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Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By matt on 3/22/2006 11:59 PM I know a guy, he owns a gas station. He drives a Caddilac Escalade six miles a day each way from home to work. He has a customer. She works in the city and lives way out in the country. She drives a hybrid Prius 130 miles each way to work every day. She feels superior to him in every way, especially in her choice of vehicles, but she's burning more gas to support the way she's chosen to live than he is. EcoLogical behavior, living in harmony with our environment, it takes more than putting a surface coating on our lives, it grows up from the roots, not down from the leaves. I think Wal*Mart's efforts at going 'green' are laughable, not because they done result in less -- slightly less perhaps but still less -- immediate damage to the world, but it's all being done in the name of selling garbage. Everything they sell will be in the landfill in three years. It's the world's largest corporation and it is built on capitalist consumption... Until we want the substance of healthy living -- until we even know what that is -- these things are empty gestures. It's like Linus says, 'I love mankind, it's people I can't stand.' .. we all want to do 'something good' in the abstract, but choose selfishly in practice. Choose selfishly based on values we never even questioned, I think. If electronic harmonic vibration was the latest cultural buzzword, I'm sure Mal*Wart would have an electronic harmonic vibration division, humming up a storm. oh, was that a typo?

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Bonnie Willow on 3/23/2006 12:54 AM Now THAT's what I call a comment! Excellent, Matt, thanks for really shining your spotlight on the whole issue! I'm taking a milder stand, not because I feel differently from you, but because I'm in the midst of focusing on Gratitude. I'm looking to find the good hidden within all the numbingly insane developments happening around us. In this case, I found a genuine upside. They WILL get the general public thinking about the topic of sustainability. I am grateful for that, and it benefits me to acknowledge the light within the darkness. It may also benefit that handful within Wal-Mart who are sincere on the subject. I am guessing that this will prove to be a pretty empty posture, but I will not give my energy to that guess. It's a real struggle within me, to walk that tightrope between bitterness or despair, and purposefully choosing to acknowledge whatever grains of goodness I can find. I'm constantly having to readjust my balance. I welcome your input any ol' time, Matt! And by the way, I like your typo, with the word "done" instead of "don't". It adds more character to the sentence!

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By matt on 3/23/2006 3:18 AM it's hard but important to remember that a forest is grown one tree at a time, and that it's the very smallest things that turn out to matter most. the problems that have been put into our hands won't be solved by big overarching interventions as much as they will by one person at a time choosing to live prudently, looking for harmony, integrating their life into the world they inhabit... so focusing on the positive, however small, however lonely it may be. is the kind of thing that makes all the difference. and i done finished my speech ;-)

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Bonnie Willow on 3/23/2006 3:24 AM ... an' I done be totally enjoying every word you write! You think with your heart, and seem to look for ways to put it into action.

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Birdie on 3/23/2006 2:57 PM I just want to say Yeah. I loved your piece, Bonnie, and your comments, Matt. I wish I had something intelligent to add. I'll think....

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Dick Atlee on 3/28/2006 3:51 PM Given the shortness of time caused by the climate feedback loops that threaten us, I can't help but wonder if the one-person-at-a-time perspective/approach, thorough and real though it might be, is going to help us. As part of a local campaign against a Wal-Mart super-store replacing an existing Wal-Mart in our town, I swore last year to never go into a Wal-Mart again, an oath I have no intention of breaking. And to be sure, turn-arounds by big-corporation always have a serious risk of being wrong-at-heart and thus dysfunctional and destructive. But do we have time for one-person-at-a-time deep change, unless that happens on a mass scale, which, ironically, is most likely to happen as a result of big corporations seeing it in their interest. The radical change in California's use of electricity in 2001 was brought about by the combination of a couple of remarkable people in key places and the cooperation of energy corporations (and the horrendous malfeasance of another). The demise of the vision of nuclear power as Britain's savior came when the government tried to offload its nuclear plants onto private business and no one would bite -- the oft-denied risks were suddenly acknowledged as too great. People will do and think the right thing only if they can get an accurate picture of what is happening, and the way things are set up in this country, is there any way they will get that message without the cooperation of large corporations, whatever the underlying motivation of those corporations might be?

