By far the most wonderful thing about the environmental movement is that it may allow our children to avoid simultaneously drowning and being mauled by cancerous aquatic polar bear gangs. What’s surely next best, though, is the excuse “going green” gives us for going into the red.
Perhaps not everyone would agree that this is an advantage, or that one should go into the red at all, even if one is saving the world like I am. I have learned through experience that money starts disappearing as soon as it slides out of the ATM, so it’s best to invest it in coffee, pastries and socks (or whatever you’re into) before you even receive it. A fool and his money are soon parted, but a wise man and his money never meet. By this reasoning, I am perhaps the wisest man you will ever know, for I have never met any money.
The only problem with this lifestyle is that not everyone understands the genius of it, particularly creditors — although most of us are still at the stage of life where creditors are quite happy to finance our whims for 19 per cent annually. To some of these dusty suits, “I wanted to” doesn’t justify your playing beer pong with 200-year-old champagne.
Many environmentalists discourage the purchase of goods mass-produced in countries with lax environmental regulations. Fortunately, much of the stuff people like you and I want is not mass-produced at all. Take chartreuse. It’s made from flowers, herbs and a bunch of secret things picked by monks in the Chartreuse mountains. The fact that chartreuse is made by monks in mountains probably exaggerates the quaintness of its production, but it certainly entitles to drinker to more eco-cred than Budweiser, and it provides grounds for a cutting accusation of earth-killing levelled at anyone withholding credit from you. “Fine! Why don’t I just drink battery acid and throw it up on baby chipmunks?” you might say.
The same goes for coffee. While some coffee roasters base their entire images on environmental sustainability — often wisely not mentioning the taste — virtually every high-end coffee roaster has a significant sustainability program to help you justify your purchase, and there’s no reason to believe that the company that touts their program more necessarily has a better one. It also helps that many coffee roasters are also from our continent’s centres of environmentalism: Washington, Oregon and California.
Clothing has recently become an arena for environmental competition among brands, too. Again, while many companies will happily sell you a certified organic tee shirt, it should not be forgotten that few tailors and dressmakers have smokestacks attached to their offices, although the environmental impact of textile manufacturing can vary.
Evidence exists such that I can confidently state that I am not an environmental scientist, nor any kind of scientist. I am a simple man, trying to do his part for the world and for spendthrifts. Even if this advice leads to misfortune, I console myself with the knowledge that this misfortune, in 10 years, will only be a momentary distraction from the task of fashioning a raft from floating panda corpses.
