December
2002/January 2003
Shopping
our Way to a Better World: Can “Green Consumerism” Save
the Planet while Ensuring Social Justice?
By Fhar Miess
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As Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin, founders of Global Exchange, are
quick to point out, it’s not often that you’ll find multinational
automobile manufacturer Toyota Motor Corporation sharing an exhibition
hall with the radical environmental group Earth First!, but this is
precisely the scenario produced by the organizers of the Green Festival
in San Francisco in November (Nov. 9–10).
The festival was meant to highlight the movement for sustainable economies,
ecological balance and social justice and was jointly organized by
Global
Exchange, Co-op America and Bioneers, mainstays of that movement establishment
in the US. Organizers brought together an eclectic mix of purveyors
of fair trade coffee, fair trade and “eco-friendly” textiles
and crafts, solar panels, “sustainable” lumber and building
materials, “clean” transportation solutions and health foods,
along with environmental foundations, “sustainable” investment
advocates, consumer and worker cooperatives, social justice groups,
body workers and spiritual healers.
While the majority of the exhibition hall was devoted to the buying
and selling of merchandise—with the typical trade fair noisy ambiance
of industry folk talking shop, PA system interruptions and offers of
free samples—the festival also featured a line-up of speakers,
including such vehement anti-corporate voices as Amy Goodman of “Democracy
Now,” and Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of CounterPunch.
Several of the featured “partners” of the event were large
multinational corporations, Toyota of San Francisco being the most obvious
with two hybrid cars on the exhibition hall floor. Across the aisle
from Toyota’s exhibit was that of Stonyfield Farms, the nation’s
fourth largest yogurt company, which uses organic milk. Stonyfield’s
CEO, Gary Hirschberg, recently followed the lead of Ben Cohen (who also
attended the festival) and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s
Ice Cream in selling a chunk of his company to a large corporation.
Unlike Cohen and Greenfield, who sold their entire operation to Unilever,
the largest packaged foods company in the world (which incidentally
acquired Slimfast diet products on the same day), Hirschberg agreed
only to sell a minority 40 percent stake in his company to Group Danone,
the largest dairy company in the world, so he could remain in control.
Still, Hirschberg is unapologetic about joining forces with the corporate
bigwigs. In a recent article he writes, “I must admit that becoming
part of the mainstream, while aesthetically unappealing, has nevertheless
been THE goal.” Hirshberg’s goal, like that of many of his
business colleagues represented at the Green Festival, is first and
foremost to capture market share. If it can be done with a “sustainable” food
source, then so much the better.
Chris Pomfret, Brands Director of Birds Eye Walls, Unilever’s
Frozen Food products company in the UK, went further to state that sustainability
is not important simply because eco-friendly and healthy products can
be marketed at a premium, but because the very survival of the company
depends upon sustainability. In a March 2002 speech, he declared, “if
our business is to continue, then we need to sustain our sources of
supply and the only way to do that is to make them sustainable.”
But that self-preservation is not just an abstract corporate response,
it is also the personal response of individual business people. Jeffery
Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, spoke at the Green Festival on
the subject of “capitalism at a crossroads.” Near the beginning
of his presentation, he posed the question, “is capitalism itself
the problem? Should we be looking for some other structure? My answer
is no,” he said. “I mean, I’m a business person, and
I benefit from the system that in some ways I don’t like, but
I’m not ready to throw it away.”
To be fair, Hollender, like most well-off green business people, does
exhibit a sincere concern for some ecological and social justice values;
otherwise, they never would have made it through the screening process
that potential Green Festival vendors had to pass through. But the personal
and institutional investment of Hollender and his colleagues in a capitalist
economy puts him at odds with many of the anti-corporate and anti-globalization
activists at the festival.
So, why were these eco-friendly, pro-business firms willing to share
the event with people who consider their consumer capitalist practices
antithetical to lasting social justice and ecological diversity? According
to Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, organizers of the event “never
hid the politics of the event and… many of the businesses that
participated felt that that was OK. Many of them are in total agreement
and those who aren’t I still think felt it was an important demographic
group for them to reach.”
And this marketing potential cuts both ways. Patrick Reinsborough,
an ecology activist, explored the flip side: “It’s an interesting
model to create events that really appeal to a mainstream niche, to
have a trade show and even the crass ‘come do your Christmas shopping
and buy environmentally-friendly products’ and bring in a wide
group of people with that and then hit them with a much deeper message.”
As he points out, however, “It’s possible to achieve an
ecologically sane world that’s not necessarily democratic or just…I’m
trying not to be dismissive of the kind of organizing that happens around
green consumerism but to figure out how we can bridge this entry point
for a lot of middle-class American people and make sure that we’re
actually exposing them to a deeper analysis.” He suggests that
examples such as the movements of landless peasants, small farmers
and
indigenous people might lead to such an analysis: one that points to
the need for alternative economic arrangements that honor human and
ecological value over that of capital.
While the environmental movement takes a great deal of flak for levying
plenty of criticisms without suggesting any solutions, Reinsborough
notes that “corporations are largely appropriating the sort of
solution-oriented end of the environmental movement,” for instance,
the solutions of smaller ecological design vendors present at the festival.
This appropriation puts activists even more on the defensive.
The jumbled mix of politics and commerce made this festival no exception.
Reinsborough told of how he had forgotten his wallet on his way to
the
festival, so he had no option of buying anything. “It made me
acutely aware,” he says, “of how little interaction there
actually was aside from buying and selling.”
Chris Carlsson, who was one of the people to first popularize the Critical
Mass bicycle ride in San Francisco ten years ago, was also at the festival,
and he shared some of his own thoughts on the event: “There’s
no critique that there might be something wrong with the buying and
selling of the products of human labor or of human time itself. There’s
no critique of wage labor or anything else… On the other hand,”
he says, for people who are new to green consumerism, “I would
argue that this [event] probably has a radicalizing impact, where people
can see how many alternatives there really are, already present, technologically
and socially, that represent themselves here through the strange veil
of capitalist greenage.”
However, he counters, “I’m quite sure we won’t shop
our way to a better world.”
“The reproduction of ‘fair’ business practices, as
opposed to NON-business practices seems to me to speak more to the problem
than the solution,” says Carlsson. “I like things where
people are able to engage in direct connections and make alternatives
in a way that escapes the logic of buying and selling. It’s not
always easy to do because you’re always stuck paying the bills,
as I am, too. But when people can break out of that logic, they get
a taste of something different and it leads in a more radical direction,
psychologically, much more quickly.”
Fhar Miess is part of The Alarm! Newspaper Collective.
The Alarm! is a Santa Cruz based bi-weekly newspaper, a source
for local, independent media analysis. It is distributed free of charge
in Santa Cruz county. To learn more or to subscribe, visit www.the-alarm.com
or call (831) 429-NEWS.
