Selling Earth Day

  • Earth at twilight. A digital photograph taken in June 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

The first Earth Day in 1970 often gets credit
for jumpstarting the modern environmental movement.
Lately, Earth Day’s meaning might be changing a bit.
A lot of companies are running Earth Day ads and
offering special Earth Day shopping events. Rebecca
Williams reports the idea is that we can buy our way
to a better world:

Transcript

The first Earth Day in 1970 often gets credit
for jumpstarting the modern environmental movement.
Lately, Earth Day’s meaning might be changing a bit.
A lot of companies are running Earth Day ads and
offering special Earth Day shopping events. Rebecca
Williams reports the idea is that we can buy our way
to a better world:

You can’t watch TV lately without tripping over ads around Earth Day.

(Commercial montage featuring WalMart-SunChips-Home Depot)

And at the grocery store:

Campbell’s soup is wearing an Earth Day label. Campbell’s says condensing
soup means smaller, lighter cans. So, that means less waste. Of course,
they’ve been doing that since 1897. Long before Earth Day and the
environmental movement.

Even Barbie’s excited about Earth Day. She’s got a limited edition line of
accessories. They’re made from scraps of fabric that would otherwise have
been thrown away. She’s so crafty.

Of course, there’s a reason why it’s raining Earth Day ads.

“Companies advertise in ways they think people will respond.”

Tom Lyon directs the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at
the University of Michigan.

“Five years ago they didn’t think they were getting a whole lot of mileage
out of advertising green. Now you could say green is the new black – every
company is moving in this direction.”

Lyon says the reality of climate change has been more widely accepted in the
past couple years. People are wondering what they can do about it. And
companies are trying to tap into that.

Joel Makower has been studying green marketing for 20 years. He’s the
executive editor of Greenbiz.com. He says Earth Day marketing ebbs and
flows over the years. But he hopes Earth Day never turns into a marketing
event on the scale of Christmas.

“I think most people recognize the very clear reality that we’re never going
to shop our way to environmental health and so to the extent that Earth Day
becomes an excuse to consume, then we’ll have sent all the wrong messages.”

But Makower says a lot of companies actually are making big changes in their
practices and they should talk about that. He says Earth Day advertising
makes sense if the company’s doing something to improve all year long.
Otherwise he says it might just be a stunt.

Others think Earth Day as a marketing opportunity is probably here to stay.

Adam Werbach is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi S. It’s a major ad
agency. He says companies see Earth Day as another holiday.

“The reason that works so well this year – Easter came very early and there
was a large gap between Easter and Memorial Day so Earth Day fit in really
well so that stores could get through their Easter merchandise and start
putting green merchandise on the shelves and then move into Memorial Day.”

Werbach thinks that’s actually not a bad thing. He’s had feet in both
worlds – as a former president of the Sierra Club. More recently he’s been
a consultant for Wal-Mart. He thinks consumers should be the ones driving
companies to improve their practices.

“Our hope is of course that people who have tried these new products will
return and buy them in the next month so that in the end you’re creating a
cycle of demand for green products on shelves so that they don’t go away and
be a one time occurrence.”

But at the same time, Adam Werbach is a little conflicted. He wishes Earth
Day could be the one day of the year we could take a break.

No branding. No ads. No buying. Just Earth.

Hey… that might make a nice commercial.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

State Car Emissions Ok’d

  • Most of the cuts would come from tailpipe emissions, but the UCS says other improvements can be made in engine design as well.(Photo by Mark Brush)

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a state law aimed at cutting greenhouse gases from
cars and light trucks. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a state law aimed at cutting greenhouse gases from
cars and light trucks. Mark Brush has more:


Like 11 other state laws – the Vermont law calls for a 30% cut in heat-trapping gas
emissions by 2016. Automakers sued Vermont saying these kinds of regulations would
hurt the industry and can not be made by individual states. A federal judge disagreed.


Michelle Robinson is with the Union of Concerned Scientists. She says the judge heard
from the group’s engineers. They designed a minivan that would meet these new
standards with technology that exists today:


“There’s no need to change the look of the vehicle or the performance of the vehicle in
any way. So you could maintain the levels of safety and performance that drivers expect
while improving the pollution performance of the vehicle.”


