Stealing Green

NZ’s independent news site Scoop featured this article which originated at Chicago’s Conscious Choice.
It looks at the shift in tone that has brought major companies to start Green initiatives and branding themselves as Green-friendly. GE, Wal-Mart, and BP all get a few paragraphs looking at how their claims stack up.
But what really appeals to me about this article is how it talks about the bigger picture. As it points out, it is unequivocally a good thing that major corporations are at minimum paying lip service to Green values, and in practice are taking some steps, however minor. The question becomes, how good is good enough?
It’s a corollary to the ‘We Won’ post I made a few weeks back. When the argument has been won, the result is that those who were on the other side colonise our side as quickly as possible. Part of being involved in progressive thought and the progressive movement is accepting that people you despise will end up espousing your position on things, shamelessly, as if they never thought any different.
Here in NZ, does it stick in your craw a bit to see the National party hasten to position itself in the Green sphere, after so many years fighting tooth and nail against any green initiatives and having a key role in scuppering our national response to Kyoto? (Although, it must be said, Labour did a fine job of scuppering that all by itself.) It should. But there’s only one response to the progressive crowd feeling grumpy about that: get over it. Let yourself feel like an honourable martyr, then let it go and get on to the next battle.
Because here’s the secret: winning doesn’t always taste good. Most of the time, those who fought the hardest don’t get to have a say in the future. Does anyone in NZ politics think this massive shift in our political sphere to welcome Green issues into the mainstream is going to undo decades of efforts to paint our Green party as loony eco-nutters? Nope. In fact, that’s going to remain an essential strategy: National and Labour, to keep votes that might otherwise go Greenwards, will claim to be sensible environmentalists, in contrast to the Green party who are loony eco-nutters.
If Wal-Mart invests billions in bringing organic food to the masses, does that make it a socially and environmentally conscious company? Only in part. They’ll still use mass-industrial methods of food production, and they’ll still operate massive and wasteful supply chains. One step up conceptually, and you have organic food supporting a consumer model that enthusiastically supports the destructive hypercapitalism that is messing up our entire global system.
But still – organic food at Wal-Mart! That’s a major achievement. There are other battles still to be won, but man, that’s good. That’s a step closer to the Another World that is Possible. I should feel happy about that, right?
Or is there another way of looking at it – that weak “successes” such as this sap energy from the movement, they are tactical maneuvers by the enemy to deny the moral high ground while changing little of consequence, and they are a sign of loss.
When you start digging into this, you quickly get down into some fundamental questions about human behaviour, about identity formation and habituation and rational vs. non-rational modes. Ultimately you’re talking about what human beings are, and that’s a very thorny area.
So how good is good enough?
(Oh yeah – read the article, huh? It’s great.)