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

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.

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Emily Bazelon: hey thanks, and you are so right about the power of the slogan. "Green is the new red white and blue" gets an A for effort, but I don't think we're there yet.

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Milford, N.H.: Eco-snobbery may be annoying, but isn't it a good thing? Nothing changes people's actions like peer pressure (why else would anybody do something as unpleasant as walk in high heels or wear a suit, for example?). If we want society to improve its environmental ways we need to cover "green" behavior with an aura of I'm-better-than-you. I say embrace your inner snob—as long as the snobbery involves something worthwhile, and not piffle like wearing crystallized carbon or being born to somebody who owns a big house.

Emily Bazelon: you may well have a point there. I guess snobbery does sell. Hmm. Maybe now I will have to go around being as obnoxious as possible about my Prius. on the other hand, since I'm not a rock star or Jackie O, seems likely to backfire.

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Fairfax, Va.: The Prius is great except when you have a collision. My daughter-in-law in Houston, driving with two very young children, recently was clipped on the side by a teenager driving a Dodge at 30 mph on the wrong side of the road. Everyone was okay, but they would have been killed if the fragile Prius had been hit in a different location. The Prius of course was totaled, and the family probably will replace it with a Volvo or a Subaru. Sorry to be reactionary, but auto safety in a well-designed, ruggedly built car trumps very high fuel economy.

Emily Bazelon: oh dear oh dear, that is an upsetting story. If more people drove lighter cars, the risks would go down, right? Though there will always be the hazard of trucks.

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New York: So would the Camry hybrid be the choice for the environmentally-conscious (but uninterested in being trendy or making statements) in aggressively Red-State neighborhoods?

Emily Bazelon: yes! (at least it sounds right, though I haven't checked the Camry out).

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Carless in the District: You really could make a bigger statement about the environment and ride the Metro or the bus. But I guess that wouldn't give you and the snobs the ostentatious symbol you crave.

Emily Bazelon: I do ride the metro to work. But I can't ride it everywhere. The public transportation/car problem is pretty chicken and egg, but for the moment, it's hard to live in a residential part of a city and not have a car. my kid wouldn't be able to get to soccer practice, for example, or Hebrew school.

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Re: Expensive: In response to Washington, who says that going green is expensive, he or she is exactly right. Many of us don't have a down payment and $300-plus per month for a car payment. Not to mention what insurance and property taxes cost for a new car.

Emily Bazelon: too true. Eventually there will be used hybrids on the market, but for the moment this sliver of the green movement does raise class issues.

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Maryland: Why is it so important that Prius owners' motives be pure? Don't many people buy cars that "make a statement" about them? And if the end result is that there are fewer all-gasoline models on the road, don't we all get the benefit of that anyway?

Emily Bazelon: You're right, of course. But I think we want to be self-aware about what we're doing. or at least, I thought I wanted to be, when I had the idea for this piece.

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Bowie, Md.: In former generations, environmentalists were largely outdoorsmen—hunters and fishermen—who actually lived in the wild for significant periods of time. Today's most visible environmentalists are mostly well-off suburbanites, who've never seen a lynx kill a rabbit (live) or an animal starving to death because it's too injured to hunt. Isn't a lot of today's enviro-chic driven by people with a Garden of Eden view of how nature works, who completely fail to comprehend how brutal life in the wild is?

Emily Bazelon: I'm not sure you have to experience the brutality of the wild to understand that global warming is a creepingly daunting problem, and to want to do something about it. There are lots of strands of the environmental movement, right? The hunters and fishers, the public health people worried about rising asthma rates, the people who live on the coasts who can't buy home insurance. It's a big tent.

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McLean, Va.: Good camping/wilderness practices say that you should never rinse off soap in a body of water. You're supposed to take a bucket of rinse water at least 100 feet away from the body of water and rinse off the soap there. Jeez!

Emily Bazelon: good point! wish I'd thought of it a little while ago myself.

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Emily Bazelon: Thank you, everyone. Your questions and comments were smart and thought provoking and feisty, and it was hugely fun to think and spar with you.

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