(Blog)


First off, I’d like to welcome WAL*MART—er, Walmart—to 2005! It seems the neighborhood-munching behemoth’s nearly two decade old logo wasn’t friendly enough to represent the company in this brave new world. Second, I wonder how long it took to develop this logo. Ten minutes? Fifteen? It probably took a year of focus groups consisting of old people who think lowercase proper nouns are cutting edge.

Business Week had the details on this change last month, and Brand New had a more snarky take—e.g. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

At least Walmart kept the capital; the same can’t be said for AT&T’s 2005 logo change. Hey, Walmart is working on being more environmentally conscious. All they have to do now is stop mistreating their employees, and destroying small-town America, and they just might back up their friendly new logo. In the exact same way that AT&T stopped being evil the moment they changed their logo. Oh, wait, never mind.

While I’m satisfied with the cheap wood laminate flooring that I inherited when I bought my home, I’ve been waiting for the time when I’ve got the extra change needed to get some real hardwood floors installed. And as a tree-hugger, the first thing that came to mind was, naturally, bamboo.

Bamboo, unlike trees, can be harvested like any other crop, and grows back remarkably fast, but how “green” is it, really? Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one thinking about this. In short, since bamboo is a renewable resource, it’s definitely better than your average hardwood flooring, but the industry behind it isn’t. Apparently, bamboo is so hot right now that whole forests are being razed to make room for more bamboo crops.

That’s right. In order to make a legion of first-world “eco-conscious” Prius-drivers more satisfied with themselves, workers in the third-world are destroying swaths of our natural forests. It’s the dark side of “green”. What’s worse, much of this bamboo comes from China, so for those of us who buy Fair Trade coffee and look for locally-sourced materials in our products, know that some Chinese kid is suffering through borderline enslavement so that you can feel good about your renewable bamboo flooring.

Oh, and all those chemicals used in other materials? They’re used with bamboo as well. It’s not like changing one material will change all materials. Fortunately, as with any product, there are good and bad companies out there. Apparently, Teragren is one of the better ones. And there are no less than thirteen dealers in my area, so I’ll have to get a quote. But to be honest, after just this cursory search, I’m already kind of turned off of the whole notion, and I’m almost afraid to look into any other green products, because I suspect the entire thing is a house of cards built on lies and there’s no such thing as “green”, besides dollars.