Aside from a likely appeal from the auto industry, the states are also waiting on the
Environmental Protection Agency. They have to get a waiver from the EPA before they
can enforce their laws.


For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Scientists Buff Up Their Tinseltown Image

When we go to the movies, we expect to escape from reality. Visiting aliens, time travel, extinct animals coming back to life… that’s the dazzling stuff blockbusters are made of. But not everybody is thrilled by the way scientists look in the movies. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the story of screenwriters who want to make movie scientists a little less weird:

Transcript

When we go to the movies, we expect to escape from reality. Visiting
aliens, time travel, extinct animals coming back to life, that’s the dazzling
stuff blockbusters are made of. But not everybody is thrilled by the way
scientists look in the movies. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the
story of screenwriters who want to make movie scientists a little less
weird:


(Theme music from “Back To The Future”)


So Dr. Frankenstein and Doc Brown from “Back to the Future” are a
little… freaky. But they’re smart… and enterprising. But those kinds of wacky
movie scientists make real life scientists hurl their popcorn.


Researcher Paula Grisafi says movie stereotypes about scientists are actually
worse than those about lawyers or politicians.


“My sense of movies about scientists is that there are maybe 10% good
guys and 90% bad guys. Or not even just bad guys but misguided, even
when they’re trying to be good, they’re usually sufficiently misguided
that what they start out to do turns out wrong.”


Paula Grisafi says there are a few oddballs in real science labs, but she says her peers are really much more normal.


Really — instead of hair frizzing out of control… they have nice haircuts. And they never, ever wear pocket protectors. Grisafi’s day job is at MIT in
Cambridge, but she’s also an aspiring screenwriter. She’s working on
scripts that she says shake up the Hollywood stereotypes.


“These sort of scientist archetypes are Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde.
They’re people who were loners obsessed with their work to the point of
being a danger to themselves or to others. It’s usually frowned upon in
science to experiment on yourself.”


Take Jeff Goldblum’s character Seth Brundle, in “The Fly.” When
Brundle tests his transport machine on himself, the experiment backfires.
Brundle becomes a genetic mutant, but he’s kinda proud of it.


“Am I becoming an 185 pound fly? No, I’m becoming something that
never existed before! I’m becoming Brundle-Fly! Don’t you think that’s
worth a Nobel Prize or two?”


Maybe Brundle should’ve stopped when he turned that baboon inside out.


Paula Grisafi admits there are a few movies that show scientists as
somewhat normal people. Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact” for
example. But Grisafi says there aren’t enough to balance out the weirdos.
She says at worst, distorted images of scientists might give audiences the
impression that science is more dangerous than good.


So Grisafi jumped at the chance to be part of a screenwriting workshop
for scientists in LA last summer. It was an intense crash course with
sessions called Plot and Character, and of course, Agents and Managers.


The workshop was dreamt up by Martin Gundersen. He’s an electrical
engineer who’s had a brush with fame. He added credibility to Val
Kilmer’s lasers in the film “Real Genius.”


“I’ve met people now who are young faculty members who have told me
they were influenced by that picture to think seriously about science.”


Martin Gundersen says if the scientists in movies were more appealing,
more people might want to go into the sciences. He says the Defense
Department and companies like Boeing are really concerned that fewer
people want careers in science and engineering. In fact, Gundersen
actually landed money from the Pentagon for the workshop.


But Gundersen admits he’s still testing the theory that scientists can be
screenwriters.


“Oh it’s impossible (laughs). That’s the thing – you can’t promise that
somebody’s going to get their picture made. To me the truest cliché in
Hollywood is that everyone has a script.”


And so, can chemists and engineers possibly compete?


One box office expert says — sure. Paul Dergarabedian is president of
Exhibitor Relations Company in LA. He says scientists have as good a
chance as anyone at selling a script… as long as their stories are
compelling.


“And it’s the more interesting characters who bring that scientific
element, or you have a scientist who’s not the typical nerdy scientist. He
might be more of a sophisticated kind of character in terms of lets say a ladies’
man or something like that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.”


And actually, there is a ladies’ man in one of Paula Grisafi’s scripts. Her
story features two rivals thrown together to figure out why sea life is
dying. The stars of the story are a lovely young marine ecologist and a
hotshot microbiologist from Norway. Grisafi’s been advised that playing
up the romance might help sell the story.


