Vanity Green

Posted by Don Hazen at 6:26 PM on April 16, 2006.

The super slick May Vanity Fair weighs in with its first ever "green issue" and it is a doozey in so many ways... maddening, actually. The weirdness starts with the odd cover combo of Julia Roberts, strangely standing over George Clooney, Al Gore, and Bobby Kennedy Junior, while wearing a green-leaved crown, a la the Romans.

There is much to rant and rave about in this issue. On the rant side, the super star-studded "Green Portfolio" of dozens and dozens of environmental heroes, with more movie stars than one can quickly count, is infuriating. Nothing against movie stars doing good deeds,sometimes it helps, but all these stars -- I counted at least eight (oh, and Bono's wife, and Paul Newman's daughter, also) in the end are just not essential to fighting for the globes survival. I know they do really care and work hard, but for them it is so much easier than for real environmental heroes who also think about poverty, lead in paint, Katrina's environmental devastation on the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans, and on and on, and not whether they are driving around in a Prius.

The VF editors appear to think the environmental movement in all its facets, has no grass roots, no problems with the enormous amount of corporate dumping of toxic waste in poor communities and environmental racism and classicism overall. Hey, it's not just about the trees, the gardens, surfing, and building costly solar powered homes. They concluded, perhaps because the notion never entered their minds, that there are no African-Americans and Latino-American environmental heroes (African Noble Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai is included). While there are some wonderful people mixed in, it is kind of preposterous to just celebrate a gaggle of multi-millionaires, six white male mayors, and Governors Pataki and Schwarzennegger as saviors of our environmental future.

I will confess to having a love-hate relationship with Vanity Fair and its editor Graydon Carter, who combines paeans to the very rich and very powerful, while producing some of the best journalism anywhere. (It helps that they tend to pay the most money for their articles.) And the journalism in this issue is first-rate, lead by a shocker of a piece by veteran progressive journalist Mark Hertsgaard: "Three Feet of Water," along with maps depicting the damage a rise of three feet of water will have -- a level that has pretty strong endorsement from many scientists. Hertsgaard explains how the rest of the world gets it, but by using media tactics like big tobacco used to deny the hazards of smoking, the Bush administration and big oil managed to get global warming -- a.k.a, climate disruption -- labeled a "liberal hoax." Michael Shnayerson writes about the "Rape of Appalachia," mind-boggling devastation in the search for coal, lorded over by corporate bad guy titan Don Blakenship, CEO Of Massey Energy. There's plenty more including an essay by the enviro superstar Al Gore, who is the subject of a much-lauded upcoming documentary...

Carter, in his editorials, is a raging progressive populist. He wrote a critical book about the Bush administration in 2004 called: "What We Lost," which he describes as an "unrelenting account of the administrations actions, bungles, deceptions, half truths, untruths, and down right corruptions." However, what he does with the magazine is downright schizoid. Last month, he dumbly handed the magazine over to designer cum uber-brand Tom Ford to create his personal "Hollywood" issue, and the results were just plain dumb, and often insulting on many levels, including Ford sitting himself on the cover next to a naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson.

I, as a bonafide magazine addict, usually enjoy Vanity Fair, and surely don't mind photos of sexy women, but Tom Ford's view of the world as manifested in the photos and lay up were pretty insulting to the reader, if not misogynous to the participants in the photos. Must be hard to turn a cover shot in Vanity Fair down, but Rachel McAdam did, after being blindsided by Ford, who wanted her as the third naked body on the cover.

Anyway, that is ancient news. One of the factors that most bugged me about this issue is the "think positive" naivete of some of the participants, juxtaposed to the dire straits the authors describe. While the cover headline reads: "A Threat Greater Than Terrorism: Global Warming: How much of New York, Washington, and other American cities will be under water?" Yet here is Heather Halberstadt, who acted as editor for the "green portfolio," under Aimee Ball's leadership and doesn't believe you have to act on a grand scale to make a difference: "Turn off your faucet to brush your teeth, and recycle your Sunday newspaper. Little things can have an impact on a global scale." Sure, and don't spend any time battling with corporations, who have to be turned around to have any serious impact on global warming. Most people don't even use hot water to brush their teeth.

Yes, the prospects of global warming are depressing... real downers, and Julia Roberts thinks we shouldn't be so despairing. "Well, we can go forward in a different way." Roberts, new to environmentalism, drives a Prius to the multi-million dollar house she is building that will be solar-powered, she brings a metal cup for coffee, returns her paper bags for a nickel to the store and uses environmentally friendly diapers... pleeeeze. When Roberts, confronts all the waste and pollution caused by the next movie she is in, for which she gets paid $10 or $15 million dollars, or better yet investigates the policies of the corporations with product placements in her film, for their role in the environment, or even better, the next time she appears on NBC, owned by mega-polluter General Electric and calls them out and tells the audience to boycott them until they get their act together, maybe then she will be taking a serious step forward.

One of the most important books to come along in awhile will soon be hitting the book stores and the Internet: Hostile Takeover : How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back by David Sirota. The basic premise of the book is that there is no longer any lines between Big Business and government. They are one and the same -- both looking to fleece the average American as much as possible. This is true in every arena, but certainly true in the environment, where giant corporations, given complete license by the government, are raping and pillaging the country. If Julia Roberts wants her twins to grow up in a world where the environment is protected and we are saved from global catastrophe, her first step will be to read this book and see what she and the rest of us are up against. And then get beyond that nickel for bringing in her paper bags.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.