This Earth Month... buy more stuff?!

We're about to be bombarded with messaging about corporate climate initiatives. We'll have the chance to buy merch to "support" the planet. And we'll be incentivized to spend more so that a small portion can be donated to organizations fighting climate change.

As you might expect, it's all marketing. Earth Month and Earth Day seem to have become another excuse for a sale.

But we miss a key issue in our fight for change if we stop at the "greedy corporation" critique. In this short dispatch, I compare Panasonic's #CreateTodayEnrichTomorrow campaign to Parks Project's mission to do good, and I advocate for a systems-level critique that can penetrate do-good messaging to get to the heart of the problem.

Footnotes:

• Panasonic's ad: Green Impact (with Michael Phelps)
• Panasonic CES 2022 Top Things to See
• The Entrepreneurs Helping Save U.S. National Parks via Forbes
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher