by Erica Grossman

Let’s say you’re one of those people who only buys compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Or maybe you consistently bring your own bags to the grocery store. Or you only drink water from reusable water bottles. And at the end of the day, after doing all of these things, you go home believing that you’ve done your small part to make the world a better place to live.

Bring up these accomplishments to Auden Schendler as proof of your eco-conscious lifestyle, and he’ll quickly burst your toxin-free, USDA-certified organic bubble. Schendler, executive director of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, is a voice in the green movement calling for large-scale environmental messages and actions that address the severity of climate change. One message? Your small efforts to be eco-friendly might not be accomplishing as much good as you think — and may in fact be causing harm to the bigger picture of global sustainability.

Boulder Weekly recently caught up with Schendler to discuss greenwashing, environmental illusion and Boulder’s role in it all.

Boulder Weekly: What is your definition of “greenwashing”?
Auden Schendler: It is environmental tokenism — that’s the shortest, most succinct way to describe it. It’s a very small act that takes no effort or money and that you use to declare yourself a green company.

BW: How pervasive is greenwashing in our society?
AS: I think in some sense every act of corporate environmentalism is some level of greenwash because nothing yet done by corporate America has met the scale of the climate problem in any appropriate way. Everyone sees greenwash as this terrible heresy. I don’t agree. I think even in the most hideous case, where a terrible oil company is giving $1,000 to a charity and then saying that they are a green company — even if they do that, suddenly they’re under greater scrutiny because the public is holding them to account. So even in the worst case, you create pressure to change a corporation.

BW: How do you keep the public from either participating in greenwashing or from being fooled by it?
AS: The being fooled by it is really the greater crime. People are extremely gullible. And it’s depressing to me. You have to hold businesses accountable on one hand, and on the other, we have to convince corporations that there is nothing to fear and that you might as well be honest. A brutal honesty is way, way more effective than greenwashing.

The public often enables greenwashing. For example, the public has this small-scale view of solution, which is like, “paper not plastic” or “bring your own bag to the supermarket.” When the public cares about those things, and the supermarket obliges and eliminates plastic bags — which only saves them money and takes no effort — the public has sort of enabled greenwashing by not having this big vision of the real solutions.

With climate change, we’ve got to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050 if we want to live in a changed world. So the public has to ask for large-scale solutions from corporate America, not for rinky-dink bullshit tokenism. And yet, most people are doing tokenism — you know, drive your Prius, buy the efficient bulbs — it’s irrelevant in the scale of the problem. You should do it, and everyone should do it, but even if everyone in the world who was so inclined, even if every American did all of those actions, we would fail to solve climate change by a factor of 1,000.

BW: Do you think those token actions, though largely done in good faith, are actually harmful to the cause?
AS: That’s part of the thesis of my book. The forces of anti-environmentalism love nothing more than these token voluntary efforts that are meaningless, because then people feel good, but they never do anything. So it is actively bad.

We don’t want to eat our own in the environmental community, but we want to bring perspective to people. I’ve had grandmothers come up to me at the end of talks and say, “Don’t you tell me what I’m doing doesn’t matter.” But my message is that it is important and you should do it, but don’t be under the illusion that it stops there. You now have to ask the question of how do we solve the biggest problem ever to face humanity at the scale appropriate to it.

BW: Boulder often touts itself as one of the most eco-conscious cities around. Is the city doing something right, or is it mere tokenism?
AS: Is Boulder doing something right? Absolutely. Even though Boulder has this reputation for self-righteousness and the individual, like “You’re bad because you drive an SUV,” they are actually beyond that. They are implementing the solutions to climate that the world has to implement, and those things include: smart-grid technology, building codes and greening your power supply. These things are the big solutions, and Boulder is applying them at a municipal level. It’s incredible. Boulder has a deserved reputation as a green city.

BW: How does the public strip itself of these environmental illusions in order to see the bigger picture?
AS: I’m not convinced that it’s possible. I don’t think you get this broad education on climate science. I think the way you have to get at this is policy solution. This is an extreme example: When you go fill your car up, it’s $1,000. So people think, “Holy cow! It’s $1,000? I need to get a more efficient car.” At the same time, so that we’re not destroying poor people’s lives, your income tax gets cut proportionately so that there’s no impact to people rich or poor in terms of your wallet, but we’ve started sending a market signal that pollution is bad. And right now we’re sending a market signal that income is bad, because we tax income. Economics 101 says that if you want less of something, you tax it. Changing tax policy, changing government policy, putting a price on carbon (because when you drive your car, you don’t pay the environmental and the human cost of what you’re doing)  — that is the way to get people to change. We’re never going to have this epiphany and say, “I understand the scale of this problem, and I am going to respond in time.”

To learn more about Auden Schendler and his book, Getting Green Done, visit www.gettinggreendone.com. Signed copies of the book are also available locally at Boulder Book Store (1107 Pearl St., 303-447-2074).

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