Does buying green products improve the environment?

Passage 1.  Con:  from “Buying Green Products Is an Inadequate Environmental Remedy” by Monica Hesse

“When wannabe environmentalists try to change purchasing habits without also altering their consumer mind-set, something gets lost in translation.”

Buying green is a sign that people recognize the need to protect the environment, claims Monica Hesse in the following viewpoint. However, she argues, consuming green products (Links to an external site.) is not the solution. Consumption will not solve the nation’s environmental challenges, Hesse explains. To be truly green means to buy less, not green, she maintains. Replacing products thought to be environmentally unsound increases consumption, which in turn increases environmental problems, she reasons.

In satiric fashion, she admonishes the green consumer:

“Congregation of the Church of the Holy Organic, let us buy.”

“Let us buy Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, 900 grams per square meter, $58 apiece. Let us buy the eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen-size.”

“Let us purge our closets of those sinful synthetics, purify ourselves in the flame of the soy candle at the altar of the immaculate Earth Weave rug, and let us buy, buy, buy until we are whipped into a beatific froth of free-range fulfillment.”

“And let us never consider the other organic option—not buying—because the new green consumer wants to consume, to be more celadon than emerald, in the right color family but muted, without all the hand-me-down baby clothes and out-of-date carpet.”