Global View

Trendy Being Green. Since 2006, it has suddenly become "trendy" to purchase environmentally friendly materials. However, many people go "green" for all the wrong reasons, trying to make a fashion statement rather than out of any true interest reducing their impact on the environment.

Airing in December 2007, ABC Television's Extreme Green Makeover decided to renovate a house using "green" engineering and design principles. While admirable, the excessive size and luxury of extreme makeover homes serves as a poster-child of overconsumption---the "extreme" part of the makeover refers directly to the excess consumption in rebuilding these homes.

Consider the oh-so-fashionable person who tears out their five year old kitchen to replace with "environmentally friendly" materials does th environment no favor when you destroyed a good and functioning kitchen (and created waste), impacted the environment by purchasing new materials (even green materials have significant impacts), for the vanity of saying their new kitchen is "green." Additionally, consider the celebrity who buys a new car every year (and owns numerous cars), and got rid of their perfectly good 1 year old SUV to get a hybrid car. In that case, the environmental impacts of creating the new hybrid car far out-weighed the impacts of their already made SUV.

The Greenwash Brigade is a group of bloggers who try to expose "greenwashers" or people claiming to be helping the environment for publicity or vanity purposes; but in reality are not embracing any (or few) environmental benefits. (The link in this box is not a required reading.)

Being green means purchasing green products when you've worn out an existing product you already own. Someone who overconsumes has an extreme impact on the environment whether they buy any "green" products or not. Being green means:

1. Understanding your role in overconsumption; how it impacts your life and impacts the environment and taking measure to reduce your consumption of new goods.
2. When you do need to buy an item; buy it used or buy a green "environmentally friendlY' version if you buy new.

What do you think?  Can you answer the question posed in the Introduction:  “At our current rates of resource usage, are we saving resources for future generations?”

While the future may not be as gloomy as eluded to here, without a doubt resource scarcity and conservation will impact your lifestyle within a few decades. Energy efficiency will be key in buying decisions, and most likely, people will own less material goods, live in smaller houses, and drive smaller cars as we adjust to living within the resources available to the population on Earth.

The "doom and gloom" scenario may come to pass if American's fail to divorce themselves from the idea that the best standard of living is measured by how much material goods or "junk" a person or family owns.  But I’d like to think that we’re smarter than that.  We just need to change our way of thinking and our epistemological approach to defining our own self worth and happiness:  we need to stop believing that if we make less money or own less stuff that our standard of living is "lower" than others who make and have more.  In the end, if we derive no happiness from a standard of living that measures happiness by "whoever has the most wins," we might just be missing the point of it all together.