Can 'green chic' save the planet?

Ecofriendly buying choices alone can't sustain America's lifestyle, experts warn – unless 'looking green' becomes 'voting green.'

from the July 26, 2007 edition

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"We need people not to be thinking like consumers, but like citizens in a society," he says. "Bold decisions from a collective of bold leaders working with bold citizens that aren't afraid to take bold steps is the only thing that will avoid a climate catastrophe. That's it. There's nothing else."

Many say it's more complex. "You're talking about the greatest consumptive society in the history of the world trying to change its footprint," says Jamieson, comparing it to changing the Roman Empire into a Vermont village. Green consumerism driven by green faddism "is necessary, but not sufficient," he says. "If you're going to get change, you need this kind of energy and enthusiasm. But that just gets you in the door."

The green consumption movement has some built-in limits. By definition, consumers willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products are a small bunch, says Michael Shellenberger, a managing partner at American Environics in Oakland, Calif. They tend to be an educated and affluent "elite," but because they are so few, their ability to effect change through purchasing power is limited. In polls, Mr. Shellenberger has found that most green consumers harbor no illusions that environmentally friendly consumer choices alone are sufficient. They see green consumption as an ethical choice – "a kind of mindfulness," he says. But "almost everyone acknowledges that there needs to be political action."

Or, as Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming Program, says: "Government has to act; so consumers, to close the loop, need to understand that they need to vote."

And it may be at the polls where the reasons for "going green" matter most. People consume products for both their "manifest" and "latent" functions, says Christopher Henke, an assistant professor of sociology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.

The manifest value of a canvas bag, for example, is to carry things without using plastic. The latent value of a Whole Foods-issued, $15 Anya Hindmarch-designed bag emblazoned with "I'm not a plastic bag" – echoing surrealist artist René Magritte's famous "this is not a pipe" painting – is almost entirely unrelated to this manifest utility.

"You're trying to present a certain image of yourself where you're someone who cares about the earth, shops at a [certain] store, and someone who's up on a particular trend," Professor Henke says. "But in the end, if it's just another thing people will grab and use for a month, then it is kind of a waste."

So while faddism may influence people's marketplace choices, many still ask the million-dollar question: What will happen when the canvas bag-toting, hybrid car-driving, "green" credit-card-wielding (GE just announced a card with carbon footprint-reducing rewards) consumer goes to the polls?

"That's the key," says Jon Isham, a professor of international environmental economics at Middlebury College in Vermont. "That's where we need to go above and beyond the idea of a fad."

If the defeat last November of a state initiative to tax oil extracted in California is any indication, what's chic in handbags is still far from what's cool at the polls. But there is one certainty, says Dr. Isham, paraphrasing the economist Herbert Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't continue, it won't."

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