Editor's Note

Little Green

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Ion Zupcu, May 26, 2009

This month, we’re kicking off a new section in the magazine, Green Living. Type “green living” into Google and you get 108 million results, offering websites devoted to all things sustainable, environmentally friendly, and eco-whatever, from tips on how to drive your car to minimize your carbon footprint to where to source biodegradable picnic utensils. Green is the new black. (Or, green is the new green—ka-ching!) Part of this greening of our culture is just capitalism going about its business, commodifying a demand where it exists, as sustainability has bubbled to the surface of consumer consciousness in the past decade. If people want energy-saving light bulbs and composting toilets, someone will build them and sell them for a profit.

But where did this eco-demand come from?

This is the question I’ve been pondering since we decided to launch an explicit section of Chronogram devoted to the best ideas for living constructively—not destructively—on the planet. But to get to that simple query, a circuitous path backward through time must be traced, charting the efforts of those who were green before green was green. Those who understood that industrial and post-industrial society could not go on indefinitely ignoring the toll that progress (that loaded word) was taking on the earth, the organism that sustains us and all life. Like ur-environmentalist John Muir, who advocated for the preservation of the American wilderness. Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring, which exposed the polluting power of synthetic pesticides, is a pillar of the modern environmental movement. Pete Seeger, who started Clearwater, the model grassroots organization upon which so many other environmental groups have based themselves.

Capitalism doesn’t create the demand, it merely stokes the furnace of an existing need and attempts to find an efficient way of making a buck on it. (Though it certainly can create demand out of whole cloth—pet rock, anyone?) The demand exists because of explicit efforts at consciousness raising by those who could not help but do it. While some may become activists because they long for the spotlight or a showcase for their righteous anger, no one remains involved in advocacy work for many years without acknowledging that it could not be otherwise—one realizes it’s what required to help society along, whether it be marching with a placard or ladling out soup or handing out leaflets.