Adam and Eve crunch the wave on Instagram, part 2
Babel Label
The big hotel groups and the most eco-friendly companies are greenwashing. Even pesticide producers claim to respect nature!
At the bend in a path in Ghana, 250 meters from an authentic ecolodge, I came across empty bottles of Arysta Glyphosate, a French company, abandoned on the ground in the shade of rubber plantations.
The ARYSTA Lifestile web page (“Arysta, a major player in the French plant protection market”) states that the Noguères site is QSE (Quality, Health-Safety and Environment) certified:
” Arysta LifeScience is a member of the UIPP (Union des Industries de la Protection des Plantes)… Through this commitment, the company supports modern, innovative agriculture that respects health and natural resources, to ensure sustainable production of French crops”.
Indeed, from the point of view of a sick mind, killing all plants to preserve just one (monoculture) may seem like an act of protection. What better protection than the destruction of the living!
There are now quality charters for everything, so much so that the very notion of a label is tending to lose all credibility, so much so do they resemble markers for commercial products. Just think of the “organic wine” label, which does not accept winegrowers who go too far in their organic approach! Hence the emergence of new labels such as “natural wine”.
In fact, most labels charge a fee, so virtue becomes the prerogative of those with the financial means to afford all the labels available on the market. The quality approach of the small producer is less visible than that of the big industry with all its labels.
In the jungle of labels, how can we distinguish between sincere approaches and those that are primarily a strategy of commercial monopoly or greenwashing? The same applies to the world of surfing, where the proliferation of virtuous labels and qualifiers is a veneer that doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny in the real world.
But how can you sell your business without a quality label or brand? Impossible, because the consumer is drawn to these labels, which are the animal world’s equivalent of olfactory markers.
Virtue and the free market are two sides of the same coin. The sustainable development label, depending on the territory in which it is applied, is not so sustainable when, in the more or less long term, it will lead to the unbridled tourism of a protected area.
Hence this evocation of the Tower of Babel, in which total confusion reigns, where words are stripped of their meaning, and labels sometimes serve interests contrary to the values they claim to defend.
