Dragon's Den: The Earth Day Blog

Fourth in a series for CBC's Dragon's Den:


Happy Earth Day!

I’m actually writing this blog while waiting for my flight back to Toronto from the Pittsburgh airport. I’ve been here for a couple of days with Bruce Lourie, my co-author on Slow Death by Rubber Duck, speaking to an amazing conference on Women’s Health & the Environment. One of the keynote speakers yesterday was Lisa Jackson, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency. She gave a kickass speech that brought the crowd of 2,000 women to their feet when she committed to totally overhauling the system of chemical regulation in the States: a system so dysfunctional it’s clearly not protecting the environment or human health.

And this brings me to the point of this Earth Day blog. As I outlined last week, yes, it’s important for consumers to be smarter and more demanding. Yes, it’s critical to read labels more carefully and purchase greener products. But ultimately, we can’t shop our way to a cleaner environment. The power of green consumerism has its limits in the absence of effective policies and regulations from governments.

On Earth Day, and every day, it’s important for people to be savvier consumers AND more engaged citizens.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting, in any way, the amazing power of consumers voting with their dollar. I think the New York Times today has it completely wrong. Environmentalists engaging with the corporate sector is not a sell-out. Green consumerism is not a passing fad, or an unwelcome dilution of “real” environmental change. The opposite is true. It is precisely because environmentalism has become a more powerful mainstream concern that many companies want to meaningfully engage with the debate. And the push-pull relationship between consumers demanding greener and less polluting products (better value, in other words), corporations who need to change their polluting ways, and governments who need to set improved ground rules is a terrain that is richer in real possibilities for change than ever before.

The women in the room in Pittsburgh understand this. These are the folks who are simultaneously pushing the Obama administration to fix a ridiculously broken law that has only properly regulated 5 out of 80,000 synthetic chemicals in the past thirty years. But these are also the women who, through the power of their green consumerism, forced -- and I mean forced -- manufacturers of baby bottles to eliminate the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA) from their products. This shift in consumer preference on BPA, and the resulting pressure on manufacturers, is making government action to ban BPA in the US much more likely. Green consumerism is paving the way for proper regulation.

The recent announcement of Ontario’s first renewable energy contracts under the new Green Energy Act is another interesting example of this interplay between consumer demand and government action. For a while now, a growing consumer hunger for greener electricity has been building businesses like the fantastic Bullfrog Power. Solar panels have been slowly popping up in the most unlikely places. http://www.bslvideo.com/ The McGuinty government took note of this change and introduced the innovative Green Energy Act – the first North American application of a European-style renewable energy system – and a policy that Al Gore has dubbed “the single best green energy program on the North American continent”. As a result, Ontario’s energy system is becoming much greener. And Ontario has a real shot at becoming a global leader in the manufacture of renewable energy equipment.

So this Earth Day, let’s celebrate the progress we’ve made. And let’s recommit ourselves as consumers and as citizens to buy smarter and demand better from our elected representatives.

We’ve come a long way from the days when dealing with corporations was considered high treason within the environmental movement. The infamous incident of the Loblaws green diapers springs to mind. These days, in fact, and much to my frequent surprise, environmentalists sometimes find themselves making common cause for the Earth with corporate actors over the loud objections of other, allegedly environmental, voices. I promise some tantalizing tidbits from this raging debate next week.