Greenpeace

    Saturday April 22nd was Earth Day. After waking up, going to the post office, and eating some breakfast, I found myself at the Greenpeace booth at the Berkeley Earth Day celebration. Both fortunately and unfortunately, our booth was downwind from the kettle corn stand, positioned behind a fountain. In back of us was a large banner talking about the dirty politics killing clean energy. One of our goals on Saturday was to encourage Bay Area constituents to write a letter to their Senator Feinstein to get her to save Cape Wind. Another one of our goals was to promote two of our other campaigns, Community Choice and the market campaign against Kimberly-Clark.
    Market campaigns are truly interesting because they target consumers as well as corporations. Both sides are encouraged, empowered, to make the right choice, and further, both sides are reminded of their close relationship. That is, while corporations are probably already way too conscious of how their decisions affect consumer choices, in these kinds of campaigns, consumers are able to see how their everyday choices really do influence corporate decisions. More to the point, consumers can see that they—not just the bad corporations— are implicated in the destruction— as well as the protection— of the planet.  Market campaigns serve to remind us that we are not innocent and helpless, that (this sounds so drastic, but really!) every decision we make has repercussions, not only for us personally, but rippling out, ultimately affecting all.  
    That being said, I must admit my shock at the Berkeley Earth Day public. To each passerby who stopped, I explained the K-C campaign, talked about how K-C destroys the Boreal, an ancient forest that is relevant in our daily lives as it forms one of the world’s largest land-based storehouses of carbon dioxide. I painted as vivid a picture I could of the Boreal, an ancient forest that is home to diverse animal and plant life and is depended on for subsistence by native peoples.
And yet—and yet, people still told me that they choose to use Kleenex because recycled paper is “too hard" on their noses. To me, this is truly mind blowing. If you are so concerned with softness for your precious noise, why not use a cloth handkerchief? Surely a handkerchief is much softer than any kind of paper, sourced from ancient forests or not.  Furthermore, I wonder how these people will explain to their children why hundreds of species of animals (moose, caribou, lynx, bear, wolves, eagles, hawks and owls to name only a few), plants and ancient trees were destroyed for the box of Kleenex sitting in their bathrooms. When it comes to ancient forests, it is not a hard choice to choose recycled.