The Spin Cycle: Greenwashing Must Stop

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

Back around 2000, BP jumped on the green bandwagon by rebranding itself as an eco-friendly oil company. Spending roughly 200 million dollars, BP bought themselves a new tag line, a sunny new logo and began to advertise their new green appearance to the public.

Flash forward to one of the worst "man-made" ecological disasters endangering the Gulf states and BP has rolled out yet another ad campaign, this time to apologize for the damages caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The expensive but lame apology came four weeks after the actual explosion, as the awful "visual" impact to the Gulf's wildlife and wetlands started to really hit the media in a big way. BP was suddenly no longer awash in feel-good green but drenched in its own stinking crude.

BP didn't invent greenwashing, of course, Nor did Haliburton, Transocean, or any of the oil companies for that matter. No, Big Oil is just one of the many sectors that realized early on it made shrewd business sense to be perceived as forward-thinking and environment-friendly. And let's be clear, there is a difference between marketing a green product and the practice of greenwashing. If a company is making or selling a product that truly does have some ultimate benefit to the environment, either through the product's intrinsic characteristics or its ability to be recycled, then fine. Greenwashing, on the other hand, is essentially a sly way for a company to express environmentalist concerns through their products, services or activities but whose real intentions are to erect a positive public image and ultimately secure good PR and more sales.

A little harmless advertising? No, greenwashing is not only disingenuous, it's unethical. It is a cynical practice that plays on the current sympathies (and fears) of the public. Moreover, it insults and devalues the genuine efforts of truly green companies and green entrepreneurs that are developing sustainable products, services and organizations. Soon, everyone will smirk or grimace when they hear the word "green." It's already happening.

A few years ago, I was excited by certain developments. Generally, people seemed to be joining the green revolution in a big way, with meaningful commitments to reducing and recycling and being vocal about pollution. Companies were starting to change the tone of their advertising. In business, we started to speak about social responsibility and giving back. All good things. I liked that business was talking about the environment and that "we" environmentalists, naturalists, conservationists, wildlife and animal lovers weren't perceived as being on the lunatic fringe anymore. You could say you wanted to save the boreal forest and not be dismissed as some fuzzy-thinking New Age freak.

Hallelujah.

But then, an ominous trend began to loom on the copywriting horizon. I began to feel very uneasy about the marketing and advertising I was hearing, reading and seeing. Certain products and companies were talking about being "green" that really, in all honesty, couldn't possibly be green no matter how much spin they could apply. How could they promote themselves as green? I found myself pondering this question more and more. If being green is a moral, ethical choice (protecting the earth for the greater good of all), then some companies were clearly walking a very fine ethical line by telling their little green fibs.

Well, not all the fibs were little. Some of them have proven to be real whoppers!

The biggest whopper yet has been the BP rebranding. Tragically, this point has been driven home in a dramatic, horrific way. I am not debating the merits of offshore drilling here. I recognize that civilizations need energy to sustain themselves and survive. The kind of energy we could be using instead must be a topic for another post. This post is about misleading the public with disingenuous "greenspeak."

The clock has struck and time is up: we as a society can no longer tacitly permit the culture of lying that dulls our brains, calcifies our cynicism and masks ugly truths and nasty realities with fine and pretty words. Greenwashing can do real harm. I think the environmental disaster in the Gulf is proof enough of that. It's just not good enough anymore for a company to say it is green. It ought to be able to back up those words with solid facts or authentic, sincere initiatives that support its claims. What is surfacing through all that BP marketing muck is a company that had anything but the integrity of the environment or the health and safety of its workers in mind—no substantially well-thought-out disaster plan and little disregard for anything but the profit margin.

If any good can possibly come out of this horrible and very preventable tragedy, maybe it is that people will be utterly and absolutely, for once and for all, revolted by corporate greenwashing. Going forward, consumers must be more analytical and skeptical, make informed and wiser choices, and hold businesses accountable for their claims.

True, advertising organizations around the world have reacted to protect consumers. For example, in Canada, the Competition Bureau along with the Canadian Standards Association discourage companies from making vague claims about their products' environmental impact, and any claims they do make must be backed up by readily available data.

Independent organizations also stepped in, issuing guidelines and carrying out their own studies. You can read Futerra's Greenwash Guide online and follow the latest (2009) TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc. study on what they have dubbed The Seven Sins of Greenwashing: the Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off, the Sin of No Proof, the Sin of Vagueness, the Sin of Irrelevance, the Sin of Fibbing, the Sin of Lesser of Two Evils and the Sin of Worshiping False Labels.

