THE GREENWASH RECYCLE
Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the millenium
Social demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets
More social class segmentation and new science of social media metrics
Identified new opportunities to market directly to the A B and C groups
Especially those spending more time at home, the newly affluent mothers
Work from homers and the general time on hands post 40 cashing in pensions
Post Thatcher there were more people with more time and more money
they were ripe for a new genrs to exploit their interests and feelings
Motherhood, environment and lower case gender politics especially
started to boom bringing a whole new set of genre specific design issues
The Bookseller began focussing on lower case issues…..ones that safe
You won’t find the Iraq War through to Gaza in their go to marketing
No it is books about birds, whales, fishes and green things in general
but without the dirty realism of actual politics, actual environments
Waterstones now replete with almost identical safe woodcut or retro-litho
Covers offering us profound poetry, novels and faction on the wilderness
Re-wilding, trees, paths, woods, estuaries, seagulls, wild places, the uncanny
Gothic landscapes, ravens, more trees, more woods, sparrows, shells, stars…
The list is endless as is the churn of third-rate authors producing this product.
It is greenwash, avoiding the inconvenient truth of the escalating climate crisis.
It is stay at home keep the fires burning comfort reading for powerless people.
Worried about the end of the world read this on how bluebells bloom in spring.
April is not the cruellest month here November is as the industry gears up for Xmas
Need a stocking filler here’s a book on and following all google shopping choices
Wintering, Raising Hare, Trees in Winter, A Walk in the Woods, The lost Spells(Owls)
The Golden Mole, Birds that changed the world, More Birds, Bob the Robin,England,
The Language of Trees, The Hidden life of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, Wildwood.
All printed on dead trees in China and shipped here …god bless container ships.
The world is burning put another log on the burner. Read about trees. Feel better.
Give to charity until they all end up in the business waste pulp bin.
It is time this drivel called out for what it is.
The last ten years have seen a huge rise in ‘Nature’ genre. Mostly how I’m feeling in nature and isn’t the environmental crisis bad type. This across genres. None of this has any connection to Deep Ecology, eco criticism or eco-philosophy or even the actual Green political movements as frankly they would call it out. It is the greenwash equivalent of mills and boon.
Most of it will be pulped.
