Greenpeace

Right now I am sitting at my desk, listening to my I-pod. Well no, not really. I am not listening to my I-pod, but rather, to music on my I-pod—but this is small change, not really taking away from the main point I was trying to make about 2 sentences ago. Main point: I am physically attached to a piece of Apple equipment and I am thinking about it.

Physically and emotionally attached to a piece of Apple equipment. It’s ridiculous how I feel about my I-pod. The year after I graduated from college, my I-pod died (stupid mistake—I thought it would be ok to take it jogging with me in a downpour) and I still mourn its passing, like it was a favorite pet. Oh, my first I-pod with all of the music from my college’s radio station on you; I will never have an I-pod as good as you! The value of my second I-pod is not so much the music that’s on it but the beauty inherent to all I-pods—it just travels so well with me. How wonderful it is to throw this little contraption into my bag and not have to worry: I want to listen to this CD now, did I bring it? But despite how connected I am to my past and present I-pods, I will never, ever, come close to feeling how those people at San Francisco’s Mac World feel towards everything Apple.

Enter Greenpeace at Mac World in San Francisco, CA.

By now you know about Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign (if not, read it here: www.greenmyapple.com), so it’ll come as no surprise to you that we were at this Mac World convention, the largest gathering of Mac lovers.  Steve Jobs was speaking on the Tuesday morning of the convention and oh man, people were lined up in front of the convention center when we got there at 7 AM. (And it looked liked some had camped out overnight. No joking—there were camping chairs, blankets and Krispy Kreme donut boxes set up through out the line.)

We got to work. A group of us handed out fliers on Greenpeace’s campaign. We’re asking Apple, an innovator in technology, to be an innovator in green technology. We want Apple to stop using toxic chemicals in all of its products and to provide a free take-back program to reuse and recycle its products wherever they are sold. Most people at Mac World were very receptive to these ideas. They took the fliers we handed out, stopped to ask for more information, even posed for pictures with our version of “the Mac guy”—a cardboard cutout of the actor who plays “a Mac” on the commercials (in our version, he wears one of our campaign t-shirts). But the weird thing was, some people wanted to argue with us. That’s not weird in itself—I mean, we’re Greenpeace, so it would be bizarre if some people didn’t want to argue with us—but these arguers wanted to argue that we were personally insulting Steve Jobs. What the what? A company’s products are hurting people all across the world and we should consider the feelings of this company’s CEO?

So here's my point: If you can’t politely ask a company to change its ways— that is, point out what they’re doing badly and how they, as leaders in their field, can be better— what can you do? Just sit back and wait for companies to self-correct? Maybe that would work for Apple (after all, as we were told that day, Steve’s Vegan), but what about the other not so innovative companies? Isn’t one of our responsibilities as consumers to be responsible consumers?