Can We Afford to Go Green?
by Most anti-environmentalists will tell you that the only way for the USA to go green is to shut down the economy. I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way, and we can do something before it’s too late.
The best action to take right now, according to Anderson, is to take care of our land and actively manage it with unfortunately expensive information technologies. This means monitoring wildlife, ozone problems, and making active changes to the wilderness like letting cattle trample fields and fertilizing it so that it grows nicely, but doesn’t overgrow. This article doesn’t think Ridgeway’s free-market plan is good enough, this person thinks “We have to admit to having power, face the impossibility of leaving nature alone, and cultivate our environmentalethics and policies accordingly” (Anderson). He would agree more with Nina Rao’s idea that our consumption culture and government economic policies need to be changed. His solutions to environmental problems are a bit extreme and expensive, but Richard Gilpen and Ali Dale bring up the biggest problem of all.
This essay so far has brought up different solutions to environmental problems and one of the biggest problems to the environment is what the environmentalists call the corporations. Published by Richard Gilpen and Ali Dale, writers for the Red Pepper news journal, in “The Great Greenwash”, go into talking about how some of the biggest and richest companies in the world are now spending more money on looking good to the public than they do on product development. The term Greenwashing means “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company” (Freedictionary.com). They have many “Deceptive PR Campaigns” designed to give them a good image so when they switch one kind of farming pesticide for one equally dangerous pesticide the public will have no idea who to blame (Gilpen and Dale). They make public media assaults on “tree-huggers”, hold meetings with environmental activists, but leave out all the important details that the activists would otherwise get a say on, and rename all their products to an oxymoron as simple as “ozone friendly aerosols” (Gilpen and Dale). The corporations do all of this because being environmentally friendly is very expensive and lowers profit. The corporations really need to step up if we want to have an ecologically friendly future because all of the government, non-profit organization, and individual financial support in the world won’t make a difference if the biggest contributors to pollution don’t stop.
I hope that I offered some valuable insight on the environment and economics today. All of these articles that I researched seem to have very moderate viewpoints and they all offer some solutions to what needs to be done. Their basic points are to put the environment in the hands of the people (Ridgeway) who consume less than before (Rao) and have the government (Anderson) and corporations (Gilpen and Dale) help them out by giving them money and resources. My personal opinion after reading their views is that since America is one of the richest countries and one of the leading problems in the global environment today we have the power to change and these four articles back me up. They aren’t the only solutions and ways to preserve the planet, but they stuck out the most against the others and summed up the basic idea behind environmentalism: the consumption culture needs to slow down and the big corporations need to stop how they pollute the Earth and then cover it up with flashy ad campaigns. We need to preserve the environment if we want to keep being a part of it.
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