Sustaining Sustainability

When Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth hit the movie screens in 2006, it spun the world on its heels as a multitude of viewers sat stunned, absorbing the details of an impermanent and fragile world. Terms like “carbon footprint” and “climate change” began trickling into the media as global warming and its catastrophic consequences were given due concern by heads of state and individuals alike.

People suddenly wanted to get involved, make changes, take some responsibility for the future course of events, and it's no overstatement to say that the film single-handedly inspired the current, growing, large-scale focus on all things environmental, including the upswing of sustainable business practices. An Inconvenient Truth was a masterly stroke of mass-scale education, and as viewers exited theaters, they passed into ownership of new and inescapable awareness.

Few environmentalists will disagree that education has always been the most effective means of inspiring mass environmental awareness and invoking change. Likewise, commercializing environmentalism and making it fashionable will also rouse — and even fast-track — mass change. But without that change anchored in meaning and awareness, how long will it last?

Like Beanie Babies, when anything grassroots undergoes sudden commercialization, it runs the risk of becoming a trend. The Flower Power movement in the late 1960s is a great example. Seeing the popularity and earning potential of underground music and fashion, corporations launched mass-production of the counterculture's sounds and symbols, soon diluting their meaning and ensuring their temporary fate.

With this new corporate swell toward sustainability and the commercial green hype, we're about to see a mass cultural explosion in green consumerism — from organic clothing to earth-friendly beauty products — that will stretch to the farthest reaches of the most rural areas. And this is a truly outstanding turn of events, as the planet finally gets a chance to breath a little easier. From here out, it's going to become fashionable and hip to be green on a mass cultural scale never imagined. But how long will it last? And what steps do we take to ensure its longevity? These are the questions.