Greenwash Works

You have to hand it to those orchestrating the Greenwashing of Bristol, it's certainly good for tourism. Bristol has just been named as one of the world's Top Ten cities to visit by leading travel guide publisher DK Eyewitness Travel. DK is part of the Penguin Group which is in turn part of the Pearson publishing empire. The DK press release says of Bristol -

Dita Von Teese recently opened a new Harvey Nichols store alongside a Cinema de Lux and a wealth of luxury apartments at Cabot Circus - a long awaited boost to the Broadmead shopping district. Not long after, Bristol’s robust eco-appeal got stronger as it was named the ‘most sustainable city in Britain’. Luxury consumerism and environmental sustainability look set to coexist in 2009.


















Needless to say visitbristol.co.uk and destination bristol are cockahoop at the news, rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of all those tourists flying in from around the world and spending their now so much more valuable Euros, Dollars and Renminbi in our earnestly green themed restaurants and hotels. And with our traditional economic base fast going down the pan, the rest of us had better get on board too, if we want a share in the spoils.

But is there not a contradiction in Bristol's image as an international luxury shopping destination and its Green Capital aspirations? Is the inevitable growth in international flights necessary to feed the tourist economy difficult to reconcile with the need to cut our carbon footprint? Is it green to travel thousands of miles to indulge in a supposedly sustainable week-end of pottering around Bristol on a bicycle consuming locally sourced produce?

I'm sure you can guess my answer to those disingenuous questions so I won't bore you with it. But I'm genuinely curious to know the response of the likes of Alastair Sawday, Chair of the secretive Green Capital Momentum Group (a sub-group of the Bristol Partnership), who has long combined promoting international tourism with green pretensions. How do these people expect us to buy into this nonsense? Or perhaps they have some other strategy for dealing with those who insist on pointing out that the emperor has no clothes?

Interfering Interface

It seems that Squarepeg's greenwash and marketing consultants, Interface, fronted by Jenny Gee, didn't like their products being given free publicity on this blog yesterday.

My last blog post revealed the type of marketing products more commonly produced by Interface, who've recently been putting on a very plausible green face for the purposes of selling the idea of building houses along the embankment of the Railway Path at Greenbank.




My blog post included several links to images on web pages included in the Portfolio section of Interface's website. But this evening I find that all the links have been cut by Interface, presumably in a fit of pique. It seems they'd rather you didn't know that their run of the mill products are glossy brochures, junk mail and excess packaging of the sort that we all so roundly despise.




So let the web wars commence. My retaliation is to copy these images to an independent site where, hopefully, they won't be able to get their coffee stained little fingers on them. So once again you can feast your eyes on the products of the creativity of Interface. I can't imagine what they were so ashamed of, can you?




Of course declaring web war on a company that claims to specialise in software development might seem rather rash, but if their software competence is anything like their PR competence then I reckon I'm on safe ground.

Egregious Greenwash

It can be a solitary business being a blogger. You dig here and there on the internet, extracting little nuggets of information to bolster your cynical observations on the ways of the world, but you rarely talk things through with real people. So when you finally click on the publish post tab extreme emotions are experienced for a few seconds. Are you making a valued contribution to human understanding - or a complete arse of yourself?

So it's very gratifying to get some positive feedback from time to time (hint), especially from such a respected source as Venue's Severn Bore column (well I'm a fan anyway). For those of you who have already read it and who have arrived here to find out more, I suggest you follow this link to run through the emerging story of "cycle" houses, clandestine land sales, deception and greenwash surrounding the proposed redevelopment of the Chocolate Factory site in Greenbank.

For the benefit of those who have not yet read the Venue piece, here it is -

If you're one of the 20 or so Bristolians who lurks in the local ishoos blogosphere, occasionally breaking cover to post comments ("Too right, m8, them counsellers are takin the piss"), you'll know that we've been pretty taken with an egregious bit of greenwash lately.

Briefly, Bristol (a Cycling City, don'tcha know) hopes to sell off penny packets of landholdings here and there to make ends meet. Meanwhile, a property development firm called Squarepeg, which proposes turning the former Greenbank chocs factory into flats, also unveiled plans for 'cycle houses' next to our famous and much-loved Railway Path. These would be on a thin strip of council-owned land between the chocolate factory and the path.

All this was uncovered by Chris Hutt in his Green Bristol Blog (greenbristolblog.blogspot.com). Not just the potential intrusion on to the path and the attendant grubbing up of a hedgerow, but he also took a close look at the designs of these trendy cycle houses put forward by Acanthus Ferguson Mann, whose ranks include the famously red-trousered George Ferguson, Bristol's patron saint of sustainable urban design.

Seems each cycle house would access the railway path via a set of steps - very handy if you've gotten home with a load of shopping. Not only that, but on the other side, they have garages as well. For cars!

As we go to press, nothing has yet had planning permission, a petition's been gotten up opposing the sale of the land by the path to developers, and there are now sketches of the proposed cycle houses, this time with ramps. Score one to some careful digging by an amateur, score no to greenwash.

Is the government throwing in the towel on global warming?

Today's Guardian reports that the government's chief scientific adviser Professor Bob Watson is warning that we should prepare for a 4°C temperature rise. The government also look set to give approval for new coal fired power stations (Monbiot.com) without any guarantee that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be applied. These are just the latest signs that government's stated aim to limit carbon emissions and global warming is falling apart.

A 4°c rise in global temperatures would be catastrophic, with perhaps hundreds of millions of people affected by coastal flooding, severe drought in Africa and the Mediterranean and the extinction of 50% of animal and plant species. Such a temperature rise might well trigger other changes, such as the release of methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic, which would then lead to even greater global warming.

Future generations, if there are any, will look back in utter amazement that we allowed this to happen when we had the knowledge of what was happening and the means to do something about it. We might well look around ourselves now and ask "how are we allowing this to happen?" It's not just about such blatant greenwash as Bristol International Airport's proposed wind turbine. The mechanism of failure embraces almost everything that is currently being done in the name of reducing carbon emissions.

So what can we do? It's easy to feel that there's little that one can do as an individual, but if individuals do nothing then there is really no hope. Yet it's not enough to modify our own lives to have a smaller carbon footprint in splendid isolation from the real world. Such pretensions merely pave the road to Hell. We must somehow engage with the wider debate to make government realise that more and more people are demanding real action on this issue. This blog is my little drop in the ocean swell of public opinion that is needed to avoid this catastrophe. What's yours?