I was reminded of them when reading an article by George Monbiot in a recent issue of The Guardian. It brought to mind the commercial fad for promoting non-plastic tote bags. They have become status symbols, even for the elite. Apparently the upper-crust leave their tony shoppes with one of Anya Hindmarsh’s limited edition I’m Not a Plastic Bag carefully wrapped in the store’s own elegant paper bags. What irony!
Having bought reusable bags we are supposed to bask in a halo of Green. Fully redeemed. All the while of course, filling them full of non-essentials! Years ago I cottoned on to the wiles of the product pushers. I sat in the library perusing thirty or forty issues of that respectable American magazine, Consumer Reports. CR gives lots of useful attention to which car or van is better this way or that way. But never did I come across a caveat that any car is addictive. That perhaps one ought to consider other options. Of course if CR were able to persuade many people that life would be better without a car, it would be committing corporate suicide!
Monbiot goes well beyond shopping bags. He puts the lie to “green consumerism” in Eco-junk. Well worth a read! My father would have agreed. And so do I.