Maybe we need tougher laws and stricter penalties for these violations? But we cannot just leave it to the advertising councils and the corporate watchdogs. The consumer can play a huge role in keeping a company honest. As the people at www.trendwatching.com point out, thanks to the exploding social media scene, transparency will matter. The Internet and social media are handing the megaphone over to the public, so opinions can be voiced and products boycotted, and it can be done with immediacy and in great numbers. Refusing to buy a company's product or airing their shameful record can send shares plummeting. Just take a look at the latest business reports on BP stock.

As for corporate communications writers, spin is always going to be a part of the job. So is there a place for truth in marketing and advertising? Call me naïve but I think so, and I think it can be really good writing and design, too. Just as there are wonderful green entrepreneurs with great ideas, there are communications specialists that can help to spread the news. And it can be done with creativity, fun, joy...and truth. I think that people will applaud your efforts for trying to do some good, but they will never applaud your lie when the truth comes out.

So for goodness sake, let's stop greenwashing the world. Let's just clean it up. For real.

To see a list of some of the world's top greenwashing offenders (and BP made that list long before the current oil disaster) check out this article at the Huffington Post.

Tony's Summer Reading List

(To the people of the Gulf, please forgive this attempt at levity. I do not mean to make light of this tragedy, actually, quite the opposite.There is absolutely nothing funny about the death of eleven men and the destruction of an entire ecosystem.)

I'm compiling a reading list for Tony Hayward. I welcome any suggestions, by the way. It would be great to send this list off to him soon so he can enjoy some summertime reading at the beach. I guess that would be the beach in Brighton, though, right? Or somewhere in the UK. Well, I guess it comes down to whatever beach his company hasn't yet polluted or destroyed.

Anyway, I thought I would start off by suggesting Thinking Like a Mountain, that wonderful book from a group of deep ecologists whom I admire. This slim volume might actually go a long way to helping Tony with his sensitivity training, because clearly the man is suffering a real disconnect with the natural world. He doesn't realize that he is human, and of course we all know that humans are really just animals after all. Gosh, Darwin has been telling us that for years. One of his own countrymen! Imagine that!

But I'm really convinced that once Tony starts reading some of the great poetic verses penned by Joanna Macy in which she slides under the skin of the beasts and the birds to speak to us through them, he will be moved. He might even learn to emote. Hell, he might even cry. I know I do every time I read the lines of the Audoiun's seagull:

"I cannot spread my wings glued with tar. Fly me from what we have done, fly me far."

My second choice is definitely Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce. This is essential reading for all business leaders. Hawken posits that the environmental perspective is the only way business will prosper, and for a company like BP that is clearly only concerned about profits, this ecological analysis of business might actually be of great interest to Tony and the rest of his management team.

Finally, I really thing he ought to read The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by the Canadian intellectual, Thomas Homer-Dixon.

I am pretty certain that Tony is not familiar with our Canadian professor, respected and renowned though he is. Tony seems to have little interest in and even less regard for colonials—gosh, American culture and way of life are of so little value to him that I'm sure Canadians don’t even register as a blip on his radar.

That was unfair. He is familiar with a couple of Canadian words. (Can you say Arctic and Tar Sands?)

Anyway, this book would be very instructive, possibly life changing. I hope that he doesn't skim over the section entitled "Stages of Denial": "Not everyone considers environmental stresses to be particularly serious or recognizes how dangerous they can be."

He really needs to read this. Oh—and that concept of the world being prepared for "worst case scenarios" by engaging in contingency planning before a disaster strikes and we're plunged into global chaos would be particularly helpful to him as the CEO of a major oil polluter—er—company. Sorry. My bad. Just a little Freudian slick, I mean, slip…(whew, there's a lot of that going around lately.)

Anywho, that's my two cents' worth. Hey, it’s a start! Three books, I know, but maybe he's a slow reader. He's certainly a slow responder.

So let me know ASAP. As I said, I'd like to get this list to him before he starts his summer vacation. Because as we all know, that poor man needs to relax and get his life back.

Clumsy, Costly Apology isn't BP's only Faux Pas

BP just paid $50 million dollars on an advertising campaign to "salvage" their image. As a freelance writer, I well understand the point of corporate communications strategies and good PR. A company has every right to tell the world what they are all about and what they are doing, even what they stand for (unless of course they are flaunting outright lies); PR campaigns are part and parcel of our modern business world, like it or not.

