The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

There is a great article in the New York Times about eco-consumerism; the idea that you can buy your way into environmental conservatism through everyday purchases such as a hybrid car, hemp blanket, bamboo flooring, CFL light bulbs, etc. What I really liked about the article is how it highlighted, with specific examples, how well-meaning consumers, buying “green,” are really not as green as they think. For example:

The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.

Or:

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

The takeaway from the article is not, however, that these purchases are all silly and that no one should make them; it’s actually that people are beginning to care on a wide enough front to make the purchases at all. Homes everywhere are shifting to CFL bulbs, which, en masse, does have a significant impact on energy usage. Now that the common man has been motivated to try to do something about it, environmental groups have a greater chance than ever of having an appreciable impact.

Towards the end of the article, the following quote appears:

A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.

If the people are interested enough in environmentalism to vote with their dollars, perhaps they’ll start voting with their votes as well.