Ever wonder where you can learn from models of successful social movements and urban youth organizing? Sao Paulo is busting at the seams with innovative, effective, creative and inspiring youth organizing and projects. I had the privilege to live there for two years, getting schooled by people like Marcela Freitas who helped start a popular education program in her neighborhood to train gang members for green jobs. Marcela is now organizing a trip to Sao Paulo for you July 10 to the 20th - She wants to bring together…
“students, philanthropists, activists, journalists, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, members of social movements, non-profit professionals or governmental representatives, and common citizens”
and involve you in all kinds of ways, like constructing community houses for young people; discovering the challenges of a community kitchen; visiting a paper-recycling cooperative developed by young people; visiting Eco-Parks, community markets and cultural fairs; discussing, exchanging and sharing information and experiences with young activists; visiting the beach Santos; taking a capoeira workshp and much much more…
Quick background: In northwestern Ontario’s stretch of boreal forest, Weyerhaeuser owns and operates a major mill which obtains wood from the traditional territory of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. The community has not consented to logging on their territory and has backed a moratorium but lacks the ability to enforce it.
So we sent two our finest out to Weyerhaeuser’s construction site to use a bit of their own technology against them. Annie and Adrian found the site yesterday and deployed a large banner reading “Wake up Weyerhaeuser; American Dream Home, Native Nightmare” directly in front of the company’s auotmated webcam.
Ten minutes later, the image made it to Weyerhaeuser’s site.
But why stop there?
Back at home base, we noticed a great feature of the site, an archive:
But it’s password protected:
Luckily, our folks are a bit smarter than their folks:
I think the first time I ever heard the word ‘greenwashing’ was in the late ’80s or maybe early ’90s after I saw a flier from McDonald’s about how they didn’t use beef from the Amazon. I brought the flier home to show my mother, an environmentalist, because I was so proud to show her that even big giant companies were doing good things and that her work was really making a difference.
She looked at it for about three seconds and told me “that’s greenwashing.” She explained the word to me and although I was sad to see my evidence of the mainstream adoption of environmentalism debunked, I realized for the first time that in a lot of ways claiming to “go green” when you’re not can be worse than just doing bad stuff in the first place.
Well, I’ve obviously come a long way since then and you may have already seen one of our “Greenwash of the Week” posts.
You’d think I would be pretty aware of the scope and quantity of greenwashing out there. I thought I was too.
I coauthored this with Amy Ortiz, a student activist from the RAN network, who also works withSouthern Energy Network.
This past weekend, April 4-6th, something historic took place in Memphis, Tennessee. During the same few days where people from across the nation gathered in the place where Martin Luther King Jr’s was assassinated forty years ago to honor the man, his legacy, and his dream for America, a thousand people, the majority of them people of color, came together to take part in rebirthing MLK’s vision. At The Dream Reborn, visionaries, artists and leaders came together to “create ecological solutions to heal the earth while bringing jobs, justice, wealth and health to all our communities.” We saw environmentalism re-defined, re-vitalized, re-energized and re-imagined, and witnessed not just the rebirth of MLK’s dream, but also the birth of a transformative movement with the power to bring the kind of change that we so desperately need.
The Dream Reborn was a weekend charting a new environmentalism that isn’t so new: the marriage of movements for social justice and the environment. Environmental Justice and other groups have been working at this intersection for years. Racial and Economic justice organizations strive to put an ecological lens on their organizing, just as Environmental organizations strive to put a racial and social justice lens on their work. But this weekend was the birth of that organizing with new language that is gaining influence in the mainstream of society, energy around program such as Green Jobs, and forcing major institutions and even presidential candidates to take notice. In more ways than one, the time for a new environmental movement, one for justice for both people and the planet, has come.
We spent our time at Dream Reborn coordinating and participating in Rainforest Action Network (RAN) – and it’s youth arm RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth (RYSE)’s youth delegation. 13 amazing people aged 13-22, along with 4 RAN staff, came together from across the nation. We represented many different communities, ages, and interests. We came to Memphis to connect, learn, grow, share and ultimately leave with the tools and the inspiration to go back to our communities and build a just, sustainable future. It was a chance not only to bring diverse youth to the table as stakeholders in conversations around green jobs and movements for environmental social justice, but to offer ideas and leadership to RAN’s growing network and the evolution of RYSE.
