"Green": The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

With the COPI4 Conference in progress in Poznan, Poland, The Daily Galaxy will be featuring not only the latest conference new, but also original insights on the issues confronting the planet's environmental future.

Spearheading what appears will be a dramatic change in the global green initiatives, President-elect Barack Obama is arguing that there is no better time than the present to invest heavily in clean energy technologies. An investment, he says, would confront the threat of unchecked warming, reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and help revive the American economy.

Meanwhile, disguising environmental harm eases only our conscience warns psychologist Albert Bandura of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. He points out that no matter how we disguise environmentally harmful practices and smooth them over with positive words that ease the conscience, such practices will nonetheless continue to have a negative impact on the planet and the quality of life of future generations. In other words, a rose by any other name is still a rose.

With so many conflicting messages, it’s hard to know what’s “green” and what is not these days. Many “green” mandates appear to be more a matter of opinion and personal agenda that science, and even “science” appears to frequently change its mind. The majority of the general public is willing to make sacrifices to offset global warming, or at least according to polls. But most of us don’t have a clear picture of what will actually end up doing the most good, and how to go about it. One of the biggest problems is that there is no clear consensus about what’s “good”. Another big problem is that even when we do know, most of us prefer not to think about it or find a clever way to rationalize our decisions.

In the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development Bandura explains that rather than continually attempting to disguise our actions, society would be better off “switching on our environmental conscience” to save the world.

Part of the problem is that as consumers we are repeatedly bombarded with messages telling us to consider the environment and to save energy in the face of global climate change, while we are simultaneously bombarded with opposing messages. Recently, there has been media attention about how personal economic savings on energy consumption might be offset by increased consumption of goods and services. What may at first appear to reduce the level of ecological harm that we cause, may in effect be cancelled out and possibly lead to even greater harm.

Moreover, Bandura argues, many of us selectively pursue practices that we know full well are detrimental to the environment but which we justify through moral disengagement. Some famous examples of this (not mentioned in the study) would be how Al Gore served an endangered fish species for dinner guests at his daughters wedding celebration a week after spearheading Live Earth. He’s done a lot of good raising environmental awareness, so perhaps he figures the environment owes him a few, or maybe he just didn’t bother to check if his menu contained endangered species. Another well known example would be how Leonardo DiCaprio flies to his environmental causes in a private jet when there are obviously more environmentally friendly options available.

It’s not that these celebrities aren’t doing a lot of good, or are any better or worse than the rest of us. But the fact is that nearly everyone self-engages in delusional/hypocritical thinking on some level when it comes to saving the environment. Rather than live with the constraints of self-censure, we defend our actions on the basis that such practices are somehow fulfilling worthy social, national, or economic causes and, as such, offset their harmful effects on the future of our planet.

Bandura points out that there is nothing quite like self-righteousness to exonerate and sanitize malpractice in the name of worthy causes. Convoluted language helps disguise what is being done and reduces accountability, and also ignores and disputes harmful effects. Bandura, however, is hoping that some clarity and consensus can be brought to the environmental dilemmas we face.

"We are witnessing hazardous global changes of mounting ecological consequence," he says, "they include deforestation, expanding desertification, global warming, ice sheet and glacial melting, flooding of low-lying coastal regions, severe weather events, topsoil erosion and sinking water tables in the major food-producing regions, depletion of fish stocks, loss of biodiversity, and degradation of other aspects of the earth's life-support systems. As the unrivaled ruling species atop the food chain, humans are wiping out species and the ecosystems that support life at an accelerating pace."

Bandura would like for the “green curtain” to stop veiling the real issues. He would like for us all to stop putting friendly labels on unfriendly practices. He adds that, "If we are to be responsible stewards of our environment for future generations, we must make it difficult to disengage moral sanctions from ecologically destructive practices."

To do so would be challenging, to say the least, but would it be better than living a lie?

Posted by Rebecca Sato