Jason J. Crawford

I haven’t used this site in a while but while making myself some guacamole I started to think about my kitchen and this week being Green week.

I’m going to spare you the common Leftist diatribe that you have probably already read elsewhere how Earth Day/Green week is all a bunch of corporate greenwashing by companies like NBC/General Electric.  Or what I will call the Skeptic crowd (who revere memos by CATO) and would say  its a regulatory hoax and any “solution” is non-sustainable to the point of being  heavily dependent on common resource chains.  What I am interested in is what I would call a possibly soft or unconscionable shift in green aesthetics.

When I say green aesthetics, the first thing that may come to mind are the obvious signifying qualities of something being green.  For example, the hemp sandals that I am presently wearing made by Simple.  It’s not that they are just recycled or hemp, its that they must carry the aesthetics of looking as if i’m wearing two burlap sacks on my feet.  This is what I would say is the form of hard green aesthetics.  One that screams the politics on their sleeves.  This is also something pointed out with critiques about the Toyota Prius in that its success is that it looks environmentally friendly as opposed to the Civic hybrids that function similarly but don’t sell anywhere the number of models because they still look like a regular compact car.  So much so that now Honda has come out with a new Insight that mirrors the contours of the Prius.

However, what I find more fascinating that these obvious symbols is what I will call soft green aesthetics.  For the most part these don’t even reference themselves as even being green.  The most obvious example of this, at least in my opinion, has been the shift (coinciding with the rise of the green popularity) to interior design minimalism.  New homes or model home dwellings for the 21st century consumer convey a perceived sleek elegance.  And I think this is the common perception that this trend in design minimalism is conveyed through a sense of elegance and organization so the homeowner doesn’t need to be the homemaker and spend their weekends having to go through the chaos of their home trying to find and clean everything.  It lacks the sentimentalism of the decades before where gaudy photos and garnishing of the nuclear age have been replaced with streamlined furniture and appliances.

It sounds like i’m selling it by its own claim, but i’m not.  What I find interesting about these homes is the “lack of stuff.”  The knick-knacks, the wastefully spent and kitsch items of no purpose are hidden.  These homes are based on what they don’t show.  It is about hiding consumerism.  Homes of the past were like your grandparents place.  Basically full of crap.  Figurines, snow globes, cheap novelty items that were displayed around the house as if they had value beyond their material construction.  But now people of the green generation feel shamed in consumerism.  They have it, but its hidden in the drawers below the empty counter-tops.

The function of the home is also in denial.

I went to help a friend with a plumbing problem last week.  He had quite the fancy modern and minimalist interior.  I went to the kitchen looking for paper towels but the counter-tops were completely empty.  Both the garbage basket and paper towels were hidden behind doors and out of plain view.  As if you were to go into the place you would think no consuming goes on there, no waste made, no paper towels to be used.  The reality is that behind the kitchen doors were tons of products ready to be wasted.

This didn’t strike me until today when I went into my own kitchen to make myself some guacamole.  Right next to me were paper towels within arms reach and a garbage basket below me so I could throw the seed and skins out (I don’t compost skins since they take much longer than other compostable materials to breakdown).  I’m not proud of waste but its a fact that happens and I don’t have it shyed away and hidden so I can doubt it ever occurs.  The aestetics of my kitchen come far behind function.  I’m all for decreasing our use and dependency of such items, particularly paper towels, but my curiosity with the aesthetics of minimalism and whether hiding away consumption is whether it is a productive or problematic recognition of our own waste?  On one hand a person is making a deccisive choice to not want to see it, but if its kept hidden from plain view then is the situation just being suppressed?