Water Footprints Labels
By: Jon Geselle
In a recent New York Times blog post from Green Inc. it was reported that the Finnish food company Raisio became the first company to print the water footprint of a product on the packaging (in this case a box of oat flakes). While the accuracy of the metric used for the H2O label is debatable, it is surely a sign of the times. The push to make carbon footprints available for all kinds of consumer products is growing. It is not difficult to imagine the day when every package contains this information right along side the nutritional facts that have become standard fare.
I met this news with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I would love to be able to see such information made available. I already attempt to make my buying choices based on what I can deduce is the environmental impact of purchases. But this technique requires consumers to make an educated guess (not that formulating an environmental footprint isn’t a ‘best guess’ approach) based on assumptions of impact. One of the assumptions I know I have is that organic foods have a smaller footprint than their non-organic cousins. However, there are probably as many exceptions to the rule as there are conformities, making it a poor way of arriving at decisions if my goal is to reduce my family’s impact. So, having this information, however imperfect, made public would help guide me, and people like me, who want to make as informed a choice as possible.
However, are there really that many people out there like me? (That question was rhetorical.) The reality is that environmental impact is not on most people’s short list of pressing concerns. From a mainstream environmental perspective this fact is often met by an earnest desire to educate people (thus carbon footprints on all our consumer goods) with the assumption that a well-informed public will make well-informed decisions. As mentioned, this is the case for the minority of people who are already trying to make well-informed decisions. Yet, one can’t help wondering, is putting footprints on our products going to really alter buying patterns that much? Has putting nutritional information on our foodstuffs made us a healthier people? Clearly not. Education is not enough.
What to do?
Well for one, a reframe of the situation may be in order. Just because environmental issues rarely make people’s list of priorities doesn’t mean they don’t care. Perhaps it is more helpful (and hopeful) to recognize that people don’t not care. In other words, they aren’t inherently anti-environment. If they lived in a society that was fueled by alternative energy sources, their once ubiquitous petroleum-based commodities replaced by identical products composed of organic, ultimately biodegradable material, and they had a comparable lifestyle as they do now, they would be fine with that. That would simply be the new social standard.
The power of this reframe is that it begins to erode the old division between environmentalists and everyone else. It also calls into question the primacy of education, because education is too often an attempt at gaining converts. Integral ecology recognizes that anyone can take up pro-environment behavior, but they won’t do so for the same reasons. Some people may be willing to embrace an alternative energy policy because it improves national security. Others may do it because they are concerned about the livelihoods of the Inuit villages in the Arctic. Still others may do it because they want to know that their grandchildren will have a livable planet. From an Integral ecology perspectives these are all perfect reasons to embrace an alternative energy policy. By shifting our assumptions about who does and doesn’t care about the environment we open up the possibility of working with a much broader swath of the population to achieve changes that seem impossible as long as the old assumptions remain unquestioned.
