500 words on Pseudo-Environmentalism

Are you the perfect environmentalist? Do you eat beef, drive a car, or use your home air conditioning? Do you wear sneakers, shop in big box stores, or watch a large screen plasma television? Do you fly in airplanes? You are not the perfect environmentalist, but I don’t think many people are so you are in good company.

I’ve long held that the biggest problem in the environmental movement is the quest for perfection. Making sound, environmentally responsible decisions is hard and often means choosing higher prices or significant inconvenience. Few families can always make the right decision and even fewer will. However, if environmental consciousness could come easy, or incrementally, than I think millions of us could have a profound impact on the health of our planet.

During this holiday season, we are going to be bombarded with commercial messages to spend, buy, and consume. Most of us will, and to expect anything less is unreasonable. While watching Thanksgiving Day television – flipping between the Macy’s Parade which is nothing more than a three hour-long commercial and Packers vs. Lion which seems to have three hours of commercials – I’m looking for the subtle messages of marketers and picked up the smallest environmental message in Wal-Mart commercials, of all places.

Wal-Mart has a long history of anti-environmentalism and the type of consumerism it pushes is inherently bad for the environment. In recent years, the company (America’s largest employer) is making attempts to appear and be more environmentally responsible. This is no easy task for 90,000 square foot super stores trying to sell the cheapest merchandise in the world. In fact, some of their measures have been labeled “greenwashing”, which is the name given to superficial efforts to appear eco-friendly while ignoring my more serious and potentially catastrophic threats to the planet. But the writing, in whatever color, on the wall is clear and Wal-Mart must make changes to appeal to the modern, eco-friendly consumer.

In its holiday commercials this year, Wal-Mart is the first store I’ve seen to put reusable bags in the hands of its actor-shoppers. Disposable, single-use bags are my cause. As an avid diver and ocean-enthusiast, I’ve seen what these bags do when they end up on our shores or in our waters. I take this issue seriously because it is also one of the easiest environmental steps any consumer can take. You don’t need to chart the carbon emissions of the store’s distribution network or analyze the packaging for potential landfill volume. You just need to keep a few bags in your car and take them into the store with you.

Where the environmental movement misses it is that few of us want to or can be crusaders. I think almost everyone cares about the earth, but with the other pressures in our lives it is hard to ignore the reality of expense and inconvenience. When we find eco-friendly routines that we can adopt in our everyday lives, the movement should be happy along with the earth.