Thursday, October 16th 2008

By Peter Goffin

     I love people. We really are the most fascinating things. What intrigues me most is our ability to adopt a cause, promote it constantly, then jump ship for another cause without ever having helped or changed anything.

     To wit: some combination of flukes, plus Al Gore, made the environment cool. So now we’re all sick with worry over global warming and non-renewable resources and desperate to go green even if it doesn’t totally ?make sense. This is the most we’ve ever talked about the environment in a long time but its just plastic concern, empty buzz, I ?think. Great as it is that everyone is going “green,” green doesn’t mean anything. It’s a colour made by mixing blue and yellow. But throwing it on a product or service doesn’t change the product or the environment.

     Right now I’m wearing green jeans. They’re blue jeans but they’re green. I know so because of a little green tag on the ass of them. They’re ordinary everyday Levi’s jeans. They fit me so I bought them. But I don’t really know what my jeans did to get called green. Apparently the denim is natural or has or has not gone through some process. But that doesn’t really mean anything either. Now I mock this but, to be fair, these are pretty informative pants. On the inside of my left hip pocket, block letters tell me that doing laundry less often and with cold water saves water and energy. Honestly, I wish my? other clothes could give me helpful tips. And it’s nice to have something to read while you’re getting dressed in the morning. But I already knew about the energy and water saving thing and I’m not convinced that writing helpful tips on clothes really makes them environmentally friendly.

     Likewise, NBC launched something called Green Week during the last television season.? Green Week was a week in which all the shows mentioned doing things? for the environment. But, like the shows, its just pretend. Liz Lemon? and Michael Scott tried to help the environment. Tina Fey and Steve? Carrell did not. “I’m not an environmentalist, but I play one on TV.”? And still I fail to understand how Green Week, or “green” anything, helps the environment.

     We’ve buzz worded environment so badly that we don’t even really know what the problem is anymore. Everyone talks about global warming but global warming is a misnomer. The problem is? actually climate change. Global warming is just an aspect of climate? change. I know this sounds like a geek-out, but making the distinction is? important.

     The argument against “global warming” is always that last? winter had record snowfall and was unbearably cold. But of course, ?brutal winters are a result of climate change. So is the record ?rainfall that we had in Ontario this summer, and so are the three major floods in the United States since 2005.

     What bothers me most is the temporary nature of all this concern.  Climate change was identified as a risk over 15 years ago. Canada was one of the first countries to suggest global action be taken to deal with it. But nobody so much as whispered about the environment until a year ago. And now, like so many other fads, environmental concern has been co-opted by fickle old pop culture, doomed to fade from public view as soon as something new comes along.

     Maybe this superficiality is all people can handle. Maybe if anyone ever delved deeper than the buzz words and p.r. the public would tune out or their heads would explode. But it must at least be worth trying to properly teach people about the environment. The rush to go green shows that people can be captivated by the environment, and even if most of them are only interested for show, some of them might want to take actual action if only they understood the realities of it.