Featuring keynote speakers such as the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Winona LaDuke, Afeni Shakur and Majora Carter, with Van Jones emceeing the event, it isn’t surprising that visions of a future of eco-equity permeated the entire weekend. Workshop and panel sessions such as Food Justice and Building a Youth Movement for Green Jobs focused on providing conference attendees with the connections and skills needed to go back to their communities and make this vision a reality. A shared understanding of the truly historic moment we were all partaking in created a space that was imbued with hope and spirituality. There were many moments when we all broke out in spontaneous hand clapping, song, celebrating the beginning of a revolution birthed from love, compassion and respect for all people and the planet.
The conference was more than just a networking opportunity. We were building community. Community with one another as RAN and RYSE organizers; community across organizations and movements. It was the birth of something exciting. It charted a course for a new revitalized vision for our country and the world. It helped provide the kind of glue that social movements are made of, bringing together the longstanding amazing work of organizers and organizations for racial and economic justice, and for the sustainability of our planet, in a way that makes a truly multi-racial mass movement for change in this country seem within our reach.
As young people, we’re committed to making the dream a reality. Lucky for us, we have the knowledge and wisdom of movements past and present to build with and learn from. We’re ready.
It’s not a secret. Environmentalism has a bad name with a lot of people – and for lots of good reasons (check the article “Soul of Environmentalism” if you are not on the same page with me on this). The mainstream, majority white environmental movement has a checkered history of ignoring (or working against) the interests of people of color and working class folks. So time and time again when I give presentations to young people in public schools about the work we do, they want to make sure I’m not a “regular environmentalist”- because, as they tell me, environmentalists are racist.
That’s right all you environmentalists out there- youth from urban settings, who have a lot more on their plate than whether or not to recycle, consider environmentalists irrelevant and sometimes racist, or at least clueless about social justice.
RAN has been working to challenge white superiority in the mainstream environmental movement and work in the intersections between environmentalism, environmental justice, climate justice, social justice and human rights… But the youth I met this weekend blow us out of the water with their intersections.
I attended Youth Questan amazing environmental conference put on by the high school students of TEAM – the youth leadership program of the Headlands Institute. They brought together hundreds of teens from all over the Bay Area. All of the workshops were led by youth. I came as a chaperone to 3 amazing young RAN/ RYSE activists - whose picture I would put up here, but it’s all grainy.
The majority of teens there were involved in organizing for the environment and other issues like immigrant rights, education budget cuts or sexual exploitation of minors.
The theme they chose was “if the Earth wasn’t green, what color would it be?”
They had four different answers in the program. My favorite read:
“If the Earth wasn’t green, what color would it be? might reference the emerging intersections of the environmental, social justice and indigenous rights movements. Perhaps we should be thinking about people of all colors, ages, and backgrounds, and how a wide diversity of people is taking action to bring about social change and protect the environment”
One of the leading groups in attendance was IYEL (Inspiring Young Emerging Leaders). They created a documentary about how the national parks exclude people of color (you can see it on their home page) and developed t-shirts that say “I’m an environmentalist” on the front and “and I heart hip-hop” or “and I don’t hug trees” etc. on the back- in a direct and marvelous attempt to redefine environmentalism for their generation.
So basically, this blog post is a challenge to the adult environmentalists to get our act together and merge our social justice and environmental selves already.
We’ve been getting some good press lately about how GM’s public relations people decided to turn off some features on gmnext.com and hold a special forum in response to our supporters’ concerns about their environmental practices (they also killed some of the images we uploaded before they ever went live). GM poured untold resources into creating this site in part to improve their environmental image; our online supporters forced them to scale it back considerably inside of a month.
This sort of online marketing is a real priority for them. From the Detroit News:
Two dozen company executives conducted chats on the site last month, including GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. “We give a lot of importance to Web sites,” Wagoner wrote. “In fact, we have shifted a significant amount of our marketing spend to digital marketing. We’re also devoting a lot of our communications resources to social media.”
GM has also routinely invited bloggers to company press events and to meet with top executives.
Clay Voorhes, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University, said the effort by GM is “part of a new push for authenticity by companies.”
