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    Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet
    Unavailable
    Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet
    Unavailable
    Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet
    Ebook244 pages2 hours

    Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet

    By Kendra Pierre-Louis

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The message that our environment is in peril has filtered from environmental groups to the
    American consciousness to our shopping carts. Every day, millions of Americans dutifully replace conventional produce with organic, swap Mr. Clean for Seventh Generation, and replace their bottled water with water bottles. Many of us have come to believe that the path to environmental sustainability is paved by shopping green. Although this green consumer movement certainly has many Americans consuming differently, it raises an important and rarely asked question—"is this consumption really any better for the planet?"

    By examining the major economic sectors of our society, including infrastructure (green housing), consumer goods (green clothing and jewelry), food (the rise of organic), and energy (including solar power and the popularity of the hybrid car), Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet explains that, though greener alternatives are important, we cannot simply buy our way to sustainability. Rather, if it is the volume of our consumption that matters, can we as a society dependent on constantly consuming ever be content with buying less?

    A new and unique take on green consumption, Green Washed shows how buying better is only the first step toward true sustainability.

    Kendra Pierre-Louis is the sustainable development editor for Justmeans.com. She holds a master's degree in sustainable development from the SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont. She has created outreach material for the United Nations Environment Programme's Convention on Biological Diversity and worked as a researcher for Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental consulting and strategic planning firm.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIg Publishing
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9781935439448
    Unavailable
    Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet

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    Reviews for Green Washed

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      From my Cannonball Read 5 Review ...

      This is another book I picked up at Powell’s knowing nothing about it because it looked interesting. Lucky for me, this one was both a quick read (even at 200 pages with many references to scientific studies) and well-organized. I feared it would make me feel a bit hopeless and pessimistic, especially given the way the author chose to approach the topic (more below), but in the end it left me feeling like I did have the tools to make a positive difference in my impact on the environment.

      The basic premise of Ms. Pierre-Louis’s book is that saving and protecting our environment isn’t a matter of plastic water bottles vs. reusable water bottles; it’s about drinking from the tap in a glass. Explored through a series of “you thought that was good but here’s why it isn’t” example, the first half of the book focuses on the sort of false dichotomies that we have set up for ourselves (often with good intentions) to make ourselves feel like we’re making good choices for ourselves AND the planet.

      This first half focuses on fashion, food choices (although not the choice to eat or not eat animal products, which is a glaring omission), cleaning products, cars, water, and buildings. The water chapter is especially fascinating, as she starts out telling the story of a group of people native to Brazil, which I assumed would be used to frame why plastic water bottles are bad. Instead, the purpose of their story is to point out how the process of creating those reusable aluminum water bottles is destroying their environment. Whoops.

      The car chapter is especially interesting, as the author points out that the biggest problems with cars aren’t their fuel economy – the biggest problems are the energy that goes into making them and the energy that goes into laying roads for people to drive on. There isn’t enough time spent here on the realities that so many people cannot give up their cars due to being forced to live far from where they work in areas without public transportation; the author gives off the impression that the choice is either car or public transit but doesn’t spend a lot of time on the fact that public transit isn’t an option for a whole lot of people. I don’t think that was an intentional omission; I think it’s just not a topic she chose to spend much time on, and I do think the chapter suffers a bit for that.

      After a (mostly) thorough discussion of the problems of these false dichotomies of green vs. not green (because the green version is often just as bad or nearly as bad, just in different ways), Ms. Pierre-Louis moves to a discussion of fuel. She properly eviscerates the absurd “clean coal” concept before taking on biofuel – questionable at best given the fact that a shift from food-producing crops to fuel-producing crops both hurts world food supplies AND is often quite inefficient – and other energy alternatives. It’s an interesting look, and while I am not an expert in environmental writing, she does provide what appears to be independent support for her observations.

      Finally, she spends the last quarter of the book focusing on how she suggests we address this problem. The basic conclusion is that we shouldn’t be focusing our economy on GROWTH, because that requires us to produce more and consume more every year. Instead, she spends a lot of time on the ‘steady state economy’ concept – something I’ll definitely be researching. For her (and clearly many others), the economy should be in support of the environment – the environment should not just be another component of the economy. As the author points out “We’ve become so focused on the economic system that we’ve forgotten that it’s dependent on the planet.”

      I liked this book, but it does have some issues. In the last, seemingly tacked-on chapter, she looks to a ‘happiness index’ instead of GDP as a measure of a nation. In theory this is an awesome idea, but my inital look at the current state of Gross National Happiness makes me extremely wary that it can be easily manipulated to support one view of what is a ‘good life’ over another. I realize that the author was likely forced to make a choice about what to focus on, but I think that given her strong talent for writing, she could have added another fifty pages, really focused on these proposed solutions, and still had a book that people could easily read and process. In spite of that I do recommend it, especially for the first 180 pages.
    • 3/5
      I can't imagine there being a stronger case put forward against not just the practice of green-washing, but of rampant consumerism in general. It also strongly slams the idea that technology will safe us from our impending ecological doom, and instead posits that technology ("sustainable" or not) is just allowing us to continue business as usual, while ignoring the underlying issues or impact. Implicit in it's criticisms of Western consumerist culture is the advocacy of "simple-living" and buying less (in this case, as little as possible). This has made me start thinking and has spurred me to ask questions about the things I buy: how was it manufactured, where did the materials come from and so on. The reason I give this a 3/5 is because there are grammatical errors and awkward sentences in a few places that were really annoying, and undermine the "ethos" of the author and the work. That is not a good thing when you are trying to persuade.