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Of $8,500 sheets and organic cocaine
~ By Coco Tanaka ~
Ted Turner’s daughter wants to enlighten me on greening my home, and I might let her, if only she didn’t own $8,500 sheets. The environmental activist’s Atlanta home (her ecomanor, she calls it) recently landed in the “green issue” of décor-porn Domino magazine, and it is indeed a bastion of sustainable floors, recycled countertops and nontoxic paint — all 6,200 square feet of it.
I don’t care if those sheets are ecologically sensitive (as they claim to be, minus specifics on how) or custom-made by magical fair-labor elves; hearing the Heal Mother Earth message from a mogul’s scion who spends a small fortune on bedding grinds my gears to a halt, as does the same magazine’s feature on “100 Easy Ways to Go Green at Home,” all of which involve shelling out for stone plates, flue-less fireplaces and chemical-free lingerie (along with global warming and pesticides, my bras are apparently killing me). I threw the issue away. That’s right: I didn’t even recycle it.
Such backlash is booming in the wake of green consumerism, the terribly misguided idea that climate change can begin with a shopping spree. I am among the 35 million Americans who literally bought into the hype, swapping my perfectly good crap for other crap because it claimed to be earth-friendly, nontoxic or 100 percent organic (StuffWhitePeopleLike.com shrewdly noted the yuppie obsession with all-natural propaganda: “It’s almost guaranteed that if some Colombian drug lord can start offering ‘organic’ cocaine, he’ll be the richest guy ever”). Like the Catholic Church selling indulgences, companies smartly capitalized on our quick-fix naiveté and desperation to undo our sins: Everything from mattresses and sex toys to bleach and motor oil was suddenly labeled biodegradable, edible, aiding Rwandan orphans. I think it was when British Petroleum reinvented itself as Beyond Petroleum, changing its logo (from an oil-blackened duck or whatever) to a cheery sunflower, that I realized I’d been had. Al Gore warned us against such false idols. I can see through the eco-initiatives of Hummer, Exxon and Clorox, but in a world where only the stupidest or laziest corporations don’t make an effort to jump on the bandwagon, telling the earth-friendly from the greenwashed faux has gotten a little sticky.
Watchdog collective CorpWatch is there to help, defining greenwashing as “the phenomena of socially and environmentally destructive corporations, attempting to preserve and expand their markets or power by posing as friends of the environment.” I define it as “lying.” But it’s not the Cloroxes of the world that fool me (how green can you be if you’re still testing on bunny rabbits?); it’s the wolves in pesticide-free lambswool. Chip Giller, the founder of Grist, has noted this “cosmo-izing of the green movement,” and the misconception that building a second home with green infrastructure is on par with owning one home, or that buying three pairs of organic cotton jeans might be better than buying one regular pair. Just look at this year’s L.A. Fashion Week, where self-congratulatory phrases like “eco-couture” were tossed around like confetti and the brilliantly named Green Initiative Humanitarian Fashion Show sent conscious looks down a bamboo-lined runway. On the big dogs’ side of design, American Apparel has started pushing organic tops, and fast-fashion mill H&M has launched an eco-line of its own. Irony, thy face is trendy sustainability.
Possible case in point: Environment Furniture, the stunning HD Buttercup showroom of lumberjack-masculine desks and beds whose allure is spreading through the celeb circuit. In terms of craftsmanship, price and sheer density, Environment is basically the anti-Ikea, especially when one hears the trash-into-treasure background story of each piece, hewn from wood reclaimed from Brazil. One can’t help but briefly wonder if shelling out thousands for someone’s abandoned barn, reincarnated as foyer eye candy, is an “emperor has no clothes” situation … but hey, a gorgeous bench is a gorgeous bench. The price, of course, is probably why most of us are still DIY Ikea types, throwing away another cheap bookcase every year or so. And therein lies the problem: Buying eco-friendly wares is obviously a step in the right direction, but consumption is consumption. Sustainability can’t be bought.
None of this is to say that buying eco-conscious sheets isn’t a noble and valid way to slow the destruction of the Amazon. But if you have another $8,500 lying around, the World Land Trust could use it to save 85 acres of threatened rainforest. Just a thought.
Published: 04/16/2008
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