The Five Stages of Grief in Environmental Comments

A few of the blogs I follow had environmentally themed posts lately (here’s one about drive-throughs at Starbucks), and I’ve begun to see the same types of comments crop up. They’re tracking along the Kübler-Ross model, a.k.a. the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).

Denial

In the comments on another blog post (about green “noise”), someone complained about “Giving credibility to faulty and refutable science.”

Let’s pick that apart. First, all science it refutable. That’s what makes it science, and not Intelligent Design. Second, to call it faulty is a stretch. Grist did an excellent piece on How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, that parses out stages of denial, scientific topics, types of argument, and their levels of sophistication. And offers evidence to address each and every one.

My sense is that people who espouse this stuff are believing what they want to believe, and voicing the opinion that best fits, without reading the science. (Hardly the first time that’s happened.) I also suspect that this churlishness stems from a more fundamental urge, which is an outright rejection to have anyone tell them what to do.

Third, it’s an attempt to reduce all our problems to something really complex, like climate modeling. But what’s impossible to deny, without sticking your head in the sand, is the overwhelming evidence of loss of biodiversity, habitat loss, air pollution, water pollution, and the depletion of natural resources. It isn’t just carbon. It’s all the other ways our lifestyle is running roughshod over the earth. I blogged earlier about Mark Bittman’s excellent talk at the TED conference. Watching that is a good place to start.

Anger

Other people are “irked with the hypocrisy exhibited by celebrities.” True, Paul McCartney had his hybrid limo flown to London from Japan, and Al Gore travels in a private jet. But they’re celebrities, and everyone always watches them through lenses tinted green with envy.

Does it really matter if they’re saints? Or are you using their all-too-human behavior as an excuse not to do what you know is right?

Besides, someone like Ed Begley, whom no one could call a hypocrite, gets a ton of flak, because no one likes anyone who’s pious, even if they’re right. (As someone rightly noted, “A zealot is a zealot, regardless of the cause.”)

I was telling someone about the sustainability tip I write, and trying to educate people about sustainability, and how many little, easy lifestyle changes it entails. And he said, “The thing is, you mustn’t preach.” And that may be true, because of the resistance you’ll get from people who reject everything you say just because you’re not perfect.

Plus, anger goes both ways. If you’re going to drive a huge SUV and leave it idling while getting a hamburger at the drive-through, you’re going to piss people off. And rightly so.

Bargaining

This should actually be characterized as “bad rationalizations for bad behavior.” For example: “I suppose we should all stop reading books. I just read in Business Week that the production of one book results in 8.85 pounds of carbon emissions.”

Depression, Acceptance

We’ve spent our lifetime ingraining bad habits. Gas was cheap and US cities are optimized for cars, not people, so we drove everywhere. Then we believed we weren’t safe unless we drove around in behemoths. And because it’s tasty and convenient, we ate fast food, just like corporations wanted us to.

Problem is, all at once we’re starting to realize how ruinous many of these habits are. Which has sparked a dialogue about how we should live. And that means change, which makes people uncomfortable. On top of that, the changes are coming from everywhere, and the information is often conflicting, so people are reacting against changing too fast.

Or that it’s being touted as a “lifestyle,” that green is the new black.

So it’s a mess. But just because there are mixed messages and people in denial, it still bothers me when people think it isn’t their problem too … unless, they think they’re going to stop eating, drinking water, or breathing. Or they’re indifferent to the world their children will inherit.

What’s wrong with what we eat

My friend Matt sent me a link to this remarkable talk at the TED conference by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, called “What’s wrong with what we eat.”

… for some reason WordPress won’t embed the video, and I can’t seem to get a printscreen to jpg to work, either. But that’s grist for another post.

Me and My Job — on Ragan.com

There’s a profile of me on Ragan.com today (UPDATE: the content is now gated, so you can’t see it), talking about what I do (and what my company does) to promote sustainability internally. For those of you coming in over the transom, I do mostly internal communications for an engineering firm, and part of our company’s sustainability efforts mean improving our own internal processes, and educating our employees about what the issues are, why they matter, and what they can do about them.

For those of you coming in from Ragan, sorry about the self-referential loop. But if you’re curious, I’ve reposted some of my sustainability tips on this-a-here blog. Check the sustainability category for more.

Why Your Garbage Stinks

These are dark days to be a foodie. Food trucks are getting hijacked in the Sudan, and reports of food riots are coming out of Egypt, Yemen, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal.

Closer to home, flour prices are up 93 percent from last February 2007, and the price of cheese jumped 25 percent. (And you can’t even cry in your beer, since shortages of hops and barley are driving up the cost of the noble brew.)

In such times of crisis, you’d expect people to make the leftovers go a long way. Ironically, a British study released this month found just the opposite. It analyzed the trash of more than 2,000 U.K. households, and found that one third of all food purchased is thrown out. A 1997 USDA study reached a similar conclusion, estimating that 27 percent of edible food is never eaten.

Adding to this rotting mess is an estimate that 8 to 10 percent of all perishable goods sold in the U.S. are wasted at the supermarket level. The United Nations concluded that U.S. retailers and consumers combine to throw away $48 billion worth of food every year.

Sources & Resources

• “How we waste food” (Toronto Star)
• “Britons wasting £10bn worth of food a year, research say” (Guardian.co.uk)
• lovefoodhatewaste.com
• wastedfood.com

I’ll Take a Whopper and Go Straight to Hell, Please

It’s not as if I went looking for evidence that Burger King is all sorts of skanky evil, but lo and behold, said skanky evil kept cropping up. First, I was looking at recently released report cards from climatecounts.org, which tracks prominent companies’ efforts to combat climate change. (This is a big deal, because as they note, “If the world’s 100 largest corporations reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by just 5%, it would be like taking 25,000,000 cars off the road.”)

Guess how Burger King did? On a 100-point scale they got zero.

ZERO.

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that I ran across another Burger King story, describing how one of Burger King’s vice presidents, Steven Grover, went onto a number of public websites and posted a bunch of snarky comments about … tomato pickers. When he was later discovered, Grover was apparently fired for his moronic efforts. (Here’s a summary from PR Junkie, a PR blog.)

But then, in a delicious twist,

The fast food giant also made the brilliant move of hiring a private investigative company with the warm and fuzzy name Diplomatic Tactical Services. The head of the company then posed as a student to infiltrate the tomato pickers group.

Of course Burger King has now fired the investigative agency, saying–get this!–that it violated the company’s code of ethics.

OK, hatin’ on the tomato pickers, and a corporate social responsibility strategy of “screw-it” is pretty bad. Then today Boing Boing ran this:

This is a tray liner from a Burger King in Amsterdam, Holland. Check out that poor onion:

The trayliner depicts the airport-style high security Burger King uses to ensure that only the top ingredients are used. Images include a scared Onion with his trousers down around his ankles while a fierce-looking Pickle guard with a latex glove, prepares to digitally examine him! Scattered about him from his open luggage are veggie porn mags!

Now, eating meat is pretty much an environmental disaster anyway, but holy emetic, Batman! Burger King has NO corporate responsibility, fraudulent VPs, hires nefarious shadow-companies to do corporate espionage, and advertises how it rectal-probes its produce? Umm … can we eat somewhere else?