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Shades of GreenEmily Bazelon takes readers' questions about the motivations and values of the environmental movement.


Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 4:24 PM ET

Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, July 12, to discuss eco-snobbery and the motivations and values of the green movement. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Emily Bazelon: Hi, everyone. Looking forward to talking with you this afternoon about green values, the perils of eco-snobbery, and Toyota's Prius. Fire away!

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Kensington, Md.: Emily, I will probably be another guy you want to punch. The people whose total contribution to the environmental movement consists of owning an impractical Prius (you can't even put stuff on the roof, can you?) and shopping at Whole Foods are only deluding themselves and others like them. Neither the wasteful people out there nor the greenies are impressed. Environmentalism is hard, it is not fun. It requires pretty much being uncool and old-fashioned. But it is worth it.

The fleet of bikes my family uses to get around was pulled from the garbage. So were some of our furniture, building materials, television, several vacuum cleaners and assorted computer equipment. We actually sew our clothes to patch holes and extend their useful life indefinitely. We compost. I use the dishwater on the lawn. All of these are things people used to do before the marketing of the 1950s brainwashed our parents and grandparents into the believing in the American right of the consumer feeding frenzy. There is nothing to be snobby about in being green. It is about being humble, not showing off consumer excess, using less and living simpler, more selfless lives. Your kids, like mine, actually will hate it.

Emily Bazelon: This is so interesting, and so wonderfully candid. not at all punch worthy! I am mostly with you, really. I worry about how little I'm really doing to reduce my own carbon count (being anything like an average American on this score is pretty untenable). And I also worry about glossing over the difficulty of really making a difference.

But here's my question for you: if it's grim and a slog, and we portray it that way, won't most people decide to do nothing at all?

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Columbia, Md.: Ms. Bazelon, people who are snobs and breed little snobs do not need a Prius to behave so inappropriately. They would find something else to feel better than the Joneses. That is just American culture—don't you think? Of all the things these egomaniacs are going to be snobbish about, the least we should be concerned about is there snobbish eco-friendly tendencies. One other point ... now that you've burned several million brain cells on this incredibly nonsensical article, honestly, didn't South Park do a much better job at poking at this demographic?

Emily Bazelon: You know you're the third person to mention that South Park skit. I haven't seen it—I'll have to go find it on YouTube.

Sure, it's just American culture, but worth thinking about if only because it's all too easy to be blind to one's own snobbery and have X-ray vision about everyone else's.

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McKinney, Texas: Forgive me for being a bit jaded, but: In the early 1990s "The Environment" was front-page news (lead story of a Time magazine) Fortune 500 companies were stumbling over each other to demonstrate how "green" they were. On the other hand I worked for a company that, in the late 1980s that was cited for serious environmental abuses (with considerable fines assessed). The company's "response" was the hiring of a vice president to reflect (whitewash?) a better environmental image (the same VP went on to resign in disgrace from the state of New York for abuses surrounding Texaco).

My point is this: When the environmental "push" of the past fell off of the front pages, corporations (and the general public) developed a case of amnesia when it came to how "green" they wished to be. Should present issues (such as global-warming) cease to be front-page print, will "green" become an after-thought again?

Emily Bazelon: You raise two great points. One is about the power of alarmism, and the problem of long-term threats for which it's hard to keep sounding the alarm so strongly. It's awfully hard to maintain an emergency posture over the long term. We all get tired or bored, and want to ease up. For sure that's a danger this time around about global warming just as it was with earlier waves of environmentalism. We need real investment in the future, and in future leadership, to jump up onto the soapbox for a second.

Your second valuable point is about the big abuses by companies or other major actors, which really needs to be addressed through regulation and law enforcement, as opposed to the usually smaller sins we commit as individuals. That's a very real concern. Priuses are all well and good, but political organizing means more in the long run, I think.

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Arlington, Va.: From your Slate article: "In the middle of a clear West Virginia stream, some of our fellow campers soaped up, shampoo and all, with nary a thought, seemingly, to the chemicals they were injecting straight into the water. Eli looked at them and then at my husband and me. 'Those people shouldn't be doing that!' he said." It's possible that the shampoo was biodegradable. Do you know that it's not?

Emily Bazelon: It was regular old shampoo—Suave I think—and nothing about the container looked biodegradable.

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Fort Belvoir, Va.: Hi—I enjoyed the piece. It reminded me of the South Park episode where all the hybrids were causing dangerous "smug" emissions. However, I think too much has been inferred from the "want to make a statement" survey result. Many people (wrongly) assumed that the statement was "I'm better than you because I care for the environment." But it also might have been "I wish to pay extra for the negative externalities that driving wreaks" or "I feel Toyota is more responsible and would rather they have my money than Exxon Mobil." Then again, I'm sure that for many people the primary statement is "look how green I am!"

Emily Bazelon: True, the statement making is probably all of those things. But what grabbed me about it is the need for external verification, which I'm so prone to myself, and which in the end doesn't seem like the best of reasons to do something.

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How about the Hummer People?: Here we are again angsting over whether Prius owners are snobs or deluded fools or faux-environmentalists, etc. Why aren't there concurrent articles and online chats about what the people who own Hummers or other gas-hogs are saying about themselves and their principles or intentions?

Emily Bazelon: Oh, I think they get roasted plenty. As they should. But that doesn't mean us Prius Preeners shouldn't look in the mirror, does it?

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Washington: In the past several years not only has going green gained snob appeal it seems to have gotten more expensive. Are any companies or groups making efforts to make going green more affordable and thus more accessible to the masses?

Emily Bazelon: This is such a great question. I'll take a stab at answering and invite other more knowledgeable to jump in as well. Companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are making some effort to stock green products. The mass demand they can command should act to expand markets, create economies of scale, and bring prices down. Two questions, though: What eco-standards are they using, and what effect does this have on small local companies? There's a tension sometimes between green and local.

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Houghton, Mich.: It seems to me that "most" Americans would be willing to join the Prius-class if it means zero sacrifice of status. That is, the people who happily trade their Hummer for a hybrid would be very much less likely to trade their McMansion for a 1,000-square-foot bungalow—a downward move in perceived status that would conserve a lot more resources than their vehicle going from 18 miles per gallon to 48. Do you think the vast number of Americans are willing to sacrifice prestige for the sake of ... anything?

Emily Bazelon: Another great question. Essentially, no, I don't. As you've astutely pointed out, changing the terms or what has status, i.e., now hybrids are hip, is usually the way to go. In the house-size dept, that's not impossible. If we decided it was cool to go Euro and have denser and more citified housing, instead of suburbs with huge houses where you have to drive everywhere, then we'd have changed that norm. Manhattan is still desirable, after all.

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Emily Bazelon edits Slate's Medical Examiner and Jurisprudence columns and writes about law and family. She previously was an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
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