Earth Day Inc.

Welcome to Earth Day 2004, brought to you by petroleum powers, big-box developers, old-growth loggers and chemically dependent coffee companies trying to paint their public image green.

Let's start with Sierra Pacific, a benefactor of northern Nevada's celebration of Earth Day. The timber company is involved in a lawsuit aimed at weakening the Sierra Nevada Framework, which protects the region's forests. Marathon Oil is Earth Day's sponsor down in Houston. Behind closed doors in Texas, Marathon worked on voluntary emissions regulations that have helped give Houston some of the worst air quality in the country.

The Earth Day cleanup and restoration program held by the California State Parks Foundation is financed by corporations with poor environmental records in the state: ChevronTexaco, which recently agreed to a $275 million settlement over air pollution from five of its California refineries; Wal-Mart, which lobbied unsuccessfully for a ballot initiative in Inglewood to exempt a proposed supercenter from environmental restrictions; and Pacific Gas and Electric, whose illegal dumping of carcinogenic chemicals near the town of Hinkley was memorialized in the movie "Erin Brockovich."

In New York City and other areas, Starbucks has its own events, centered around its latest slogan, "More than our logo is green." Yet the company will neither label nor remove genetically modified ingredients in its products. And while it promotes its "origins" line of coffees as a symbol of its commitment to sustainable coffee farming, the origins varieties account for just a sliver of the coffee that Starbucks sells.

Some might argue that there is nothing wrong with corporations acting as a friend of Earth Day, no matter how unfriendly their everyday operations may be. Perhaps they are just showing solidarity with the millions of Americans who support Earth Day each year to combat the necessary environmental evils of their year-round lifestyles. But the reality is that sponsorship is often intended not as atonement for misdeeds against nature, but as a distraction from them.

Through concerted marketing and public relations campaigns, these "greenwashers" attract eco-conscious consumers and push the notion that they don't need environmental regulations because they are already environmentally responsible. Greenwashing appears in misleading product labels like "all natural" and "eco-friendly"; in television commercials showing S.U.V.'s rolling peacefully through the wilderness; and in the co-opting of environmental buzzwords like "sound science" and "sustainability" - which corporate executives render meaningless through relentless repetition.

Earth Day events are select venues for greenwashers, allowing them to communicate with their target audience of green consumers. They also amount to a public relations bargain. BP spent $200 million rebranding itself from British Petroleum to "beyond petroleum." Major corporations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for environmentally themed advertisements in high-circulation magazines like National Geographic and Time. In contrast, at most Earth Day festivities, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars will get a company marquee exhibition space and a prominent place for its logo on publicity materials.

It would be a shame to let the high-flying banners of greenwashers distract Earth Day participants from the environmental advocates, community associations and government agencies that work to protect the environment throughout the year. But it is also incumbent upon those same groups - many of which are in the position of choosing who sponsors these events - to adopt a strict screening process to separate the genuinely green businesses from the greenwashers. Finally, let's not forget the most charitable patron of all. Earth Day, like every day, is brought to us by the generosity of none other than the planet itself.

Geoffrey Johnson is program coordinator of the Green Life, a nonprofit environmental group.

© 2004 NY Times

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