Praxis

If you care about the environment, if you really care, if you care about our Earth, if you care about humanity, you don’t get to say “well, I care today, but not tomorrow”. It’s not a thing you get to switch off because it’s inconvenient. In spite of this some of us will make concessions. We will say things like “well, the most practical way for me to get where I am going is to fly, so I will fly, and then I will pay to offset my carbon footprint”. (There are, however, some folks who would simply say “if there is no alternative to flying then I will not travel”.) But we know, deep down, that these acts have an impact. Even those of us (myself included!) who love to fly know that there is a downside. We are, after all, human, and inherently imperfect. We do the best we can in the circumstances we are presented with. We think about these tradeoffs and we know that sometimes we will do things that will gnaw at us.

This is praxis.

You know what isn’t praxis?

As an outdoor company, we make every effort to respect and preserve natural resources. Our goal is to limit our impact on the communities we touch while sustaining the land we love.

Last week, these two box trucks festooned with LED screens were parading around Lower Manhattan showing a daft advertising campaign for Columbia Sportswear. I’m not even going to bother addressing the substance of the ad campaign, because it doesn’t really matter. It is fundamentally tone-deaf and the height of hypocrisy for a company that claims to “make every effort to respect and preserve natural resources” in order to “limit our impact on the communities we touch” to advertise on a pair of roaming billboard trucks.

You might say “well, they were parked most of the time; it’s not like they were actually driving around clogging the roads!”. But they had to get to and from wherever they were parked!

You might say “well, what if the trucks were electric, would that be okay?”. But electric vehicles are substantially heavier, posing a greater threat to vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. And because they are heavier, they cause even more road wear, increasing microplastic pollution from tire debris.

The reality is that there is no way to square this circle.

Do you want your future customers to have an outdoors to romp around in? Great, then get these trucks off the roads. There is only one “outdoors”. The pollution you generate in urban environments tarnishes the “great outdoors” too. You can’t have it both ways.

If you really believe in corporate responsibility, you understand that it is all the time. Corporate responsibility isn’t just about a soundbite here or a photo op there, it must be baked in. So when you, or your advertising agency of record say “hey, New York’s streets aren’t clogged enough, New York’s air isn’t polluted enough, let’s put this ad campaign on some roving billboards”, you show your true colors. You make clear that caring about the outdoors is something that you do just enough to lure in socially conscious, environmentally-conscious customers (the kinds of folks an old friend of mine once described as “granola-prone”).

And the thing is, unlike someone saying “well, I’m going to fly even though I know it’s not the best for the environment, because it is the practical thing to do”, this ad campaign, and the manner in which it was presented were completely optional. A conscious decision was made somewhere, by someone, to not only run this ad campaign but to run it in this manner. This should tell us something.

Praxis.