Letting go of expensive environmentalism
©cover illustration by Aarushi Rai.
Like most blazing youngsters, I too love social media. I love the plethora of creative content it offers and the almost free platform it provides for people to raise awareness about hot topics. I, for one, am easily drawn to anything green; people raising awareness about the environment are my favorite. I follow them, I (usually) believe them, and always try to use their advice to reduce my carbon footprint.
So, it should come as no surprise that the brilliant Instagram algorithm usually blasts me with eco-friendly business advertisements. It’s been happening for years now. I get ads for organic shopping bags, zero-waste toothpaste and bamboo brushes, re-usable cutlery, eco-friendly cosmetics, organic food with zero-waste packaging, and whatnot. Everything that we use daily has a ‘modern’ zero-waste alternative. Lately, some of the best bloggers and ‘influencers’ I know have been collaborating with eco-friendly brands to promote their products for a greener environment.
The strategy used is a classic guilt-trip tactic. Our environment is dying, climate change is a reality and you are screwing it up, so it’s your moral responsibility to purchase eco-friendly products and save it. It’s a psychologically sound tactic. Why wouldn’t someone buy an over-priced bamboo toothbrush delivered to their footsteps with an amazon prime delivery wrapped in thin plastic cellophane if you guilt trip them to save the environment?
Now here’s the thing, I’m Indian. Indians have been using jholas (jute bags), datoons (teeth-cleaning twigs), steel utensils, traditional home-made beauty products, and several other daily-use things which are by default ‘eco-friendly’. If they aren’t, it’s because they have been deterred by the invention and commercialization of plastic. But those by-default eco-friendly products still exist and are widely used and are excessively cheap, at least in India. Still, I wanted to know how it was before plastic was commercialized on a mass scale. The only sensible thing I could think of was to ask an old person who had lived a life before the plastic age.
My father, I found, finds the ‘innovation’ of the zero-waste shops and advertisement of eco-friendly products nothing more than a commercial tactic. The truth is, our parents and their parents knew what greenwashing was even before greenwashing was a thing (at least conceptually). According to him, they used to carry their cloth bags or jars to buy ration, packaged fast food wasn’t a thing back when he was a child so that saved a lot of waste, they used some sort of kaali mitti that came in a tin box for shampooing and datoon, of course, was always there. And these are just a few of many things that are a modern environmentalist’s dream. And it wasn’t just an eco-friendly lifestyle, it was also regionally appropriate because almost everything was locally bought. People didn’t have to use hashtags to go vocal for local.
Of course, things are way more complex than the invention and mass commercialization of plastic. But isn’t carrying a reusable bag easier than accumulating several plastic bags wherever you go? And isn’t a locally bought re-usable bag a better alternative than an online bought aesthetic but over-priced ‘eco-friendly’ bag that says “I am a climate warrior”?
Yet, we succumb to the commercial greenwashing strategies used by the coming of age ‘eco-friendly’ businesses. If the guilt doesn’t do it, then their brilliant marketing strategies do. The best way to sell your business today is on social media and social media have influencers, who true to their title have immense power to change the minds of their social media ‘followers’. These businesses do just that, they team up with these influencers to create content that draws people to use these products.
Another major problematic outcome of this marketing gimmick is the sense of guilt that it builds in people who can’t afford this eco-friendly lifestyle. Because it is pricey if not elitist and the adoption of these commercial eco-friendly products seem to be for the rich; when it shouldn’t have to be. Nor it is if you go back to your roots to pick some of those old-fashioned habits from your parents.
The commercial social media sell-out on an ‘eco-friendly’ lifestyle is a fatal façade of capitalistic marketing. Not only are many not ‘eco-friendly’ in the grand scheme of things, but some of them are also classic cases of cultural appropriateness or cultural piracy (if that’s a thing) while Indians themselves call it old-fashioned or barbaric. A case in point is the fancy neem chew sticks sold in Europe. The fancy neem chew sticks are datoons.
Here’s the thing, social media and it’s influencers aren’t bad. In fact, a lot of content creators on environmentalism are quite mindful of what they are putting out and are also well researched. Some of the best ones will tell you how to be more eco-friendly in your daily life without you having to buy anything. Many will recommend you to buy less while condemning consumerism. They’ll also tell you that your existing plastic goods don’t have to be replaced with eco-friendly alternatives when it still has a lot of life left in it. Here, the onus comes on us, the consumers, to be more ‘logically mindful’ of the behavior we adopt to reduce our carbon foot print.
And sometimes, we just have to look in our houses for the solutions. Indian mothers mocked for using your worn out clothes as holi wear and then tearing them apart to make cleaning and sweeping rags are the best zero-waste influencers there are.
So really, choose well.
