‘Green Gone Wrong’: Can Capitalism Save the Planet? by Heather Rogers
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Heather Rogers warns about the dangers of buying into an “eco-consumer” mind-set with “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution”
She says green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress. [br]
Heather Rogers warns about the dangers of buying into an “eco-consumer” mind-set with “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution”
She says green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress. [br]
Heather Rogers warns about the dangers of buying into an “eco-consumer” mind-set with “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution”
She says green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress. [br]
Ms. Rogers is a muckraking investigative reporter who is also the author of “Gone Tomorrow: the Hidden Life of Garbage.”
She says corporate America has led us into thinking that we can save the earth mainly by buying things like compact fluorescent light bulbs, hybrid gas-electric cars and carbon offsets.
“The new green wave, typified by the phrase ‘lazy environmentalism,’ is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice,” Ms. Rogers complains, according to this review in the New York Times.
“This brand of armchair activism actualizes itself most fully in the realm of consumer goods; through buying the right products we can usher our economic system into the environmental age.” …
“Green Gone Wrong,” to be released later this month, doesn’t just go after easy targets like big corporations that she says are clearly more interested in making money than saving the earth.
She is also critical of fashionably green rock bands like Coldplay, whose members fly around the world and think they can erase their sizable carbon footprints by planting trees in developing countries. In Coldplay’s case, many of the trees died. [br]
Indeed, Ms. Rogers is so scornful of the mainstream environmental movement that a lot of her points could be used by its enemies, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who are always looking for ammunition.
Even if you don’t agree with all of Ms. Rogers’ assertions — and I don’t — they are not so easily dismissed. “Green Gone Wrong” is well-written and exhaustively reported.
The author went to places like Uruguay, Borneo and India to show problems she says the green movement has inadvertently created….
It would have been better had Ms. Rogers delved more deeply into another of her suggestions: instead of buying green, we simply need to buy less stuff.
She seems reluctant to push this too hard because it’s a truly radical idea that flies in the face of capitalism — green or not.
“Around the world, many politicians, the conventional energy sector and manufacturers of all kinds oppose any major reduction in consumption,” Ms. Rogers writes.
“If people start using less, then economies based on consumption — such as that of the United States, where buying goods and services comprises 70 percent of all economic activity — will be forced to undergo a colossal transformation.”
