SHAWVILLE, QUEBEC | This issue of the Aylmer, Quebec, Bulletin contains our annual "Go Green" supplement. We hope it contains enough information and encouragement to assist our readers in transforming their households and workplaces into places for change, rather than the traditional sink-holes for our old wasteful life-styles.

With climate change, resource depletion, and the pollution of our environment, we have no choice at all -- either we change our wasteful ways or the planet will change them for us. The status quo isn't an option.

The good news is that green consciousness has swept the country (apart from those areas and industries where despoilation yields big short-term gains). School kids, seniors, businesses, and political leaders are all climbing aboard the green bandwagon, and it is only through a wide-ranging switch to green that we humans will be able to survive.

The popularity of the Green Movement has also created its share of deception, and it is important voters and consumers pay attention to this dark side of the environmental movement.

One new phenomena is "green wash", where promoters try to colour their products or their candidates as green merely to take advantage of the popularity of green. When advertisers try to convince us that products and services are "really green" although they look as brown and as dirty as they have always appeared, we are the targets of green wash.

When politicians who've denied climate change, fought the Kyoto Accords, or who've argued that the oil stands can't be cleaned up, when these characters suddenly become crusaders, in word, for a greener world, we are being targeted by green wash.

There's also a second deception: green blindness.

This could be called green weariness, except that these people haven't done anything yet to be weary of. They are just tired of hearing about the environment, tired of the moralizing and lecturing that unfortunately seems to go along with any principled crusade. This is still a form of self-deception. These people are kidding themselves in trying to ignore the necessity of putting their own lives and life-styles in sync with the actual situation of our communities and our planet.

The green blind know the rap; they know what they should and shouldn't be doing. They know as they take a Styrofoam cup for their coffee that these cups last for eons in the land fills. They know their cars pollute. They know they should invest in better windows or better appliances. But just hearing about all this makes them too tired to actually do anything about it.

As when denying so many things, all we are doing in our self-imposed blindness is putting off the inevitable and, through the delay, making the inevitable even more destructive. Not too smart, is it?

We find it easy -- and satisfying -- to point the blame at other people and other jurisdictions. But apart from this momentary satisfaction, does procrastination and denial really give us anything.

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Copyright © 2009 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/04.09