Apr 24 2008

Earth Day - a different view

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

Here's a little different look at Earth Day. The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog carried a lively post asking: Earth Day: Green Yawn? Madison Avenue has embraced Earth Day and is slapping green labels on everything from "Earth Month" candles offered by a beauty products company to - my favorite - potato chips cooked in a solar-powered factory.

"Every company is out there touting 'we're green' -- it's the new requirement for being a good corporate citizen," Allen Adamson, managing director of WPP Group's branding consultancy Landor Associates, said in a WSJ story. "The noise level is so high now," he says. "The first few people into it had some benefit. Now it's a cost of entry."

Yes, there's an awfully sloppy embrace of Earth Day by a lot of opportunistic companies but, then, there's also a lot of well-intentioned efforts by other corporations, institutions and just folks trying to make a green difference. We saw more than 1,300 PG&E employees and families join with employees from other companies and groups last Saturday to collect trash and plant trees at parks and beaches around northern California. Some of my neighbors in San Francisco launched a block clean-up.

Over the last ten years, the California State Parks Foundation's Earth Day Restoration and Cleanup event has engaged thousands of volunteers statewide at hundreds of state and community park locations. More than $3 million dollars has been raised to support the parks. That's a lot of green.

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