One enormously negative effect of the environmental movement being mass-marketed is it has become incredibly consumerist and has lost its purpose. Sure, a lot more people are aware of the movement, but does that matter when its purpose has been muddled?

Instead of confronting the hard questions and making the hard

choices, we’re using quarter-measures to make ourselves feel better about our behavior, and in the process, we aren’t doing much of anything to fix the problems we’ve caused.

The environmental movement now concerns itself only with how much carbon we’re tossing into the atmosphere, which is important. But it loses sight of the other problems we face.

In the name of curbing global warming, we’ve decided it’s better to refine currently used technologies, as opposed to deploying newer, cleaner technologies. Instead of changing our habits, we lower industrial carbon emissions. Two of the easiest ways to reverse environmental damage are to replace cars entirely with more robust mass transit — not buy hybrids — and to stop eating so much meat.

Instead, we buy energy-efficient light bulbs (a treatment of symptoms, not the disease). Most people playing along with
the green movement aren’t making any effort to replace the energy grid with something that doesn’t require extensive mining or produce excessive greenhouse emissions. No, most of them are just buying “green” light bulbs. We aren’t making sacrifices; and frankly, we should be.

For example, some restaurants use chalkboards to take orders. Sounds like a good idea on the surface — until you factor in the destruction of mountains and ecosystems in the mining process of both slate and chalk. It’s just as damaging as paper and causes more health problems for humans.

The dust wreaks havoc within the human respiratory system. Why aren’t these restaurants installing computer kiosk systems at each table, or giving all waitresses and waiters touchscreen PDAs? That would be far better for the environment, as long as broken PDA/computers were recycled properly.

The fact that the vast majority of the green movement isn’t diving headlong into the hard choices leads to the inescapable conclusion that this movement isn’t at all about helping the environment. It leads to an epiphany: This movement is about money on the part of the sellers of the ideas, feel-good attitudes of the buyers and the desire to keep up with the Joneses.