Actions Speak Louder than Words: Greenwashing in Corporate America
![handle is hein.journals/ndlep23 and id is 677 raw text is: ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS:
GREENWASHING IN CORPORATE AMERICA
JACOB Vos
INTRODUCTION
Forty years ago, people may not have cared about which companies
used the most carbon-neutral manufacturing processes, or which used
non-biodegradable packaging. Things have changed. Now green is eve-
rywhere-green cars, green packaging, green buildings. This green wave
of current environmentalist thought stemmed from the likes of Thoreau
and Muir, while the old guard of environmental thought stemmed from
the utilitarian approach favored by Theodore Roosevelt, where the wild
lands existed to be tamed.1 Though the environmentalist movement was
slow to start, it began to pick up steam with the publication of Silent
Spring.' Being green started to become synonymous with good business.
Companies are now able to capitalize on their new green-collar jobs and
biodegradable packaging. However, green manufacturing techniques can
only take a company so far. To borrow from the introduction of Green to
Gold-
Our economy and society depend on natural resources. To over-
simplify, every product known to man came from something
mined or grown. The [Note] you're reading was once a tree; the
ink these words are printed in began life as soybeans. The envi-
ronment provides critical support to our economic system-not
financial capital, but natural capital.3
When, as is often the case, a company's practices don't match up to the
image they would like to have, they start to engage in greenwashing.
The term greenwashing stems from whitewashing. While
whitewashing a fence may bring up sentiments of down-home Ameri-
cana,4 when applied to corporations its meaning is more sinister: a
deliberate concealment of someone's mistakes or faults.'5 Greenwashing
is defined as disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to
1. BRIAN ToKAR, EARTH FOR SALE: RECLAIMING ECOLOGY IN THE AGE OF COR-
PORATE GREENWASH 6 (1997).
2. RACHEL CARSON, SILENT SPRING (1962).
3. DANIEL C. Es'rY & ANDREW S. WINSTON, GREEN TO GOLD: How SMART
COMPANIES USE ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGY TO INNOVATE, CREATE VALUE, AND
BUILD COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 3 (2006).
4. See, e.g., MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER ch. 2 (1876).
5. Whitewash, in COMPACT OxFoRD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (Catherine Soanes
ed., 3d ed. 2005).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ndlep23&div=30&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Actions Speak Louder than Words: Greenwashing in Corporate America
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most