Selling Green To Wal-Mart Moms2010-10-19

 

 

Tradition has it when a political party is thrown out of office, the first response of those left standing is to purify their particular strain of -isms by ridding themselves of compromisers in order to become better defined. Typically, it takes a second electoral spanking before they learn the necessary lessons of cooperation and conciliation.

 

The pattern remains unblemished recently as evidenced by the post 2008 Republican Party of No, and the 2010 post-Blair/Brown Labor Party in the U.K., which took an unexpected left turn in its leadership after a successful run in Downing Street.

 

Two writers from two very different genres have given me pause to wonder recently if the purifying parallel is going to be apt for the green community in the wake of the build up and bubble burst over the climate and energy bill this past year.

 

Charlie Cook is one of the foremost non-partisan political pundits in the nation. Recently, he penned a column titled  “For Wal-Mart Moms, Nothing Abstract About Financial Pain” about deeply disheartening focus groups conducted across the country with moms who shop at Wal-Mart. Living less than paycheck to paycheck with no sense that anyone is looking out for them in a nation that is going the way of the Ottoman Empire, these women were the embodiment of the cruel fears felt by tens of millions of Americans each day.

 

Ideology--of any strand--was largely useless to them, and the disconnect from the issues of the day presented on cable news, talk radio and the Internet was so large it seems like we are likely to travel twenty light years to reach another planet with water before a society that speaks with the same language will be able to bridge the divide.

 

As for green: it isn’t even on their radar screen. Expecting someone who can’t see past tomorrow to pay extra for an organic version of something that looks the same in a can or in the produce aisle is called failed marketing. Thinking these moms share the desire to see gas go to $5 per gallon so we finally adopt alternative liquid fuels and build electric vehicle charging stations is just pure fantasy.

 

None of these women went to the Solar Power International Conference or the Algal Biomass Conference in the last month to see the remarkable innovations in green technology because they don’t have the time or the money for the registration.

 

Sure, they want to be green, but what they see and hear is that green costs more in higher energy bills and higher food prices when they can least afford it. Yes, those canards are peddled by the Koch brothers and their oil titan ilk, but you can’t blame BP when a budget stretched shopper looks at two seemingly similar heads of lettuce with a 50 percent price differential.

 

Enter Michael Pollan and his exhaustively well researched book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that traces our food from soil to plate and the consequences of the industrialization of America’s food chain.  Despite his attempts to be even handed about what we eat, Pollan can’t help but take the moral high ground when it comes to organic food, (for example) asserting it’s oxymoronic to have frozen food that’s labeled organic, and criticizing industrial farms’ attempts to grow food organically--even if it cuts the price.

 

Point to Mr. Pollan, but the practical rub is if green advocates hope to educate consumers, they have to do it at the places where consumers live, work and shop; that means Wal-Mart, especially in this time of high anxiety.

 

Just as you can’t turn an agrarian society into a post-industrial society overnight, green advocates can’t afford to search for heretics and purge them like the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages when sustainability to tens of millions of families means having enough food for another day.

 

Sure, we can message all we want about green’s lower long-term costs for our health and our planet, but when it comes right down to it, self-preservation trumps solar system preservation pretty much every time. 

 

Wal-Mart is now the largest private employer in America, like it or not. By making mega-stores the enemy, green advocates are cutting themselves off from a lower-income audience who stand to learn as much about sustainability in well stocked aisles as they do from any non-profit.

 

If megastores Wal Mart, Target and Costco can sell organic food at more competitive prices, undercut the cost of CFL light bulbs and bring E15 ethanol blend gasoline to their members at a price beneath unleaded gas at the Shell station around the corner--all while adding these terms to the public lexicon--why not encourage them?

 

The FTC’s new Green Guides are good for protecting consumers from fraudulent advertising and blatantly misleading green faces on products, but the compulsive and reflexive need among some in the community to distinguish light green from dark green products smacks of the same failed elitism enshrined in Dr. Seuss’s parable about star bellied sneeches. 

 

Market forces and grassroots energy have always been at the vanguard of change in this country. Our government was unable to meet the challenge of a clean energy future this year because the public will wasn’t up to the task in this economic climate; because green has to compete for peoples’ priorities; and (oh yeah) that $500 million of lobbying spent by oil and coal companies. While it makes strange bedfellows to see Wal-Mart profit by promoting sustainability and educating consumers for us, if they’d rather share that bed with green advocates by mixing locally produced and low carbon goods on their shelves along side the thousands of other inexpensive products they sell, perhaps green could finally get over the hump with Wal-Mart moms. 

 

Let’s try keeping a (low watt) light on for them.

 

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