RSSFriday B.S.: Everything Has Gone Green
May 16
Humor, Society and Culture Comments Off
I’m not usually a huge fan of bandwagon trends but the latest “go green” nonsense spouted by bands and banks and Tyra (Banks) has me a little ambivalent. While I can concede that environmental health is a topical issue that probably is due some loving, I have a hard time believing that all these superstars who are supposedly pushing green initiatives really give even one tiny llama turd.
Take the case of Radiohead, who angered fans over a show in middle-of-nowhere Bristow, Virginia earlier this week. Torrential rains kept fans from getting to the show and the venue, at least, was less than conciliatory about making it up to them. But the fans, interestingly, were far more vitriolic about the fact that the venue itself was 40 miles from the nearest metropolitan area and not accessible except by car, seemingly defeating the band’s new environmental mission. Radiohead 2.0 has taken a number of innovative approaches to rockstardom, from the one-off set your own price digital release of In Rainbows (which is excellent by the way) to turning down an appearance at the Glastonbury festival because of potential harm to the environment. For their latest round of tour dates, the band has asked fans to minimize their carbon footprint getting to and from concert venues, which makes the choice of Bristow, VA (and the August 13th show in Mansfield, MA) more than a little contradictory for the lack of public transportation available nearby. (By the way, the llama turd line wasn’t mine. It was post by a rather inventive Radiohead fan.)
Green bands are nothing new. Madonna wrote a pro-environmental song called Hey You! which she performed for the first time (and hopefully the last) at Live Earth on July 7 in London. It’s just about the worst song every recorded and includes these inspirational lyrics, “Hey you, there on the fence, you’ve got a choice, one day it will make sense.” Live Earth, you might not remember, was the Al Gore-organized event that came on the heels of his climate crisis documentary An Inconvenient Truth (and apparently the height of Gore’s 15 minutes of fame.) Concerts were staged on every continent on the Earth where it was convenient and they could sell tickets. Bands from Black Eyed Peas to Dave Matthews Band played for the climate to massive, beer-soaked crowds, and the music was interspersed with commercial pleas to do your part for the environment.
To its credit, the message was at times a carefully executed and potent call to action. The problem, though, was that the event on the whole was forgettable, and not just a little bit vague about its own environmental responsibility. Concerts were supposed to be staged with the smallest possible carbon footprint (climate-speak for reducing greenhouse gases) but there was never really an obvious connection between the event’s own efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and the spectacle we saw on TV. Did Live Earth actually do anything for the environment, or just talk about it? (You could argue, and assuredly Gore would argue, that just talking about it was enough on its own. But an audit of the concerts eventually found that, yes, they managed to minimize the impact of hosting 8 large-scale concerts worldwide simultaneously.) Ultimately, Hey You! epitomized the whole Live Earth initiative. It was bland, unmemorable and full of mixed messages. But Live Earth marked a turning point in the environmental bandwagon and suddenly within the year, everybody has gone green.
I laughed when America’s Next Top Model went all eco-friendly and rented a “green” bus to cart around 13 aspiring models in cycle 9. Do the viewers of ANTM, much less the models themselves, even know what a green bus is? And what about the house they lived in was eco-friendly? We never really found out, only that Tyra told us that “Top Model is going green” and we took for granted that meant something besides the color of the CW website. Lime-green, at that. For the record, the bus was using 100% BioDiesel, assuming that clears things up for you. And what happened during cycle 10, which concluded this week? Not a single word about the environment. This season’s soapbox was reserved for genital mutilation, fat chicks and Anya’s incomprehensible accent.
While I think it’s nice that musicians and media are trying to recruit the masses to eco-friendly living, I can’t help but notice that no one seems to be able to walk and talk green at the same time. Live Earth promoted the right message but oddly failed to address its own environmental impact. Sure, they eventually concluded that the environmental damage caused by the concerts wasn’t as bad as it could have been but did we really need 150 bands, endless hours of MTV coverage and a special broadcast event from Antarctica just to destroy the world a little less? Then, there is Top Model that went in eco-friendly overdrive for a single season and spent less than one tenth of one scene explaining why it was important, giving this viewer, at least, the distinct impression that it was nothing more than a bandwagon ratings boost.
Does the media push even really matter? The challenge is gaining any kind of momentum and turning green into a lifestyle change. A lot of environmentally-friendly activities are already integrated into our daily lives. Recycling. Composting. Carpooling. Admittedly, we take for granted that doing any of this helps but those kind of messages are not anything new. At best, we now have a new round of enthusiasm for unplugging small appliances, taking the subway, and cutting copier paper into notepads. When I read about the new green elementary school being built near Scranton, PA with its on-site sewage treatment plant (which for some reason makes me think of the swimming hole where Mr. Burns dumps all the toxic waste from the nuclear plant) and rooftop garden, I don’t think, oh great, they are doing so much for the environment. I think, oh great, just another sign that this go-green crap is out of control. Especially when the green school is going to take 20 years to build at an approximate cost of $22 million by which time, I kind of doubt we’ll still be so gung ho about saving the environment and funding will be cut off before the geothermal heating is even installed.
Not surprisingly, what finally has woken people up to the crisis is the skyrocketing costs of food and gasoline. Biofuel is diverting foodstuffs from the grocery store to your automobile. Years of drought is affecting food supplies. Home utility costs are on the rise. And nobody anymore can control the oil companies, which means gasoline costs will continue to rise because the companies can simply refuse to produce the oil which aggravates the supply chain. But we aren’t dumb. If food costs rise, we make to eat everything we buy. Less food waste. If utility costs go up, we make sure to turn off the lights when we leave the room. Less energy waste. Higher gas prices? Then we drive less and carpool. Those things meaningfully impact people’s everyday lives, not concerts for the climate crisis and reality TV shows pandering to latest craze. Some catchy slogan isn’t going to convince people to change their routine. But in our own way, we are fashioning life long habits that will benefit the environment simply because we have to.
