Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Green Noise: How being Green is missing the mark

Cynthetiq · 06-21-2008, 07:16 PM

Quote:

View: That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise
Source: NYTimes
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That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise

June 15, 2008
That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise
By ALEX WILLIAMS
DESPITE the expense and the occasional back strain, Mary Burnham, a public relations consultant in San Francisco, felt good about the decision she made a few years ago to buy milk — organic, of course — only in heavy, reusable glass bottles. For the sake of the environment, she dutifully lugged them back and forth from the grocery store every week. Cutting out disposable paper cartons, she reasoned, meant saving trees and reducing waste.

Or not. A friend, also a committed environmentalist, recently started questioning her good deed. “His argument was that paper cartons are compostable and lightweight and use less energy and water than the heavy bottles, which must be transported back to a plant to be cleaned and reused,” she said. “I have no idea which is better, or how to find out.”

Ms. Burnham, 35, recycles religiously, orders weekly from a community-supported farm, buys eco-friendly cleaning products and carries groceries in a canvas bag. But she admits to information overload on the environment — from friends, advice columns, news media, even government-issued reports. Much of the advice is conflicting.

“To say that you are confused and a little fed up with the often contradictory messages out there on how to live lightly on the earth is definitely not cool,” she said in an e-mail message. “But, heck, I’ll come out and say it. I’m a little overwhelmed.”

She is, in other words, a victim of “green noise” — static caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long.

Two years after “An Inconvenient Truth” helped unleash a new tide of environmental activism, green noise pulses through the collective consciousness from all directions. The news media issues dire reports about disappearing polar bears; Web sites feature Brad Pitt arriving at a movie premiere in his hydrogen-powered BMW; bookstore shelves are piled high with titles like “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth”; shops carry hemp-enriched shampoo and 100-percent organic cotton tampons.

An environmentally conscientious consumer is left to wonder: are low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs better than standard incandescents, even if they contain traces of mercury? Which salad is more earth-friendly, the one made with organic mixed greens trucked from thousands of miles away, or the one with lettuce raised on nearby industrial farms? Should they support nuclear power as a clean alternative to coal?

If even well-intentioned activists are feeling overwhelmed, the average S.U.V. driver must be tuning out. And some environmentalists fear that the public might begin to ignore their message before any meaningful change can be accomplished. For them, it’s a time to reassess strategies and streamline their campaigns before it’s too late.

“We worry about it,” said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “We all understand that today’s media environment is an extremely crowded one, and message overload is the order of the day.”

A study by the Shelton Group, an advertising agency and market research company based in Knoxville, Tenn., that focuses on environmental products, showed that consumers surveyed in 2007 were between 22 and 55 percent less likely to buy a wide range of green products than in 2006. The slipping economy had an effect, but message overload appeared to be a major factor as well, said Suzanne C. Shelton, the company’s president.

“What we’ve been seeing in focus groups is a real green backlash,” Ms. Shelton said. Over the last six months, she added, when the agency screened environmentally themed advertisements, “we see over half the room roll their eyes: ‘Not another green message.’ ”

Jen Boulden, a founder of idealbite.com, which sends e-mail messages to its readers with daily tips about eco-friendly living, said that “every conversation I have on the professional level is, ‘If people are going to get green fatigue, we don’t want to become irrelevant.’ ”

Meanwhile, environmentally conscientious citizens, she said, “Come in and say, ‘Just tell me what I need to know, just give me the cheat sheet.’ ”

The need to simplify the green message has become obvious, she said, especially after the argument over Nalgene bottles, which are made of a strong, reusable plastic. As recently as last summer, the bottles, marketed to sports enthusiasts, were hailed as an alternative to disposable water bottles, which environmentalists say waste petroleum, both in their manufacture and their transport.

But some environmental groups and scientists raised concerns that polycarbonate plastic, used in the manufacture of some Nalgene bottles, baby bottles and the linings of tin cans, can leach bisphenol-a, an endocrine-disrupting chemical.

Environmentalists and consumer health advocates debated the question — to Nalgene or not to Nalgene — seemingly endlessly. (While the company points to studies that indicate the products are safe, in April it announced plans to phase out products made from the compound.)

Bottled water is not the only issue people find increasingly confounding.

“I would be a much more productive member of society if I didn’t have to worry about, ‘Should I wash dishes by hand or run the dishwasher?’ ” said Erik Michaels-Ober, a 24-year-old software engineer in San Francisco. “There are all sorts of conflicting stories about that.”

Eddie Stern, 38, a media strategist in Durango, Colo., said he recently “went nuts, just trying to buy a car” because of the “overload of info, from the news, from the Internet, from quote-unquote experts on the street.”

