Socially Responsible is the New Green

After spending 2004-2007 living in Brazil, I was quite surprised to return to a US that seemed noticeably greener. I was taken aback as I heard mainstream discussions of carbon footprints, alternative energy, hybrid cars, and even the widespread recognition that oil addiction is the culprit for so much of our country's violent military exploits across the globe. The New York Times' article on green weddings, Safeway's "O" line of organic foods, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger's biodiesel and hydrogen hummers were some of the clues. Michael Pollan's and Eric Schlosser's roughly parallel ascendancies as pop eco-heroes were equally unexpected. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth—well positioned to take advantage a growing wave of anti-Bush sentiment—seemed to have kicked off a large part of it, though I'm sure there must have been other causes as well.

Having spent the years before moving to Brazil at Berkeley studying the "political economy of environment and development," doing an internship at the White House Council on Environmental Quality at the end of the Clinton administration, and then attending protests in the US and Europe against environmental destruction, I left the US in all honesty feeling like a bit of a raving lunatic for my environmentalist convictions. Coming back, it seemed that all that had changed: the environmental movement, despite (or maybe due to?) all the Bush administration's efforts to squelch it, had gone mainstream.

And now what? I myself slowly lost interest intellectually in environmentalism. The movement that I was both studying and taking part in seemed like the same struggles over and over coming up against the same obstacles—the specter of big business in bed with governments around the world colluding to make sure that no real environmental progress would be made if it were to impose even the slightest cost to corporations.

Greed slowly became the central human behavior to pique my activist and intellectual interest. As a sociology graduate student at the University of São Paulo, I attended the World Social Forum in Brazil and Venezuela. I wrote my master's thesis ("You will serve me"...) on the relationships between domestic workers and their employers. Why the big switch? Why should one injustice (the triple play of classism, racism and sexism embodied in domestic service) take precedence in my mind over another (the destruction of our environment and our very habitat)?

When writing my thesis, I saw domestic work as a way to more deeply understand the roots of the selfishness that allows a society's elite to educate their own children to be skilled professionals while a seemingly permanent underclass scrubs their toilets, sinks and showers with no realistic hope of anything better in their lifetimes.

Socially responsible is the new green. That's what it was for me, and that's what I hope it will be for the US as a whole. If we can have a White House vegetable garden, why can't the White House buy sweatshop-free clothing and certified fair trade products as policy, not just as novelty items? And even more importantly, why can't we rethink our relationship with the world's poor and hungry not as objects of trade policy, but as cohabitants of our planet that we have a moral obligation to respect and treat as though they were our neighbors. Socially responsible products are beginning to appear on our supermarket shelves, the Yes Men's new movie is coming to a theater near you, and I would hazard a guess that social responsibility will soon be in fashion in the US in a very major way.

As with the green movement, it will then be another major task to turn the rhetoric into reality. But wouldn't it be great if we were to have that problem.