[NYTr] Ethical shopping: just another way of showing how rich you are

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

The Guardian - Jul 24, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2133110,00.html

Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are

The middle classes congratulate themselves on going green, then carry on
buying and flying as much as before 

By George Monbiot

It wasn't meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told us
that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I can't
claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or are even
consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas yet to
come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world that we will
inhabit if we don't sort ourselves out.

With rising sea levels and more winter rain - and remember that when the
trees are dormant and the soils saturated, there are fewer places for
the rain to go - all it will take is a freshwater flood to coincide
with a high spring tide and we have a formula for full-blown disaster.
We have now seen how localised floods can wipe out essential services
and overwhelm emergency workers. But this month's events don't even
register beside some of the predictions circulating in learned
journals. Our primary political struggle must be to prevent the breakup
of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The only question now
worth asking about climate change is how.

Dozens of new books seem to provide an answer: we can save the world by
embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for instance, the
Guardian published an extract from A Slice of Organic Life, the book by
Sheherazade Goldsmith - married to the very rich environmentalist Zac -
in which she teaches us "to live within nature's limits". It's easy.
Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles,
keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens,
beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as
modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political
change, there is not a word. You can save the planet from your own
kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was
reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a
look. He flicked through it for a moment, and then summed up the
problem in seven words: "This is for people who don't work."

The media's obsession with beauty, wealth and fame blights every issue
it touches, but none more so than green politics. There is an inherent
conflict between the aspirational lifestyle journalism that makes
readers feel better about themselves and sells country kitchens, and
the central demand of environmentalism - that we should consume less.
"None of these changes represents a sacrifice," Goldsmith tells us.
"Being more conscientious isn't about giving up things." But it is if,
like her, you own more than one home when others have none.
Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving
things up is an essential component of going green. A section on
ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic, buy
seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing
about buying less.

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped
the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it.
But two parallel markets are developing - one for unethical products
and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does
little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide
of ecojunk. Over the past six months, our coat pegs have become clogged
with organic cotton bags, which - filled with packets of ginseng tea
and jojoba oil bath salts - are now the obligatory gift at every
environmental event. I have several lifetimes' supply of ballpoint pens
made with recycled paper and about half a dozen miniature solar
chargers for gadgets that I do not possess.

Last week the Telegraph told its readers not to abandon the fight to
save the planet. "There is still hope, and the middle classes, with
their composters and eco-gadgets, will be leading the way." It made
some helpful suggestions, such as a "hydrogen-powered model racing
car", which, for #74.99, comes with a solar panel, an electrolyser and
a fuel cell. God knows what rare metals and energy-intensive processes
were used to manufacture it. In the name of environmental
consciousness, we have simply created new opportunities for surplus
capital.

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social
status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and wind turbines
before they have insulated their lofts, partly because they love
gadgets but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how
conscientious and how rich they are. We are often told that buying such
products encourages us to think more widely about environmental
challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green
consumerism is another form of atomisation - a substitute for
collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

The middle classes rebrand their lives, congratulate themselves on going
green, and carry on buying and flying as much as before. It is easy to
picture a situation in which the whole world religiously buys green
products and its carbon emissions continue to soar.

As many environmentalists argue, it is true that most people find
aspirational green living more attractive than dour puritanism. But it
can also be alienating. I have met plenty of farm labourers and tenants
who are desperate to start a farm of their own but have been excluded
by what they call "horsiculture": small parcels of agricultural land
that are being bought up for pony paddocks and hobby farms. In places
such as Surrey and the New Forest, farmland is now fetching up to
#30,000 an acre as City bonuses are used to buy organic lifestyles.
When the new owners dress up as milkmaids and then tell the excluded
how to make butter, they run the risk of turning environmentalism into
the whim of the elite.

Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party
pooper, the spectre at the feast. Against the shiny new world of organic
aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable
restraints: carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher
building regulations, coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement
will carry an article about that. No rock star could live comfortably
within his carbon ration.

But these measures, and the long hard political battle that is needed to
bring them about, are unfortunately required to prevent the catastrophe
that the recent floods presage - rather than merely playing at being
green. Only when these measures have been applied does green
consumerism become a substitute for current spending, rather than a
supplement to it. They are harder to sell, not least because they
cannot be bought from mail order catalogues. Hard political choices
will have to be made, and the economic elite and its spending habits
must be challenged, rather than groomed and flattered. The
multimillionaires who have embraced the green agenda might suddenly
discover another urgent cause.