My Incredible Remarkable New Green Office

I just got a new office for myself and my new media consulting company, Common Sense NMS. We have clients ranging from Veterans For America to Climate Counts. I got a great space in downtown Boston, Leather District, which I am really excited about.

In deciding how to furnish my new office, I was faced with a dizzying array of green options; ergonomic green desks, organic cotton rugs, green picture frames, my son even discovered a website that had green pencils -- made out of recycled newspapers.

It was when I contemplated actually buying green pencils, I stopped and thought about the insanity of buying a dozen pencils, shipping them across the country, and calling it "green." Nothing could be less green than FedExing a dozen pencils 3,000 miles no matter what the company trying to make green by selling green guilts you into.

Then I went to lunch.

And as I emptied my tray of trash, a wrapper, some napkins and went onto recycle the Orangina bottle I had drank, I had a thought.

Around America, at that very moment, hundreds of millions of people were doing the same thing, consuming and creating trash -- the issue at the core of our problem is not what we are doing for the environment, it's that by simply being, we are causing stress to the environment.

So my new green office?

My desk is an old dining room table that we used to have in our house. It's actually a nice square antique desk. The chair I write in? Rescued from the garage of our house. All the pictures on the walls? All the pictures I used to have in my attack.

Now, I do have a very nice Steelcase office chair, that I picked up in Somerville the other morning from Dave whom I hooked up with through Craigslist (come to thing of it, I suppose you could argue for Craigslist being a great green company.)

I furnished my entire office and didn't buy a single thing, not one pencil (I had tons at home.) Not only was this green, it was pretty easy on the budget I might add.

My new office furniture is just a continuation of what has been a green awakening for me, someone who has always thought of myself as green, but over the last year, I have peeled away the layers of my misunderstandings a touch more.

At first, I t is natural to think that buying green is a smart thing to do and compared to not buying green, perhaps it is.

However, my friend at Climate Counts, Wood Turner, with whom I work from my new office, has opened my eyes to a core fallacy about green products.

A green product bought from a company that is not serious about its commitment to reducing its impact on the environment and/or reducing its impact on climate change, well, that's actually harmful in the long run.

This week, we saw this with Apple. Apple is pushing some its products as green, but Climate Counts looked at Apple's record, its real commitment and gave it the score of 2 out of 100 -- and no, 1 is not the best.

I can't quite completely explain my distress and feeling of great disappointment and unease not only because I am, and always have been a huge Apple fan, but I also am a tremendous admirer of Al Gore. I pushed very very hard for him to run for The White House, but as Apple said no to a sustainability committee, it occurred to me that if he was running, that would have just about sunk him.

The company that he is on the board of, saying no to something that many other companies have embraced. Sad, tragic really.

As I read the story of Apple, in my opinion, giving a very blah corporate answer to questions about its commitment to truly changing its not very environmental ways, I did so on a blog that has the new ads for Al Gore's Climate Change Project. The irony, and my disappointment, could not have been greater.

I walked by the Apple store last night, and saw the new computers.

The one with the big screen? That would look great in my new office where right now I am typing this on my MacBook.

Should I buy the green new Apple? The one without arsenic?

Or should I keep typing away on my MacBook Pro?

I think I'll just keep typing away.

Comments

[MaxMarginal]

Yeah. The next phase of this will be when companies catch on to this message and say "Don't Buy This Product" in some kind of reverse-psychology green jedi mind trick.

[jvarga]

Just think, if you continue to use the old computer (with arsenic) you're sequestering it from a landfill and the water table. If you specifically buy a computer to use one made w/o arsenic, and actually throw the old one out (I dont know anyone who has ever put a computer in the garbage, but some people do I suppose) you're making things worse :P