Every new tidbit of research seemed to contradict the last. Some environmentalists made the case for a new hybrid, others insisted that buying a used model with a standard engine would save the huge amounts of energy that go into manufacturing a new vehicle. Other environmentalists supported biodiesel, on the grounds that it means, essentially, growing gas. Others countered that biodiesel still pollutes.

Mr. Stern said he finally settled (after a coin flip) on what seemed like the ideal compromise, a used Ford Escape hybrid. Ideal, until his brother, who works in the solar-power industry, asked, “Where are you going to bury the battery?”

In a way, the heightened public awareness about global warming shows that the early public campaigns were successful, said Chip Giller, the founder of grist.org, an environmental news and information Web site.

Along with that success came a torrent of green products from marketers. And it is these eco-pitchmen, trumpeting claims that are not always substantiated, whom Mr. Pope of the Sierra Club blames for generating much of the green noise.

But others in the environmental movement say activists and nonprofits must shoulder their share of responsibility, too, for bombarding people with messages. “The groups that are trying to get them to change overwhelm them with information,” said Diane Tompkins, a founder of the Curious Company, a market research firm based in San Francisco.

Her company has conducted focus groups to investigate the psychological barriers to taking action for the sake of the environment. The activist groups “believe that, surely, if I just gave them one more reason why they should do it, then they would,” she said. “But the fact is, people are not motivated by more facts. That can just reinforce their feeling of helplessness.”

In response to the confusion, the Natural Resources Defense Council last year unveiled Simple Steps, a how-to campaign that broke up advice into three tiers, according to the interest and commitment level of its audience.

People logging onto simplesteps.org can select the depth of information they desire on the basis of whether they want to spend a minute, a morning or a month adopting green habits, said Phil Gutis, the organization’s communications director.

Leaders of Greenpeace also decided to help its audience prioritize environmental concerns, said Kate Smolski, a senior legislative coordinator. So instead of asking people to juggle disparate concerns — including nuclear waste, coal pollution, deforestation and ocean wildlife endangerment — the group now tries to bundle them under the umbrella of climate change.

So now, when the group campaigns against nuclear energy, it labels reactors a “false solution” to global warming. When the group talks about deforestation, the focus is on its contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“It’s very helpful,” Ms. Smolski said, “to show that it’s all connected.”

It may also be helpful to teach patience. Climate change will take several generations to combat, and there will never be a single moment when society can declare “mission accomplished,” said Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and author. “There are no watershed moments in the environment. It’s a century-long process.”

A scary prospect, given that, as Mr. Hawken said, “even people inside the movement have the same feeling — burnout.”

I started to pull out quotes from this article and then realized I had quoted almost the entire article. I've gotten tired of this early on.

Some examples of the disconnect I twisted around on:

Save water! It takes gallons of water to clean that glass. So I used paper cups. Don't use paper cups it's bad for the environment!
Don't use that dishwasher, wash by hand it uses less electricity and less water. But I bought the dishwasher, it was made with materials that I can't just waste... I want to use the dishwasher because I don't want to stand there washing dishes.
Heating oil burns cleaner and is better than using electric heat. Heating Oil keeps us dependent on finite resources, yet electric and natural gas are also based off of finite resources.
Get rid of that car and buy a hybrid. But my car is paid for, it gets decent gas mileage, and it already exists in my life. Hybrids have actually larger carbon footprints and batteries have to shipped from place to place, and what happens when the batteries need to be disposed of?

I am very tired of the contradictory messages. I am tired of feeling stupid. I'm tired of feeling like I'm not doing enough or anything. There no one saying, "Yes, you're doing good, here's more that you can do..." in any kind of heirarchy. Maybe a Eco-pyramid or Earth's Hierarchy of Needs (ala Maslow's heirarchy) to help people understand that they should be doing something that makes sense.

But for all of this, the message seems to get diluted to me, to the point where I'm ready to rebel against it.

Example: I know that our building there is a man who picks out the recycling to ensure that we catch it all and don't get fined by the city. So I don't bother to seperate since I'm already paying for someone to do so.

I've changed my light bulbs to CFs, but I hate they light they give off. I love the warmth of incandescant bulbs. I'm not going to just replace all my bulbs, that's completely wasteful. So when my incandescent bulbs in my home burn out I will replace those that are in areas that I don't care are flourescent in look such as hallways and kitchen. But my living room will have the look that I want it to have.

But seriously, I'm very tired of articles, tv segments, movies, anime, etc. telling me I'm doing it wrong, not doing enough or not doing anything.

So I've just given up. I do what makes sense to me and my wallet. I don't find it better to pay an extra preimum just to "save the earth." I'm just going to do what it takes to keep the most amount of money in my wallet.