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By phil2bin on 4/8/2006 6:28 AM "It's a real struggle within me, to walk that tightrope between bitterness or despair, and purposefully choosing to acknowledge whatever grains of goodness I can find. I'm constantly having to readjust my balance." That's a great frame of mind to strive for, Bonnie. Thanks for articulating it. That said, I don't think that mere moral suasion is an effective long-term strategy for influencing corporate behavior. That doesn't mean that all corporate behavior is evil, although each has its peculiar culture. It's just that a corporation's overriding, if not only, mission, is to maximize shareholder value. Any manager in a corporation who contravenes this is engaging in dangerous, if not criminal, behavior. We have a responsibility, as a society, to define our desired outcomes, and to impose limits on corporate organisms in their pursuit of value maximization, and not feel like apologizing for articulating, and imposing, our vision. We have succeeded in articulating many of these goals and codifying them into law. The signal failure of our society has been to accede to the overpowering economic power of the corporate sector, and flinching from the relentless enforcement of our stated vision. The current administration is really the culmination of this failure. The goals of the corporate culture trump the goals of the citizenry wherever they are in conflict, and the outcome is ensured in the myriad administrative rulings of an extensive network of embedded corporate appointees to regulatory posts. The goals of the corporate culture and the goals of society are not mutually exclusive, but they are seldom consonant. The fact that society's goals have been virtually vanquished is cause for great alarm.

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Bonnie Willow on 4/8/2006 2:51 PM Dick and Phil, your comments are wonderfully worded. I do recognize that public outcry and protests, public education and corporate cooperation are necessary to make real change within the required time frame. I'm certainly with you there. Climate catastrophe is fully upon us already. It's clearly the result of degradation of nature's balance. Interestingly, I believe WalMart's pseudo-interest in sustainability will really help the cause of educating the public. They will want to toot their own horn about everything they're doing. There are some basic areas in which they are making strides that will have some impact, given the hugeness of the WalMart corporation. That would include recycling, buying a few renewable materials, and some basic things like that. For the WalMart shoppers of the world, it may be the first time they have ever applied the concept of recycling and sustainability to their own lives. That is a silver lining to the massive black cloud that is the proliferation of WalMarts. I do not currently believe that WalMart will do anything other than those small token efforts, and I currently believe that they will continue with most or all of their abominable practices. I'm not being fooled by this campaign. I just feel compelled - by my growing understanding of how I want to live - to acknowledge Light and goodness wherever I find it. There are probably a small handful of employees within WalMart who believe strongly in sustainability, who brought this concept to WalMart. Maybe I'm wrong, and they only took this public stand as a result of too many lawsuits and too much bad publicity. But if there are Green folks within the machinery, I want to honor them for the huge stride they made. And I do want to honor the fact that a by-product of WalMart's effort to appear something they're not will be widespread education about the basic first steps of sustainability.

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Mike on 4/13/2006 7:15 AM As a person who works in an organization where maximizing profit is not a factor I have a distinctly different view of things. Our job is to do things for the greater good, making money is not in the equation. WalMart is 90% a blight on the American landscape. There are cases where WalMart actually helps communities, when you have nothing and WalMart comes in and gives you opportunities then that is positive. There are areas in America where this is true. Most of the time WalMart just comes in with their predatory pricing structure and annihilates all competition, pay terrible wages and generally lays waste to all around it while trumpeting what they do for the environment, neighborhoods, and oh yes, the handicapped. I don't like WalMart's business practices and I will never set foot in one if I can help it.

Re: Green Heart or Green Veneer?    By Robert Maxwell on 7/20/2006 6:51 AM I think that all attempts to lighten our foot print on the earth should be appauded. If only corporations were not legally bound to place the concerns of the shareholders first and paramount I would feel easier.

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