The following article is part of what I hope to be a long and detailed review of The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial by Dave Lipsky, which I am reading now. Much (but not all) is taken from the Chapter called “The Brakes and the Indian” and deals with a very early (and largely forgotten) case of Greenwashing. So early that the term would not exist even as a concept for another 20 years. But not too early that I don’t remember it.
The first real environmental battle (after the “Silent Spring” War) was over recycling.
Before the Second World War beverages were sold in hard glass bottles of various sizes that were returned for re-use. With home milk deliveries this practice continued right into the early 1960’s. During the war, particularly in America, beer and soft drinks were shipped to soldiers overseas in a new package – cans. Coca Cola was vey big on this and often Cokes bumped food and ammunition in the shipping line up to the G.I.s. It was one of Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan’s greatest gripes. After the war the companies simply stuck with the practice and, along with snack foods, (and later fast foods) went completely to non-returnables (or “throwaways”).
At the same time (post WW2) there was a huge revolution in travel and vacationing practices. With a booming economy where CEOs were NOT over-paid and employees were well paid, suddenly almost everyone had an automobile and a paid vacation. This led to a blossoming of gas stations and the fast-food stores—everything in non-returnables. The result was an absolute frenzy in throwing garbage out of car windows; and no one considered it inappropriate or unsightly. That’s what medians were for. By the early seventies, the industry’s seventy billion annual non-returnable containers, stacked end-to-end, would have made a tower five million miles high and suddenly everyone woke up to the fact that we humans were creating a horrific mess of our world and the battle against litter and “litterbugs” began.
“There’s one ad most people alive and at their TV sets in the 1970s remember. Open on a river, at sunset, with thumping drums. An Indian in buckskins, paddles his canoe downstream. He’s concerned, ancient, dignified someone who knew the land before. His canoe skims newspapers and nudges paper cups. He beaches on a junkyard shore. Then, superhighway: the something gray and hopeless of car after car. Somebody chucks a fast-food bag out their window. Napkins and French fries splash across moccasins. The Indian turns directly to us, camera pushing in tight. The jet-black hair, simple braid, creased features. A single tear inches down his cheek. “People start pollution,” a voice importantly announces, the tear filling the screen. “People can stop it.” The Crying Indian became one of the era’s stars: printed, broadcast, stamped everywhere: Posters, newspapers, gazing damply from classroom walls and billboards. The Indian was the land,” The Parrot, p. 103
With repeats and You-tube videos, this ad is estimated to have had something like 15 billion views. It has been referred to as “perhaps the most visibly shed tear in history.”
The ad was created and paid for by an organization that called itself Keep America Beautiful which had on its board The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, The Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation and even the League of Women Voters. It also had presidents and officers from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the Brewers’ Association, Reynolds Metals, the National Soft Drink Association and American Can.
“The Indian himself, Iron Eyes Cody, was a Cree-Cherokee. “It was more than advertising.” Keep America Beautiful president Roger Powers said. “What we found - it was a stroke of luck - was a man who lived it and believed in it.” Iron Eyes Cody was committed to heritage. He declined, for example, to perform a Chant to the Great Spirit in the campaign. “I chanted it once on the Tonight Show” Cody explained. But the audience had been disrespectful. And when the moment came, he refused to weep on camera. “Indians,” he said, “don’t cry.” So, the actual tear was glycerin -a product of the factories.” The Parrot, p. 104
Cody became famous, “quite likely the best-known American Indian in the world,” one Native American publication wrote, He sat with presidents, met the Pope marched in the Rose Bowl. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where he is to be found next to Errol Flynn, recording artist Earths Kitts, and the man who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island.
“He was also a fake. He grew up in New Orleans, a child of Sicilian immigrants; his birth name was Espera de Corti. As a boy, his sister recalled, “he had his mind all the time on the movies.” He graduated from playing the Indian in the schoolyard, testing and perfecting, to acting the Indian in Hollywood, crossing soundstages and deserts. He appeared in titles like The Paleface and Gun for a Coward. He rode beside John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Ronald Reagan. Offscreen, he traveled the streets of Los Angeles wearing buckskin and feathers, hair tuckedvbeneath a thick braided wig. In 1995, a New Orleans reporter confronted himwith his birth records. “You can’t prove it,” Iron Eyes said. “All know is that I’m just another Indian.“ The Parrot, p. 104
Keep America Beautiful was a fake too. Their real objective was to head off a new concept: recycling. They were founded in 1953 by representatives of the beverage and packing industries. Their aim was to battle litter but more than that, litter regulation. They would do this by what Lipsky calls blame-avoidance, tactical ducking.
“[President of Keep America Beautiful] Powers said. “Our whole program is [to] stimulate a sense of individual responsibility for environmental improvement. You could hear this in the slogan, by what it doesn’t say: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” That is, not industry: It was the gentlest way of saying, “Handle this yourself, you’re on your own.” Parrot, p. 104
People start pollution, People can stop it.” Not the industry. Not by expensive (for the industry) recycling laws. Does that remind you a little of the NRA slogan: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” After all, the NRA was on the board of Keep America Beautiful too.
And they fought re-cycling tooth and nail (losing The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, The Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation and the League of Women Voters in the process.) Their position was that recycling was communism.
“Keep America Beautiful held the line against recycling for two decades In, 1988,Roger Powers was still telling the New York Times that politics was no way to tackle pollution. Let industry be. “You’re not going to solve it by pointing a finger and scapegoating. Set an example.” In 1998, the outfit decided to give Iron Eyes Cody, now near death, one last shot-a bid to reactivate what executives called “the spirit of the tear.’ . . . Commuters wait it out at a bus shelter: are presentative for each of us. The bus arrives, loads, departs. And. of course, we’ve left a mess. The camera moves to the poster inside the shelter - Iron Eyes Cody. The poster sheds one tear. Look closely, and you see the litter is Kleenex, paper cups, sports sections; everything but a bottle.” The Parrot, p.105
Greenwash. Keep America Beautiful had marketed one opinion — we should all clean up-while secretly selling the opposite: large companies should not be on the hook for that cleanup.
“Delay and Defeat.”
The Pre-curser to BP’s “Carbon Footprint.
