Saturday, April 12, 2008

Adam Werbach, the face of the Dark Side.

This is a cross-post is in response to Adam Werbach's post over on Gristmill where he attempts to promote his new greenwash campaign BLUE as some sort of grass-roots environmentalism. Let's be absolutely clear; the people who advocate for pollution and cover it with greenwashing are more evil than blatant polluters. Their goal is to confuse and corrupt people into thinking they are helping the environment while they continue to degrade it.

Here's my reply to Adam:

It's not "Greenwashing"

It's "BLUE"-where you get to buy all the same crap and feel good about it.
Don't y'all get it?

I don't either. I'm not a religious man but I'll join any religion that reserves a special level of hell for guys like Adam that use their former association with (token) environmental groups to sell pollution. You really have to wonder how the guy sleeps; in a wooden box filled with dirt from a mass grave? Can he see himself in mirrors? What's it like to go to the dark side young Anakin Adam?

Let's just be absolutely clear; if Adam and the people he represents "win" you can kiss the ecosystem as we know it goodbye. WalMart is the very core of the enemy camp from their big box store model that causes more car trips, to the debasement of their own labor force, to the coal-powered, plasticized, cheap crap that they import from the vast pollution that China has become.

There just isn't any solution set that includes "shopping for sustainability" unless you define that set as deliberately purchasing less goods than you previously did and those goods are chosen for maximum longevity, utility, ability to repair or re-use or just old-fashioned value. An example is the one pair of hemp jeans that replace ten pairs of cotton jeans over the course of a decade. Notice WalMart will never, every, ever, sell hemp jeans or socks because they would LAST. There's no return sales factor.

I am very, very lucky to live in a town that has a small, active core of people that rejects the WalMart philosophy and maintains a core of culture. I just came back from my local farmers market that happens every saturday. Our downtown is still thriving unlike most downtowns within 20 miles of a WalMart. People still try to take care of each other and give a hand to the planet. We just kicked one planned WalMart out of town and we're going to beat down the expansion of the existing abomination.

In other towns nearby the WalMart has essentially killed local business and with it civic life. Show me a town with two WalMart Supercenters and I'll show you a town with a serious meth problem. That's methamphetamine, as in nasty chemicals dumped in ravines and entire families destroyed. As in the chemical refuge of people whose future living in a community has been transformed into a future of working in a box and ruled by unseen corporate masters. WalMart and meth are like peas in a pod.

Here's a clue Adam; cheap labor costs the planet as well as the working people. Those nice walkable neighborhoods in San Francisco and next door to Brown University (yes I've been there) are there because there are hundreds of little shops that serve niches and create community. WalMart effectively sterilizes the cultural landscape as well as it's suppliers in China sterilize the physical landscape. So that what happens is people don't form community relationships and therefore are unable to form emotional attachments. Attachments to things like neighborhood trees, and vines and flowers and critters and their children. They definately don't give a crap about some stranger on the street.

How's that working out for everybody here in the great prison that america has become? Is "BLUE" labeled crap going to replace the social relationships fostered in little, inefficient neighborhood shops?

So whatever your new mcmansion lifestyle is, Adam, please understand that it won't ever, ever, make up for the degraded planet you promote. It's one thing to be helpless or overwhelmed in the face of the problem but to promote the destroyers is flat evil.

May your karma find you "faster than expected."