Rose-colored glasses

Everything is green. You can build a green house, not a greenhouse, but a house that is built with the environment in mind. Even cars are green, and I hear that there’s going to be a green Bible soon, with green-lettered verses where God’s Creation is mentioned. Everything is recycled and recyclable, natural, organic, transfat free, no CFCs…

Don’t get me wrong, I try to buy things that don’t absolutely devastate the earth as they travel from soil to shelf, but sometimes I wonder about this green explosion. Yes, we should all try to fight evil, be green, buy and eat good things, but as long as our greenness is just another route of consumption we’re still headed down the same road.

Yesterday, they taught us to fear for our safety in smaller cars and then sold us SUVs ; today capitalism has gone green, and they tell us to fear global warming and then sell us hybrids. I have a friend who lived in South Africa for a few years a few years back, she told me Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize was ridiculous. She sees all our greenness as a last-ditch plead for some fantastic forgiveness from a God whose Creation we’ve ruined—it’s all a bandaid, she says. And while I loved “An Inconvenient Truth,”  as I stepped to the counter today at a glass-walled, vegan menu, fair trade coffee café,  I find that I have a hard time arguing with her.