Tuesday, December 4, 2007
An even paler shade of green
Posted by Harold Henderson on Tue, Dec 4, 2007 at 6:46 AM
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."
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"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." What a cop-out of epic, bombastic proportions. Is it really so hard for Americans to think about the world outside of a framework of what they consume? Here's a nice easy one people could do with little effort - look at the items you're purchasing made of plastic, find which classification of plastic it is, and then try to buy only products in packaging you can recycle (which will vary on your location). non-recyclable #6 plastics should be avoided as possible, but then Americans will need to come to grips with the reality that there is often a trade-off to get that Wal-Mart low price.
Talk about bombastic cop-outs...with a steaming pile of straw men just for added fun. And some really silly advice, at that! You and Twitchell are actually on the same page, and welcome to it; I'm going to stay over here in reality though, thanks anyway.
Gotcha Paul, you just let me know when we can use your backyard as landfill for trash and for toxic by-products of industry. One would think this current Chinese lead/toy problem would be awaking people to the reality that out-of-sight-out-of-mind isn't a brilliant philiosophy - let me guess, that won't happen to you or anyone you love, and thus you won't deal with it until it's a crisis. You're out of touch in a huge way. Kicking and screaming over the next 10+ years will be the ostriches like you getting dragged into the 21st century.
Heh. Actually Carter my professional background and expertise is wide, deep and extremely current in the specific subject area about which you just bloviated. So one of us is at least a decade out of date, yea, but it ain't me.
oooh, the mysterious Paul Botts, expert on all issues, to the extent he has transcended needing to ever provide backup to support his opinions. but hey, I'll bite, what kind of expertise do you have in the field of mindless consumption and waste?
Reading your comments in this blog is a good start. Actually the number of actual topics on which I am personally expert is fairly constrained due to the relative narrowness of my personal career path. This particular subject just happened to be among them, so being accused of being "out of touch" was in context fairly amusing. I pointed it out just now to some colleagues who are of course delighted, and I expect my new office nickname to have been identified by tomorrow.
does your office happen to have padded walls? let the record show that once again our good Mr. Botts provides no actual information to back up his claims. jeesh, how lazy does one have to be to suggest paying attention to what plastics can and can't be recyclable isn't realistic. what's the matter, those little numbers in the triangles too small for you to read? Twitchell is nowhere near the same page I'm on, bubba. I don't whine to the sky about how futile trying to be environmentally responsible is, small changes by individuals can add up, and there are so many resources to learn about them it isn't even funny - google isn't exactly difficult to find.
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