"How Green Was My Advertising: American Ecoconsumerism" by Lisa Lebduska
Lebduska makes a distinction between "'greenwashing' (commodifying nature to produce capital) and 'greening' (commodifying nature to produce capital to be used in the conservation of nature)" and asks whether, since the rhetoric of each uses similar signs, whether it is possible to distinguish between the two and to what extent we need to do so to achieve environmental goals. She also asks whether "environmentalism [can] participate in the commodity system without being co-opted by it" (5). She follows Andrew Dobson by distinguishing between "green" (associated with environementalism and the environmentalist effort to consume differently, for example by recycling aluminum cans) and "Green" (associated with ecologism and efforts to effect "substantial political structural changes in the way resources are used," for example by not producing the aluminum can to begin with). Since advertising perpetuates the very consumption to which ecologism is opposed, Lebduska's paper "is already situated within the environmentalist project; nevertheless, it endeavors to explore the possibilities for moving towards the ecologic given such constraints" (6).
For Lebduska, ecoconsumerism's success is founded on "the myth of the apolitical landscape" that "is constructed by and through most dominant conceptualizations of 'American'" and undergirds Frederick Turner's Frontier Hypothesis and American Transcendentalism. In Turner's Hypothesis, the opening of the frontier provides equal opportunity for land ownership and becomes in this way a political equalizer. Like the frontier in Turner's hypothesis, Lebduska argues, "functioning within a capitalist ideology, ecoconsumerism supplies an ever-changing frontier of natural images, textualizing nature into a quest for individualism" (9). In a reading of an AT&T ad in which the modern Thoreau "Dave" works in a wilderness setting while staying liked to his job through AT&T, she notes that nature here is in the background and "does not intrude on the production of this ecoconsumer" (11). Reading a U.S. Council for Energy Awareness ad for nuclear power, she shows how here too the ecoconsumer "becomes a commodity for the sustained growth of the nuclear industry" (12). Corporate involvement in Earth Day also encourages consumers to view their purchases as opportunities to achieve their desired "unity with the Earth" (14).
For Lebduska, promotion of consumption is inherently at odds with Green. This is especially true of advertising that sells luxury products like the jewelry, note cards and wrapping paper in the Greenpeace catalogue. Ecoconsumerism also risks taking the place of grass-roots activism. For the user of Greenpeace checks, "Check writing is substituted for political activism, as the ecoconsumer is no longer a grass-roots activist, but a check-writing member of a large institution that will cary out environmental goals without using the deadly sign 'politics'" (15). In a Greenpeace ad about dolphins in driftnet, Lebduska argues that even the information the ad provides about exploitative fishing practices don't do much to address the political and economic forces that encourage those practices - "the ecoconsumer as resisting subject is again constructed soley in terms of his/her buying power, which in this case is the ability to make a financial contribution to Greenpeace Action" (16). Returning to her question about the compatibility of environmental and capitalist agendas, Lebduska suggests that the problem is not in choosing to participate in the market system but rather in neglecting "to address the knowledge bases informing that system" and that "if it were to deploy advertising in such a way as to foreground systematic exploitations, Greenpeace and other environmental groups would ultimately construct ecoconsumerism in terms of its ecology rather than its consumerism" (16). The major barrier to this development is, for Lebduska, the reulctance to "acknowledge and publicize the very political nature of nature" (16).
Lebduska, Lisa. "How Green Was My Advertising: American Ecoconsumerism." ISLE 1.1 (1993): 5-16.