Next year, I will be celebrating the final payment on yet another USDA Farm Service Agency loan. In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic raged we managed to get two arrays of solar panels partially funded and installed on our farm, one on our barn and another on our house. For roughly eight months of the year the panels obliterate our electric bill, and during the colder months, particularly when snow is scarce, our costs are a fraction of what they once were. Joint state and federal rural grants, which were available to farmers covered 80% of the cost. We took out a loan to cover the remaining 20%.
It would be dishonest for me not to admit that I feel some satisfaction, as I do generally and hopefully not too smugly as an organic farmer, that I’m doing my part in grasping for and at forward-thinking solutions to our species’ energy woes. It feels good to know that my walk-in cooler system and the air conditioners in my house are drawing their power from the sun, and even though we still use propane for heat and diesel fuel for cultivation our farm has made a dramatic, net-positive impact on our share of carbon pollution.
Something I really enjoy about having the panels is checking the monitoring system for them; an app that allows you to check your array’s output. One feature of the system is informing you of how much carbon your system is off-setting in the form of an analogy. For instance, the monthly output of your panels my have “the carbon storing equivalent of thirty trees”, or it might inform that your daily solar production could “power a refrigerator for three days.” The one I enjoyed the most was when I was told that my farm’s monthly production was the “equivalent of sequestering 1/5,000,000 the atmospheric carbon output” of the latest SpaceX rocket launch. Haha okay, so perhaps this effort is effectively more about my personal financial savings than any impact my farm is having on our collective efforts to sequester carbon. I think I remember that particular SpaceX launch resulted in the rocket exploding in mid-air. I suppose it’s possible that there are five million farms with arrays on their barns out there awaiting Elon Musk to send us all checks for carbon credits. If that check ever comes I’ll be sure to put the money towards my next loan payment.
Greenwashing is the attempt by industry to take otherwise environmentally questionable products and practices (ie ethanol in our fuel, natural gas for our heat), and solutions (ie recycling, solar panels) and give them an environmental, or “green”, veneer. Recycling has been one of the most successful greenwashing efforts in modern history, presented to us as a solution to overconsumption and single-use products. The vast majority of the things we throw into our recycle bin never get recycled. It is more often their fate to be shipped off shore to pollute some other country, or to simply get dumped in a landfill or the ocean. Industry has done a remarkable job of making our current trash problems the fault of us, the consumers, who are told we just don’t recycle enough. The majority of us who care about such things are gas-lighted, made to feel guilty for every piece of trash we produce. In fact, industry imposes trash on the market place. Instead of investing in more efficient and green ways to make their products they spend their money instead on marketing campaigns, such as recycling, which they cynically know to be a farce.
Perhaps the most insidious, persistent, and pervasive greenwashing effort is around the food we eat. One small example concerns the labels on on food products. Most of these labels such as “GMO-free”, “sustainable” or “regenerative” mean, in a sense, less than nothing. Less than nothing because they are not benign, but in fact harmful. In fact they are a classic greenwashing bait and switch technique. Industry knows that the public has misgivings, well placed, around eating genetically modified (GMO) food, hence the “GMO-free” labels we see on packaging now in the grocery stores. Although these labeled products, like corn chips for instance, may indeed be GMO-free they are still grown in a conventional manner and sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, leaving themselves and the soil they are grown in contaminated in ways worse then if they were grown with GMO seed. The fact is that these labels are a soft and squishy stand-in for products that do not pass the rigor to be certified organic (a label that although under attack by the USDA itself, is still the gold standard in the world for healthy, safe food). Frankly, these labels should be illegal, or at least they should be obsoleted by a FDA food labeling system that informs consumers of all the chemicals the ingredients have been exposed to, something similar to what we do with cigarettes. Oversight of these squishy labels is suspect or pathetically thin-veiled. If you examine many of the official looking “certificates” you can find on processed food packaging you’ll realize that many of them are actually industry-internal labels: they give them to themselves.
That’s greenwashing. It’s derived from brainwashing. It’s intention is to manipulate you and keep you buying things that are bad for you. But let’s face it: regardless of the quality of the packaging and the integrity of the products, we just simply don’t need all this stuff we buy. Luckily, for the vast majority of these things, if we didn’t have them we’d never miss them.
On the weekend my wife and I let our son watch an hour or so of the wildly popular Australian kid show Bluey. If you’ve never heard of it you probably don’t have young children. It’s a wonderful show. Bluey and her sister Bingo are the six and four year old children of Bandit and Chilly. They’re anthropomorphic heelers, cattle dogs, that live in modern day Brisbane and go about their charming, mundane lives in seven-minute episodes. All the other families are dogs as well and the show highlights all the interpersonal stuff that young kids and adults deal with (even though they are dogs their ages are in human years, so at six and four the pups are still kids). Some of the episodes are truly brilliant, sometimes deeply touching, and all of them are sweet.