“I guess I was sort of writing for a PG audience. I spent eight years in
Catholic girls’ school so I’m not sure how competent I’m going to be to
write really steamy sex scenes, but I’ll make an effort.”


Grisafi says even if she never sells a script, she’ll still get up at 5 a.m. to
write, and then she’ll put in a full day at the lab.


These new screenwriters hope to prove you don’t have to be a mad
scientist or a loner in the lab to invent movies that sell tickets.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Utilities React to Air Pollution Case

A group of electric utilities hopes the EPA appeals a recent ruling in a major air pollution case. Coal-burning power plants, refineries and older factories are watching the case closely. The GLRC’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

A group of electric utilities hopes the EPA appeals a recent ruling in a major air
pollution case. Coal-burning power plants, refineries and older factories
are watching the case closely. The GLRC’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


A court in Washington D.C. recently ruled against the EPA’s plan to
make changes in the new source review portion of the federal Clean Air
Act. The Bush Administration had wanted to make it easier for utilities to
make major upgrades at power plants without having to install expensive
pollution controls. But fourteen states worried the plants would just get
bigger and pollute more…so they had sued the EPA.


The Electric Reliability Coordinating Council represents some power
companies across the U.S. Council Director Scott Segal says the federal
agency ought to appeal the new source ruling.


“Because they would not want this court case to stand as a principled
statement of environmental law.”


Environmentalists have cheered the recent court decision on new source
review, but said they expected it would be a while before utilities and the
EPA would accept the decision.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Judge Orders Water Bottling Plant to Stop Pumping

A judge in Michigan has given a spring water bottling plant three weeks to stop pumping water from the ground. He says the Ice Mountain facility is causing harm to surrounding lakes, streams and wetlands. We have more from the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta:

Transcript

A judge in Michigan has given a spring water bottling plant three weeks
to stop pumping water from the ground. He says the Ice Mountain facility is
causing harm to surrounding lakes, streams and wetlands. We have more from the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta:


The Ice Mountain plant pulls hundreds of thousands of gallons a day from
an underground spring in northern Michigan. The bottled water is shipped
across the Midwest.


Environmentalists say that should be considered an illegal diversion of
water from the Great Lakes basin.


Mecosta County Circuit Judge Lawrence Root said that’s not the case. But
he did say the facility is having an adverse effect on nearby surface water
levels, fish, and plant life. He ordered the plant to stop pumping water.


Plaintiff Terry Swier says that’s good enough for her.


“All of us that heard it could only say, ‘Wow.’ It is, uh, it’s great.”


Ice Mountain officials say the impact of this will be felt by farmers,
golf course owners and other businesses that require large withdrawals of
groundwater.


They plan to ask for permission to continue operating while they appeal
the decision.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Rick Pluta in
Lansing, Michigan.

Related Links

Industrial Egg Farm Ordered to Close

One of the largest egg farms in the nation is being ordered to shut down. The reason… a decade of complaints, including nine contempt citations for environmental violations. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:

Transcript

One of the largest egg farms in the nation is being ordered to shut down. The reason… a
decade of complaints, including nine contempt citations for environmental violations.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:


The Buckeye Egg Farm churns out more than two and a half billion eggs a year… but
Ohio agricultural officials have ordered the factory farm to close. Neighbors of the farm
continue to complain about swarms of flies and bad smells… and environmentalists
continue to complain about manure being dumped into streams. In the words of Ohio’s
agriculture director….it’s “intolerable.”


Environmental activists such as Jack Shaner are glad about the shutdown order.


“We’re happy the state of Ohio has wised up to the fact that just like violent crime, when
it comes to environmental crime, some repeat violators just can’t be rehabilitated.”


Buckeye Egg warns of job losses injuring the economy…..and it promises an appeal of
the shutdown order. Company officials say a better approach is to sell the farm to new
owners.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Bill Cohen.

Appeals Made in Water Diversion Decision

A series of pre-hearing meetings have begun over an Ontario waterbottling company’s efforts to export Lake Superior water to Asia. TheGreat Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports that the appeal isfacing an uphill battle: