Are We Just Greenwashing Ourselves?

We can’t all be No Impact Man. It takes a huge amount of effort to follow the lead of Colin Beavan (pictured above), the New York City-based writer who forced his wife and young child to join him in eliminating their entire carbon footprint, meaning losing everything from Metrocards to disposable diapers to window A/C units.

Frankly, most of us would stop at giving up toilet paper. In fact, myself and many of my supposedly environmentally conscious peers—who switch to compact fluorescent lights, bike to work and take reusable bags to the grocery store—won’t stop buying Apple products. (That’s despite it ranking number 133 on Newsweek’s recent rankings of green companies, whereas competitors Hewlett-Packard and Dell finished 1st and 2nd, respectively.)

One of the reasons we’re not able to go gung ho green, according to Stanford marketing professor Baba Shiv, is that we’re old dogs and new tricks don’t come so easy to us. Case in point: Shiv spent a weekend afternoon in 2008 staked out in front of a Bay Area Trader Joe’s. He stopped all the customers entering the grocery store armed with their own reusable shopping bag and took down their contact information. A few weeks later, he called the shoppers and asked if they again brought their reusable bag on their next trip to the market. The overwhelming response (even outside of San Francisco) was: No. Instead, they carried their bounty home in Trader Joe’s paper bags, which, until recently, they’d probably been doing for years.

“When people have already paid for being green but they forget next time, they’re not willing to invest more in their behavior,” Shiv told Stanford Business magazine, who is now teaching a seminar on green marketing to business school students. “Goal adoption is much more powerful if there is a potential slap on the wrist for not adopting.”

Wrist slaps for forgetting your reusable shopping bag doesn’t yet exist in our society. Supermarkets don’t often charge you for the bags they put your groceries in. Instead, leaving your reusable bag at home or in the car results in no real penalty to the shopper. He or she receives a new single-use bag. It’s not just a far cry from a wrist slap, it’s almost a reward.

A recent report by an American Psychological Association task force examined the psychological factors at play behind the slow adoption of green practices amongst the U.S. population. It also identified habit as the biggest obstacle keeping Americans from going green en masse. Other important barriers included a mistrust of messages from the scientific community, a still-vocal minority that denies the existence of global warming and people opting to do nothing (believing their actions won’t make any appreciable difference).

So, many of us who believe we’re going green are just greenwashing ourselves. We might be doing more than the next guy, but we’re likely not doing everything we could to reduce our impact. We simply don’t have the discipline for it. And our businesses and governments haven’t put in place carrots (or sticks) to keep us in line.

For that kind of resolve we have to look at what Shiv calls “captains,” champions of going green, like No Impact Man, who are willing to sacrifice the inconveniences that it entails. Though, I should note, nobody’s perfect: No Impact Man wrote a book and produced a documentary about he and his family’s no impact year. No way printing all those books and distributing a film didn’t have some environment impact.

Posted by Nikhil Swaminathan

Graphic courtesy of No Impact Man