And there are many enlightened corporate citizens out there who write genuinely well-intentioned CSR policies, and do the deeds to back up their words: donating generously to charity, sponsoring charitable events, and implementing greener, kinder initiatives within their organization. Many business leaders today know this is wise; either they have fully embraced the realization that sustainability issues are serious matters because we live in a world of finite resources, or they are keen to ensure that their company's image is untarnished in the court of public opinion. As morally dubious as the latter is, the peer pressure to "do good" in the corporate world could be keeping a lot of companies from "doing worse."

This has not been the case with BP. Moreover, BP's decision this past week to (finally) publicly apologize to the American people reveals only one true motive, and it's certainly not moral contrition. No, the only reason BP acts now to publicly apologize, and in such a lavish way I might add, is directly related to their plummeting stock value. Period. BP found itself bleeding money as fast as their well in the gulf is gushing oil. Financial loss is the only thing on BP's collective managerial mind right now.

While I am not at all impressed with how BP has handled its communications with the public and the media over the past 48 days, my real fury (contempt) for the company is reserved for their lack of preparedness and contingency planning. For a company like BP, with so much wealth and so many resources at its disposal, this sort of negligence is inexcusable and unforgivable. I would go so far as to label their attitude "aloof disdain." They are so big, so powerful, and so supported and backed by governments the world over, they simply know they can get away with murder. In the Gulf of Mexico, they have.

Before I decided to open my own small business, I worked for a large multinational bank. In the years leading up to the millennium, if you recall, the fear of a digital meltdown led to a "Y2K" contingency planning frenzy around the world. Motives aside, every business, every organization, every government and municipality on the planet was busily beavering away on their contingency/emergency plans.

As a member of the Y2K project management team, my job was to write the disaster recovery plan for my business unit. The goal was to leave as little as possible to chance, and if indeed the worst happened, there would be a plan in place to mitigate total disaster. To that end, we brainstormed multiple scenarios and solutions. I wrote scripts and steps for manual input, should it actually come to a system infrastructure failure. We reviewed, we did test runs, we made sure everyone knew what they would be doing, and then we archived it, in the event that…

In short, we were prepared.

Now, I realize that a disaster recovery plan for a financial institution is not quite the same as an engineering contingency plan for an offshore drilling rig. But the principal is essentially the same: addressing that horrible "what if." One thing you can't deny is that the stakes are significantly higher for offshore drilling, where human lives and entire ecosystems are at risk. Those factors alone should be reason enough for making absolutely certain that all possible consequences and outcomes have been envisioned and contingency measures in place to mitigate the damages if the unthinkable were to ever happen.

That a company the size and scope of BP has not engaged in appropriate emergency planning and preparedness is mind-boggling. Scientists and software at their disposal, BP could have been easily working on detailed disaster prevention and disaster recovery strategies. They should have been made to produce these strategies before being allowed to drill. Indeed, that is what environmental assessment agencies were created for, to ensure that companies who drill, mine, manufacture—whatever—are prepared, that they will do no harm to the environment. Of course, when the "watchers" are as equally corrupt and careless, then you have the BP oil spill tragedy of April 2010. Collusion is even murkier than the oil oozing into the Gulf.

Finger-pointing isn't going to clean up the mess though. Finger-pointing isn't going to bring back those eleven men who lost their lives. Finger-pointing isn't going to revive the thousands of oil-drenched birds already dead or rehabilitate the ones gasping for oxygen and still struggling to survive. Finger-pointing does nothing to save the marine life of the Gulf or repair the fragile wetlands and marshes, which may not be able to sustain life for decades to come.

For those of us who value our wild places and spaces and hold dear all forms of life, large and small—from dragonflies and frogs to herons and dolphins—the sense of despair and futility is overwhelming. If you are like me, you alternate between tears and fury. I see the oil-covered birds and I feel physically ill. The Gulf was their habitat too. But BP, clearly, doesn't give a damn about a bird's life. All that "green" sounding, eco-friendly marketing patter they've been spewing for the past decade is meaningless in the face of this horrific reality.

There is no ad campaign in the world that will make this right. Indeed, BP's disingenuous CEO is dead wrong. Instead of spending such astronomical sums now to save their image, they should have been investing in preparedness planning over the years.

For more details about BP's lack of preparedness, read this article from Newsweek.

Of Meter and Meteors

Ah, when worlds collide - Literature and Astronomy! This fascinating article will appeal to both the science junky and the Whitman enthusiast. Enjoy.

Forensic Astronomer Solves Walt Whitman Mystery

CultureLab is a great blog, too.