Ever since Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden for misbehaving, or so the story goes, humans have been scratching out their existence at the expense of the earth. Exploitation didn’t take its toll until recently. If you ran out of something, you either moved on or paid someone to bring you more. Whoever thought there would ever be a shortage of timber? The rain forest was considered no different than the forest that covered what’s now known as New York City. Cut it down, bring in the cement trucks, progress will solve everything. And it still might. Or it might not.
The question of whether progress could or can solve our environmental problems became a giant concern when acid rain, the hole in the ozone, and global warming started to gain traction. The green movement started to move. It picked up momentum with Earth Day, angry protests, The Green Party, Ralph Nader, and now almost every Hollywood star and news outlet rushing to center stage to elbow their way into the green spotlight.
In 2004 we saw a shift in how products were being sold and proposed a concept we called “GREEN HOT”: The Return to Nature by Force.
We saw tangible evidence that products would soon have to be positioned as being better for the planet, or at least capable of making a significantly smaller impact on the grid. We saw early evidence that the masses were starting to give a damn. And what we know is that when the masses start caring, they start voting for or against a product with their dollars. And at that point, companies take notice and either change or die.
We called it GREEN HOT while it was still only warm, but now everybody knows it’s about as hot as you can get. Just a few years ago, Al Gore or no Al Gore, a documentary on global warming would have struggled to draw even a small crowd; this year it got an academy award.
There’s no real controversy about whether green is hot; the real question here is why—and what will the next evolution be?
