”The future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
For my Mother Pelican monthly essays, I have recently been writing about digital-technology addiction. I interrupted those investigations with a few essays on Martin Luther King Jr. (which I will continue next month), and now I am interrupting that exploration with this interlude on greenwashing for the month May.
Before we continue our discussion from last month further exploring interspecies communication/collaboration—how tree-knowledge as tree-living can be nourished through prayer-as-action—I must address, yet again, the haunting ubiquity of greenwashing: this time in the context of the month of May. Across time and culture, May symbolizes transition. Maius, the Greek Goddess of Growth represents the personification of transmutation. Maia became an agricultural deity.
Rather than thriving in the fertility of Maia/Maius (transformation), corporate capitalism and it's offspring, consumer complicity are enraptured by the Hindu version of måyå (artifice).[1] Måyå represents “pernicious power and knowledge” that “rob[s] a person of liberating insight (jnana)( Abington Dictionary of Living Traditions, 1981, 469). Convenience-culture compliants are much more comfortable with the known, habits maintained through socially constructed comfort and desire.[2] It behooves fearless cultural workers to reframe the concept of growth—understanding/embodying growth as alchemy (Maius/Maia) rather than our cultural epidemic that positions growth as acquisition[3] (måyå). This paradigm shift requires radical self accountability. We industrialized humans can re-ignite our spiritual intelligence: our radical (Latin, radix, radic for “root”) inherent relationship to deep time, land, water, spirit, and one another embedded in daily life.
Because I am focusing on the imperative of radical care and radical investigation linked to radical action, this month's installment is dedicated to:
Rachel Carson, born May 27, 1907
and
Isidore the Farm Labourer of Madrid (Isidro de Merlo y Quintana) (the patron saint of farmers, peasants, day laborers, brick layers, domesticated animals, and impovrished peoples and agriculture in general), died May 15, 1130
The great feast celebrating Isidore and his love for all animals (including people) is held on May 15th.
In order to illustrate the distinction between Maia/Maius as co-evolution through alchemy (growth through transformation), a collaborative interspecies intelligence, and måyå as trickery (economic growth through greenwashing and capitalist acquisition) this month's installment is also dedicated to unraveling various manifestations of måyå—the intricacies of too frequently illusory humanitarian and ecological justice—"care" that may actually divert us from addressing why care is needed in the first place. Måyå, conditioned by human ignorance, is both cause and effect. Radical diversion refers to the systematic erasure of the underlying roots of our entangled crises. In the case of the month of May:
Consumer Product Safety Commission,[4] established May 14, 1973
and
Endangered Species Day, established May 20, 2006 (the Endangered Species Act was established in 1973)
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has become a hazardous farce for two reasons:
1. The CPSC encourages consumers to feel like they are buying something safe. In fact, "safety" must be distinguished from "health." This illusion of safety justifies flagrant consumption.
2. The CPSC has radically failed to protect consumers, actually supporting dangerously duplicitous product development. By exposing gross misrepresentation of measurable negative impacts, I hope to galvanize consumer activists to truly hold corporations accountable for product standards.
Equally critical to protecting consumers is a regulatory system to protect those along the entire supply chain. A modern Isidore the Farm Labourer might fight to establish a Producer Product Safety Commission to protect laborers from manufacture-based exploitation. For example, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is Mike Daisy’s Off-Broadway performance addressing the slave-labor conditions of Apple-product factory workers in Shenzhen, China. Because of the daily attempts of workers to commit suicide—jumping off roofs—Apple installed a net across the tenements where millions of workers live. iPhone Suicides have not impacted global sales.[5]
My proposition to protect exploited laborers is not to be confused with Producer-Responsibility Laws—i.e., corporate accountability.
Congruently, since its establishment in 2006, Endangered Species Day diverts our attention from the reasons why animals are becoming extinct—inadvertently perpetuating the root causes of their imminent extinction, their inability to survive because of habitat loss, climate crisis, etc. This illusion of action invokes a false expectation of collective effort, but in reality results in social inertia.
I highlight these two historic examples (CPSC and Endangered Species Day) in order to sensitize ourselves to måyå—the phantasmagoric ways in which manipulative marketing manifests (including not only branding and advertizing, but how we educate/indoctrinate our children and how we take for granted imbricated layers of consumer entitlement). Similar to Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizen's Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture (Vandana Shiva, Editor, David Orr, Forward), these forms of greenwashing placate consumer-citizens. They utilize single-issue diversion tactics—maintaining consumer/captialist distraction through mass psychological persuasion. Manufactured consent (sustained compliance through “persuasion psychology”) is more intricately and intimately woven into our lives than ever previously imagined. In contrast with complex, multilayered, intersectional, decolonized, polymath thinking, education, and action, these forms of greenwashing establish trends[6] that are rooted in single-use products and single-use mind-set.
A Declaration of Interdependency: Love Lessons from Zazu Dreams,
performance at Fiske Planetarium, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2018.
Click the image to enlarge.
Greenwashing is "sustainable" for capitalist-economic growth rooted in måyå (deceit), not the Maia transformative growth of empathy, compassion, cooperation, or resiliency, because it dovetails with corporate and governmental diversion from systemic, underlying root causes. Below, I present the convergence of an example of institutionalized eco(justice)-diversion through Band-Aid food-waste solutions with an example of greenwashing through the compostable plastic industry.
At the University of North Carolina, Asheville, 2019 Food Waste Solution Summit, in addition to my full-length lecture, I was asked to present a five-minute motivational talk that would compete with a group of other food-waste activists. All of my “competitors” proposed wonderful “solutions” such as hog-farm “composting,” school lunch reuse food tables, rewriting the EPA's Food Recovery Hierarchy.