A recent article in the Globe and Mail (not online) seemed to buy into the idea that GM was really trying for “authenticity.” The reality, however, is that these companies are making a push for the appearance and aesthetic of authenticity, not for authenticity itself. When the latter rears its sometimes-ugly head, they back off. In another article from the Financial Times, a spokesman states that their goal is “credibility:”
GM set up the website www.gmnext.com only last month as a springboard for ideas on future automotive technologies. The site was immediately bombarded by the carmaker’s critics. Posts included pictures of protestors at the Detroit motor show calling on the industry to combat climate change and to create more environmentally friendly jobs.
…
“We want to get as many voices in this debate as possible,” a company spokesman said. He added that: “We can’t just pick the friendly questions if we want this to be a credible conversation.”
So here’s the question for GM’s greenwashing crew: can they allow enough public feedback to appear “credible” while still avoiding uncomfortable criticism from knowledgeable, organized environmentalists? Here’s a hint: it might require making real, substantive changes outside of the PR department.
The Detroit News covered the event, featuring GM executive Brent Dewar “answering” questions from more than 65 RAN supporters (I use scare quotes because of the large number of questions he ignored and the indirect responses he gave to the most pointed inquiries).
The article quotes Clay Voorhes, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University saying that the effort by GM is “part of a new push for authenticity by companies.”
Of course, it would be more accurate to describe it as a “push for the appearance of authenticity” because the corporate world isn’t really trying to genuinely communicate in an honest way with people. Instead, they believe that if people think a particular corporation is more “genuine” or “authentic” then those people will buy more of whatever the corporation is selling.
Nonetheless, I think it is important for us to recognize that the meme of “authenticity” is taking hold in corporate marketing.
What I loved about this series of actions connected to gmnext.com, was that RAN supporters stood up, together, to challenge that meme. They sent a very clear message to the company that people aren’t just going to accept declarations of “authenticity” by corporations without serious actions and commitments on the corporation’s part behind those declarations.
Otherwise, we’re going to call it like we see it. And what we see is more corporate greenwashing.
On that note, I’ll wrap up by sharing my other favorite part of this whole experience. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a giant company use the term “greenwashing” in their own marketing. But, when I went to the chat, there it was. Looks like we won the framing battle on this one.
We posted pictures of student activists at the Detroit auto show protesting automakers on the site and thousands of RAN supporters flooded GM with comments supporting the students and asking the giant automaker to take real steps, not just greenwashing PR, on climate and green jobs.
Within a matter of hours GM shut down comments on the site.
Then, Christopher Barger, Director of Global Communications Technology for GM, came to our blog and wrote that they turned of the interactive features because “‘dialogue’ does not mean ‘open to demagogues.’” One of his employees–who it seems didn’t realize that her IP address identified her as part of the GM PR machine–going by the name “betty” also commented on our blog and started a lively conversation.
I know, hilarious.
Anyhow, Mr Barger also promised that they “are planning to have an open forum — possibly even a series of them – in the coming weeks where we will address green jobs, the quest for 100 mpg cars and other pressing environmental issues.”
Well, to give him credit, GM has announced the first of those forums.
Mr. Barger left a note on our blog and everyone who left a comment on the site got an email today announcing that:
“GM executive Brent Dewar will be on hand to answer your questions about GM’s environmental policies and initiatives. The chat will take place Wednesday, February 6 from noon to 1 p.m. EST. To access the chat, go to http://www.gmnext.com/LiveChat.aspx and register with your e-mail address. On the day of the chat, click the “Enter Chat” button and join the conversation.”
Great! Let’s ask some questions! I’ll be in the chat and I hope to see lots of RAN supporters there asking GM why they are doing so little about global warming, green jobs and social justice.
Don’t expect a lot of candor or honesty, we are, afterall, dealing with the PR apparatus of one of the biggest corporations in the world. Instead, I expect more of the same–greenwashing slogans and little real action.
Last week RAN supports shut down one of the biggest and most ambitious online corporate greenwashing campaigns.
To mark its 100th anniversary two weeks ago, General Motors launched a new interactive website, gmnext, where the public was encouraged to submit photos, videos and comments in order to help the company answer questions like “how should GM best address global energy issues we’ll face for the next 100 years?”