Nearly all of them have a theme centering the kids’ imaginations, of which the parents always indulge (although sometimes begrudgingly). The short episodes are often centered around a simple game the girls are playing, like keepy-upy (keeping a balloon up in the air) or tickle crabs (torturing their dad). They set up obstacle courses, forts, and so-on using a combination of toys and stuff they find around the house. They’re quintessential kids, doing simple, quintessential kid stuff. Their games are clever but also straightforward and easy to replicate. One of the things I love about the show is that each episode is basically a little prompt for shutting off the TV to go and do what the girls were doing.
It’s not entertaining to watch someone else watch TV, so it’s not surprising that the girls don’t watch much, nor do they have smart phones (although sometimes they make them out of cardboard to participate in the gig economy). It also feels obvious, to me at least, how little branding is in the show. They’re dogs so they don’t wear branded clothing and there is no indication to which brands the girls owe loyalty. There is no fussing about collars or leashes. They’re a short-haired breed, so they don’t worry about hair styles. Although the family is clearly middle-class, and the show may be criticized for being class-blind, it does a fairly good job of keeping consumerism on the margins of the show, focusing instead on the family’s imagination and their relationships.
I thought we had done a good job allowing a show like Bluey into our home, in a scheduled way, and with a good message that was fun for all of us to watch. The problem was that once people in our orbit discovered he liked this show a unconscious effort was made to subvert the shows real message, an effort that Disney was happy to assist with. Bluey backpacks, underwear, diapers, jammies, figurines, marketplace sets, more figurines, hoodies, t-shirts, make-up, stickers, and more figurines all started appearing in my house in the weeks after we started watching this show. There are now three Blueys, two Bingos, a Bandit and a Chilly living in my home. To be clear and to his credit, Josiah did not ask for any of this stuff. It was given to him as a way to acknowledge that he likes something, and that someone who loves him wants him to know that they know that he does… and they want him to be happy. These things do make him happy, basically for several minutes when he first gets them (presents are exciting!), but not in any long term way. What makes him happy is doing what the girls do, learning from them, and experiencing the world like they do. All the rest is just brand-washing, something the show itself rejects, and frankly its brainwashing: encouraging the idea that the aesthetic of the show is more important than the message of the show.
One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century has got to be Bill Watterson, that pristine mind who brought us Calvin and Hobbes, the cartoon of a six-year boy and his imaginary friend, a stuffed tiger. Watterson made Calvin, along with many other things, an environmentalist. Calvin was disturbed by wastefulness, careless development, trash. He loved the outdoors, beauty and engaging with Nature. His imagination was rich and informed by books on dinosaurs, sci-fi, noir, and Nature. He was troubled, had interpersonal problems, was bullied, and lashed out at others (like girls, babysitters, teachers, and his parents). He was a messy, difficult, and brilliant little kid.
And he was not for sale.
Have you ever seen a Calvin or a Hobbes doll? Believe me, if they had been available when I was young I would have had my own stuffed Hobbes doll and I would have carted it around with me every where I went. But there were none available in the toy stores. I had to make do with my own imagination with one or more of the nameless stuffed animals or other things I had in my toy arsenal. Watterson did not want me to have another Hobbes, or to be another Calvin. He wanted me to use my own imagination and make the worlds I wanted to inhabit. Some of these worlds were very much like Calvins’, others were very different. Calvin and Hobbes was a love that I shared with all the kids I knew, but it was something we never competed over. My wealthier friends never had more Calvin products than me or vice versa. It was never a brand, never an expression of self through a cynical, marketing aesthetic. Watterson kept Calvin and Hobbes pure it that way, kept it real in the sense that its’ offerings were intangible, fluid, decentralized. This more than anything I read in the actual comic itself was the true, great lesson of Calvin and Hobbes. It has served as a beacon for me about value for my whole life.
Perhaps you’ve seen t-shirts of Calvin (I even had one when I was young that I got at an amusement park) or the bumper stickers of Calvin urinating on this emblem or that logo. None of those products were supposed to be made. They all violated copyright infringement that Watterson protected aggressively. I understand now that he was protecting more than just his share of any profits or his control of his brand. He was protecting us kids, the fans, from that vise of commercialization that wicks the life blood out of a good idea like Calvin and Hobbes, or like Bluey. Watterson said that if you ever saw a Calvin and Hobbes product it was the result of “theft and vandalism”.
He was punker than punk really, and I’m so grateful for him. God bless you Bill Watterson.
Greenwashing, brainwashing and brand-washing are nothing more than cynical efforts to divert us away from truth, objective truth, about how are minds and bodies engage with the world. Making unhealthy food seem healthy poisons our bodies. Although cynical branding may seem innocuous, in fact it deeply impacts our minds, our imaginations, our bodies, and our planet. And worst of all, it separates us from one another.
Let’s work for Bluey, Bingo, and Josiah and all those little vessels out there that the barons of industry are so eager to fill.