Greater>Than Clothing

This is the first in a series of posts on the broad topic of “sustainability”.

From the beginning, I have thought of Greater>Than as a kind of laboratory. I’m interested in different ideas about how to structure a business, but I have never been in a position to implement them myself. Further, it seems unlikely that I will ever have license to be truly radical within the context of my day job.

As in most larger companies, greater responsibility seems to coincide with increasing conservatism. I’m not sure which side is causal, but they are definitely directly correlated. So, Greater>Than is a chance for us to try things out, and while it isn’t exactly risk-free since we have invested some significant effort into the project, it isn’t the basis of our livelihoods (at least not yet).

photo credit: shearforce

One of the most buzzed-about concepts in business today is sustainability. When oil companies are making commercials touting their environmental sensitivity, I think we can safely say the concept has reached a critical mass. Consumers are leading the charge. As the general public becomes more convinced of threats such as global warning, they start looking for ways to mitigate their contribution to the problem. More and more, consumers will choose “greener” products if given an opportunity.

Many companies have responded by flooding the marketplace with products that claim to be less harmful to produce, use or dispose of than their predecessors. While greater attention on the issue is a positive development on the whole, there are to my mind at least two major flaws with these early efforts to consume more sustainably.

First, given the American tendency to use “what we buy” as a proxy for “how we live” and even “who we are”, we may have found ourselves a path to getting the small things “right” at the expense of the larger picture. There is a peculiar symbiosis between American consumers and the products that we buy that allows us to construct our public and private personas in part through the products we choose. The ramifications of this relationship are far-reaching, but it’s most germane to this topic in that it explains why adjusting our consumer choices is the most efficient way to start to feel like we’re making a difference. Buy some recycled paper towels, some natural detergent, maybe even a Prius, and you become a full-fledged eco-warrior.

You might even begin to look down on people who haven’t made the same efforts that you have (here, as in many, many other areas, South Park provides the sharpest satire, showing us that despite reducing smog the Prius leads to dangerous levels of smug). My point here is not simply to point out that some people are a bit hypocritical in their greenness (I’m not free from guilt here myself), but to suggest that real change may require asking tougher questions of ourselves than whether we are willing to switch to CF bulbs. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that a few years from now we’ll look back on our attempts to buy our way out of this mess and realize how stunningly hubristic it all was. We might even find that “sustainable consumption” is an oxymoron. Read the rest of this entry »