Yeah, it’s typical corporate greenwashing, but with a new “web 2.0″ spin where the company pretends to care what the public thinks.
I guess it wasn’t really public discussion the company wanted. Big surprise.
One of GM’s PR flacks claimed that they were shutting off the interactive features because “we have no intention of letting a vocal set of activists highjack the conversation with invective and dogmatic misinformation.”
What were these comments filled with “invective and dogmatic misinformation” actually like?
“GM needs to stop thinking of “green” as an advertising term and nothing more. Really committing to better gas mileage and alternative fuels–NOT including ethanol, which is not environmentally sound–will be better publicity for you than mere sloganeering.”
“Since the most famous quote from Ioccoca, “How much clean air do we really need?”, the auto industry has let the public down. Most citizens believe that the auto industry has it’s hands in the oil pockets as well. Whether that is true or not, we will never know. What we do know is that the “green” options are simply not good enough. We don’t wish to see the auto industry pat themselves on the back for what we perceive as a poor job. It is just not good enough yet. This group pushes so that the industry doesn’t stop working on it. No pats are deserved yet. Cutting emissions is great, but we want better. So less patting on the back and more work is what they want.. I have to fully agree. What the production of these batteries do to the enviroment is disgusting. We have a long way to go. No kudo’s until this job is done and done responsibly. Ethanol is not a solution either. It takes just as much energy to produce as oil.. so where is the benefit, and now people are starving due to the lack of corn. Iceland uses meat that is unconsumable. Why are we not? A better job has been done by other countries.. step up to the world plate please and stop patting..”
Sounds less like dogma than clear well-reasoned comments by people who care.
Of course, GM is shutting down the interactive features of their new marketing campaign because the comments they got aren’t in line with their branding, not because they are inaccurate, mean-spirited, or dogmatic.
My take: I think that as more and more companies move towards trying to use fake “web 2.0″ “interactive” features to promote their greenwashing, we’re going to keep on them and show through our actions that the public isn’t going to let them get away with anything short of real action. Greenwashing on the web isn’t going to be easy for them.
So I say thank you to everyone who helped shut down one of the biggest greenwashing campaigns by one of the most powerful corporations on earth.
I noticed another climate change column from Thomas L. Friedman in my e-mail in-box this morning. On the whole, it was a lot more encouraging than this earlier piece, in which he lamented that the current generation of American college students isn’t making enough noise about the issue of climate change, among other things. (I wonder if the massive convergence during Power Shift 2007 did anything to change his perception on that one).
Now he’s back on a happier note, breathlessly recounting the ways that “our country is increasingly alive on this challenge.” These include:
Google’s “RE < C” renewable energy research initiative (to make renewable energy cost less than coal),
The M.I.T. Energy Club, an energy research group
Also at M.I.T., some students who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit, which is building “[t]he Linux of cars!”
It’s good that Friedman has begun to realize that young people are not, in fact, addressing the issue of climate change solely through their Facebook profiles. That’s one lesson learned. But this quote, about the Vehicle Design Summit, is typical of what he likes about the initiatives listed above:
They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car.
That’s great. We’ll need all the efficiency gains we can get in the coming decades, and the M.I.T. projects Friedman mentions here will help with that. And Google’s project to make renewable energy cheaper is laudable. But what Friedman does not acknowledge is that lack of technology is simply not the problem. Plug-in hybrids are already viable, but automakers refuse to mass-produce them and are fighting tougher emissions standards in the courts. Massive gains in efficiency are already possible with today’s technology. And we could make “RE” less than “C” tomorrow by passing a law forcing coal companies to pay for the true environmental cost of their activity. In other words, even if all of these great efforts make great progress, they won’t avert climate disaster on their own. Nor, in fact, are they actually necessary to get us started.
Friedman and the geek set he’s loving up in this week’s column would prefer that the climate issue were an Apollo-like challenge that demands a technological solution. The fact is that it’s a political challenge. The only way to change course quickly enough to prevent the worst effects of global warming is to intervene on corporate behavior. Google and M.I.T. can lead corporations to water, but it’s up to governments and groups like RAN to make them drink—and deeply.
I noticed another climate change column from Thomas L. Friedman in my e-mail in-box this morning. On the whole, it was a lot more encouraging than