Archive for December, 2007

On my last day blogging under these auspices (now you can find me here), I yield the floor to fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, from The Country of Marriage (buy it, you won't be sorry). Years ago, this one resided on the wall of our downstate outhouse, which looked out on just such a tree: 

THE OLD ELM TREE BY THE RIVER

Economist and blogger Brad DeLong talks about his favorite economist:

"Marx saw that the coming of capitalist economies destroyed all feudal, traditional, and patriarchal relationships and orders. [Joseph] Schumpeter saw farther: that market capitalism destroys its own earlier generations. There is, he wrote, a constant 'process of industrial mutation -- if I may use that biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.'"

Not to mention its employees. 

The late congressperson Henry Hyde, speaking at Notre Dame 24 Sep 1984:

"Many of the same voices who hailed the American bishops as 'prophetic' when they tacitly endorsed the nuclear freeze now find the bishops 'scary' when the issue turns to abortion. This is hypocrisy."

An excellent point. Of course, it applies equally the other way around -- these days, to those who talk about the pope's opposition to abortion but ignore what he said about the US war in Iraq.

Henry Hyde was well qualified to speak of hypocrisy, having managed the impeachment of a Democratic president for perjury and then kept quiet about the far more consequential perjuries of his Republican successor. His legacy is that of a partisan first, with patriotism and morality trailing well behind.

H/t Jameson Campaigne for the link.

Thanks to Whet for pointing me toward Penelope Green's NY Times piece on "eco decorating." Among other extreme weirdness, she describes conceptual event planner David Stark, who was commissioned to do the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's awards gala in October. He "directed the museum to shred its office paper for six months, producing a harvest that he augmented with 12 years of his personal tax returns and his own office’s papers. He then turned the resulting 6,000 pounds of paper strips into giant topiaries and chandeliers, floridly archaic shapes fashioned from trash. It was the language of excess -- those topiaries recalled the gardens of Versailles -- expressed in the material of frugality."

And that's as good as it gets in our "Prius culture" -- James B. Twitchell's word for the situation in which "We know things are wrong. We don’t know what we can do. We can’t know. And so we do what marketers encourage us to do to get those feelings we want to have."

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward reports on a survey of green marketing that TerraChoice Environmental Marketing made at six big-box stores. Their research teams found 1,753 green claims made for 1,018 products. Most of them (57 percent) were misleadingly narrow, and 26 percent offered no proof either on the product or on its website. Fewer than 1 percent were actually false.

Neither Makower nor I would call this "greenwashing," as TerraChoice does. Would other claims made for products stand up even this well? I'll make a wild guess that, for the moment, green marketing is actually a bit more honest than marketing in general -- a low standard to be sure, but if the environmental movement could raise the standards of 21st-century capitalism in this area, it should count for something.