EPA's Food Recovery Hierarchy.
Click the image to enlarge.
However, I was the only competitor who examined the intersectional underlying conditions why one in four children in the United States is malnourished and twelve million are obese—the majority of whom are also malnourished. This irony is at the core of our food-waste emergency. The enormity of our food-system crisis demands a cultural paradigm shift towards symbiotic interdependence. It is critical to address the underlying causes behind why people and institutions waste food.
These underlying causes include:
1. US standard of living based on a sense of entitlement
2. Refusal to recognize the intrinsic value of food
3. Disconnection from the food-production process and food justice
4. Adherence to technological fixes
5. False divisions between corporations, government, and everyday people
6. Lack of education for children and adults
7. Environmental racism undermines food security
I suggested that one direct action is to learn from other cultures’ reciprocal relationships to food production. Another is to include children in our food-system solutions’ conversation. How we raise our children is a direct reflection of our commitment to preventing food waste. If we want to create a world without waste, we’ve got to develop and support cross-cultural and historical education for adults and children.
The voting took place in the auditorium using smart phones. (I have never and will never own a smart phone, and the fact that the organizers assumed all audience members owned one and that was their only way to cast a vote was in and of itself rooted in a colonized economy—and represented a direct obstacle to sustainable food-waste solutions.) Regardless of my position on digital technology, most participants, of course, did own smart phones and cast their votes. I received eight percent. The audience felt overwhelmed by my proposal to examine root causes, and chose to focus on, what I felt, were Band-Aid perceived solutions—again our easy-access addiction to institutionally-supported illusion—måyå.
I had hoped questioning and taking intellectual and structural risks would be welcomed; a willingness to directly challenge how underlying causes maintain intricately entangled systems of food insecurity, colonial economics, and corporatized oppressions. If vulnerability, curiosity, and a capacity to learn from the unfamiliar were integrated at the core of our beings (radical self accountability), I suggest many of our interlocking devastating realities could be uprooted.
My final example for this month's essay in which I attempt to unveil måyå by disentangling greenwashing confronts "compostable" plastics. In the name of people and planetary health, surrogate Band-Aids are deployed that are in fact equal to or worse than what is being replaced including bioplastics, phthalates replacements, and hydrofluorocarbons. For example:
1. Compostable disposables, also known as bioplastics, are most frequently produced from GMO-corn monoculture and “composted” in highly restricted environments that are inaccessible to the general public. Due to corn-crop monoculture practices that are dependent on agribusiness's heavy use of pesticides and herbicides (for example, Monsanto’s Round-Up/glyphosate), compostable plastics are not a clean solution. The infrastructure and politics of actually “composting” these products are extraordinarily problematic. These not-so eco-friendly products require extremely high temperatures to decompose. Such composting facilities are rarely available to private consumers. Additionally, their chemical compounds cause extreme damage to water, soil, and wildlife. They cause heavy acidification when they get into the water and eutrophication (lack of oxygen) when they leach nitrogen into the soil.
2. The trend to replace Bisphenol A (BPA) led to even more debilitating phthalates in products.
3. Lastly, we now know that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), “ozone-friendly” replacements, are equally environmentally destructive as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
Compostables marketing, like the recycling industry, strips us of our capacity to recognize our radical interrelatedness.[7] Through habituated obedience to consumer-addicted societal norms, we abdicate our capacity to think, to imagine, and to dream—reinforcing the concept of nature and “resources” as solely utilitarian. In 1991, I initiated Sarah Lawrence College’s first recycling program that Governor Cuomo used as a prototype for the state of New York. The head of Sarah Lawrence's Student Affairs was delighted: “Now we can use more!” That comment has haunted me for twenty-five years, and is at the crux of many of my professional and personal life choices.
Next month we will explore how natural burial practices offer an antidote to greenwashing through the fertility of alchemy found in Maius (Greek Goddess of Growth).
Notes
[1] The Sanskrit concept, Law of Måyå, symbolizes principles of relativity and duality. Although Måyå, the mother of Buddha, is the symbol of extraordinary fecundity and creativity rooted in empirical reality, måyå is unpredictable, mysterious, fleeting, and the most popular—and perhaps most reductive translation, the most facile identification: illusion. This ubiquitous dumbing down of Eastern philosophies (for example, the Sanskrit concepts of Måyå, Karma, and Prana), reinforces mass commercialization.
[2] For further discussion on manufactured consent and habituated obedience see my “Queering the Apocalypse: Climate Chaos and The Obscene,” in Socioscapes: International Journal of Societies, Politics, and Cultures; Gender and Sexualities Studies in Difficult Times: Uncertain Presents, Coalitional Futures, S.IJSPC vol. 1 Issue 1, pp. 143-154, ISSN 2734-0940.
[3] See my "Disentangling Green Colonialism:Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewable Energy Revolution.”
[4] See Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Will Kenton, Investopedia, 5 June 2020.
[5] For details on this post-human phenomenon see my Viscous Expectations, Justice, Vulnerability, the Ob-scene. State College: Penn State University Press, 2014, 274 n. 465.
[6] The list of single-issue campaigns that ignore the root of the crisis at hand is almost infinite, including "Save the Turtles," "Save the Whales," " Save the Bats," "Save the Bees"...
[7] For a detailed exposé of greenwashing and the industrial-capitalist motivation for recycling see Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert's Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost It's Way and What We Can Do About it. Monkfish Press: New York, NY, 2020. Also see their article in Mother Pelican
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