The obsessive love of “Green” will leave us awash in plastic. A rainbow of multicolored waste with chemicals quick to follow, soaking through all the world, and finally into our blood.
Neutral to carbon, but to other elements? No, little care is taken. A symphony of symptom doctors interested only in the fever and not the disease. And it has reached a pitch.
As have the cries of desperate neutrality. With the odd hope that, by not being “the problem,” hundreds of years of contributions—with contribution itself still far and wide—will melt away like a mere glacier. If responsibility can be denied, well that’s as good as a solution, isn’t it? At least to the self-interested denier.
“And the beauty of it all? Well if I cloak myself in the right language, the most opportune words, I can claim the mantel of ‘Green’ while only being the barest grey! Yes, I can claim neutrality on one issue, ignore all others, and minimize my cost! Maximize my revenue! What a wonder! Could anything be as perfect as that? To bat off the eyes of the masses with a noun? Not even a verb, that implies action so dangerously unlimited… but a finite noun!
Never mind the problem at hand, someone else will take care of that. Some nonprofit or government. Some other company or perhaps even myself—if there is money to be made! Because I would never solve a problem whose solution does not involve me skimming off the top. In fact, no such problem exists in my world! Only for those… other people. The ones who always seem so concerned with living instead of making money, whose veins flow (for some ridiculous reason) with blood instead of cash.”
Enough with this corporate caricature.
We now give one tenth of a thought, spread out over ten square miles, to the devastation caused by wasteful packaging and chemicals. But so far only as a gimmick; external costs once suffered by all internalized by the corporation… for the sake of selling more units and securing more profit. In the case of carbon, the bare minimum effort is put in… to maintain or increase current sale volume and not be shunned by the consumer. And when we speak of other problems? The ones that do not so easily float across the world on currents of wind or water but instead remain local? The theft of water, the pollution of local biomes, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems? We speak in silence with words whose tremors do not pass our lips, and whose meaning immediately thunks to the ground like a hunk of brass. And one day we will wonder why we did not care and why so few ears, mouths, and hands came to this cause. We will imagine, that this was not our gravest threat, that all our efforts were already spent, yes we will imagine… But mark my words as I speak thus:
These problems remain unsolved because they are not the problems of the company and the consumer. Because they cannot be denominated into money by supply and demand. Because they do not directly affect those who can pay. The economic incentive is just not there: profit-focused corporations cannot afford to help without incentive, and money-needing consumers strain at the end of the same financial leash. In this money-system, no problem disinterested in money will ever be solved—which is precisely the nature of every important problem. At best, such a problem can be a side-project.
But there are those who proclaim that this is the best system, and there is nothing to be done about its failings but compromise. “Side-projects can still create change!” They say. Suffering is essential to life, and we are merely doing our best! The circumstances are regrettable but necessary, and over time all will be better off…
But I must ask you, is it really the best system if it demands such immoral things? A money-system demands what is best for money just as surely as the war-system of world war I demanded what was best for warfare. Even as bodies piled up on the battlefield and rotted in the trenches. Side-projects—such as human life—are the first thing to be dropped in a time of need.
I digress, for now, and settle myself to say that this is not about a deficit of means, but a deficit of attitudes. The force of engineering present in our solutions—technical and social—fixes errors. Regardless of the frame of reference by which we decide those errors, they are only errors. They do not reach towards a future brighter—the wisp of a firefly flying off into the fading horizon—that is not just fixed but also good. Whereby the solution to the environmental problem would not just be more steel, waste, and replacement of flawed parts as we pave over the world, but more environment. For that is what is good, what is lacking, and what is needed—is it not? Rather than these endless work-around fixes, a core solution for the problem at hand.
But no. We fix the problem decisively and visibly, just as it was made, and so dig ourselves further into the same hole. Because the attitude is to do more and always more, to always paddle instead of navigate. When really a delicate and focused hand could stem and slowly eliminate the damage; if it cares for what is really green and blue and every shade imaginable. If it really cares for all people’s plights, eliminates waste, reduces consumption, facilitates reuse, builds to last, repairs. And above all dreams of a natural world and a happy humanity, realizes these are not at odds, and loves this future enough to bring it about. For what proponent of nature demands and screams and fights for the maximization of artifice, the creation of the artificial, and abhors true efficiency and the relaxed free-running of nature? One whose only concept of efficiency is profit, I’m sure.
