A candid peek at the Environment Day Celebrations

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Was both elated and appalled to see the Environment Day Celebrations! While it is great to see that many organizations are taking a verdurous leap into matters ‘green’, it is abysmal to see them touting their brands as eco-friendly from the front pages of our ubiquitous green newspaper! The newsprint professes to be recycled but is tinted green to add colour to the proceedings.
Shampoos in plastic bottles, a shoe sole with a huge transportation footprint on their acquired recycled rubber, real estate developers shrouding concrete under green canopies, computers and laptops and data-centers all reducing the heat they generate, have all trucked up the path of the green bandwagon. A television channel was running a protracted fundraiser, and both companies and individuals bared their economic chests for Saving Private Gaia!
At the rate at which the Environment (Day) turned verdant, our quandary will be centred around assigning it another colour by the end of this decade itself! But who’s complaining? We cannot blame the heavy polluters from trying to alleviate some of their guilt by adopting a measure or two of the potion of deliverance, nor can we admonish the newbie fresh-com (read new company) from ‘green-washing’ their dirty linen in public!
So what does the common man do? Wear the green badge proudly on one’s chest and be labelled a Mr. Psycho Pants, or shroud oneself in ignorance and be branded an anachronistic bum-chum! There’s nowhere to run, but many places to hide. Join the CSR department of a corporation and try planting a tree, shake a fig leaf at all the acerbic activists, become a rating agency to monitor both sides of the Kyoto protocol, or simply annihilate your-self on a road made from recycled plastic!