 
multinational corporations, Toyota of San Francisco being the most 
obvious with two hybrid cars on the exhibition hall floor.  Across the 
aisle from Toyota’s exhibit was that of Stonyfield Farms, the nation’s 
fourth largest yogurt company, which uses organic milk.  Stonyfield’s 
CEO, Gary Hirschberg, recently followed the lead of Ben Cohen (who also 
attended the festival) and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream 
in selling a chunk of his company to a large corporation.  Unlike Cohen 
& Greenfield, who sold their entire operation to Unilever, the largest 
packaged foods company in the world (which incidentally acquired 
Slimfast diet products on the same day), Hirschberg agreed only to sell 
a minority 40% stake in his company to Group Danone, the largest dairy 
company in the world, so he could remain in control.

Still, Hirschberg is unapologetic about joining forces with the 
corporate bigwigs.  In a recent article he writes, “I must admit that 
becoming part of the mainstream, while aesthetically unappealing, has 
nevertheless been THE goal.”  Hirshberg’s goal, like that of many of 
his business colleagues represented at the Green Festival, is first and 
foremost to capture market share.  If it can be done with a 
“sustainable” food source, then so much the better.

Chris Pomfret, Brands Director of Birds Eye Walls, Unilever’s Frozen 
Food products company in the UK, went further to state that 
sustainability is not important simply because eco-friendly and healthy 
products can be marketed at a premium, but because the very survival of 
the company depends upon sustainability.  In a March 2002 speech, he 
declared, “if our business is to continue, then we need to sustain our 
sources of supply and the only way to do that is to make them 
sustainable.”

But that self-preservation is not just an abstract corporate response, 
it is also the personal response of individual business people.  
Jeffery Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, spoke at the Green 
Festival on the subject of “capitalism at a crossroads.”  Near the 
beginning of his presentation, he posed the question, “is capitalism 
itself the problem?  Should we be looking for some other structure?  My 
answer is no,” he said.  “I mean, I’m a business person, and I benefit 
from the system that in some ways I don’t like, but I’m not ready to 
throw it away.”

To be fair, Hollender, like most well-off green business people, does 
exhibit a sincere concern for some ecological and social justice 
values; otherwise, they never would have made it through the screening 
process that potential Green Festival vendors had to pass through.  But 
the personal and institutional investment of Hollender and his 
colleagues in a capitalist economy puts him at odds with many of the 
anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists at the festival.

So, why were these eco-friendly, pro-business firms willing to share 
the event with people who consider their consumer capitalist practices 
antithetical to lasting social justice and ecological diversity?  
According to Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, organizers of the event 
“never hid the politics of the event and…many of the businesses that 
participated felt that that was OK.  Many of them are in total 
agreement and those who aren’t I still think felt it was an important 
demographic group for them to reach.”

And this marketing potential cuts both ways.  Patrick Reinsborough, an 
ecology activist, explored the flip side: “it’s an interesting model to 
create events that really appeal to a mainstream niche, to have a trade 
show and even the crass ‘come do your Christmas shopping and buy 
environmentally-friendly products’ and bring in a wide group of people 
with that and then hit them with a much deeper message.”

As he points out, however, “it’s possible to achieve an ecologically 
sane world that’s not necessarily democratic or just.…I’m trying not to 
be dismissive of the kind of organizing that happens around green 
consumerism but to figure out how we can bridge this entry point for a 
lot of middle-class American people and make sure that we’re actually 
exposing them to a deeper analysis.”  He suggests that examples such as 
the movements of landless peasants, small farmers and indigenous people 
might lead to such an analysis:  one that points to the need for 
alternative economic arrangements that honor human and ecological value 
over that of capital.

While the environmental movement takes a great deal of flak for levying 
plenty of criticisms without suggesting any solutions, Reinsborough 
notes that “corporations are largely appropriating the sort of 
solution-oriented end of the environmental movement,” for instance, the 
solutions of smaller ecological design vendors present at the festival. 
  This appropriation puts activists even more on the defensive.

The jumbled mix of politics and commerce made this festival no 
exception.  Reinsborough told of how he had forgotten his wallet on his 
way to the festival, so he had no option of buying anything.  “It made 
me acutely aware,” he says, “of how little interaction there actually 
was aside from buying and selling.”

Chris Carlsson, who was one of the people to first popularize the 
Critical Mass bicycle ride in San Francisco ten years ago, was also at 
the festival, and he shared some of his own thoughts on the event:  
“There’s no critique that there might be something wrong with the 
buying and selling of the products of human labor or of human time 
itself.  There’s no critique of wage labor or anything else.…On the 
other hand,” he says, for people who are new to green consumerism, “I 
would argue that this [event] probably has a radicalizing impact, where 
people can see how many alternatives there really are, already present, 
technologically and socially, that represent themselves here through 
the strange veil of capitalist greenage.”

However, he counters, “I’m quite sure we won’t shop our way to a better 
world.”

“The reproduction of ‘fair’ business practices, as opposed to 
NON-business practices seems to me to speak more to the problem than 
the solution,” says Carlsson.  “I like things where people are able to 
engage in direct connections and make alternatives in a way that 
escapes the logic of buying and selling.  It’s not always easy to do 
because you’re always stuck paying the bills, as I am, too.  But when 
people can break out of that logic, they get a taste of something 
different and it leads in a more radical direction, psychologically, 
much more quickly.”
 
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