Green!?!

In this month’s column, I’d like to respond to a reader e-mail:

Dear Yellow Scene,
Please remove (address withheld) from your mailing list. My family is a very green family and are trying to decrease our footprint by unsubscribing from as many mailed advertisements & or magazines as we can. If possible please confirm that we have been removed from your mailing list so that we do not have to contact you again. Thank you,
­—Jenn

Dear Jenn,
Thank you for your e-mail. Because you will no longer be receiving Yellow Scene, we have decided to give your next-door neighbor your copy. You see, Yellow Scene Magazine serves local businesses based on the number of readers we have. When we lose a reader, we also lose someone who can use the magazine as a community-based informational resource. Thusly, that former reader loses access to learning about locally owned businesses. If enough people do the same, those local businesses lose customers as well as revenue. When restaurants, shops and service providers lose revenue, they often can’t afford to advertise, and then poof, no more YS.

The next step in that very logical process is the termination of a dozen or so staffers (and a loss of income for a number of freelancers). This affords our staff the ability to live close enough to their workplace to commute a short distance on a daily basis. Now, because your carbon footprint is one magazine smaller, all of these people have been cast out into a cold, uncaring world to fend for themselves and find work.

Currently, the average period of unemployment in this country is trending around six months. So now, we’ve got all these unemployed people living off of unemployment—not contributing to it—commuting all sorts of distances multiple times every day as they seek work. You wanna talk about a carbon footprint?! Egads! Just look at all the carbon footprints left all over the Front Range as these people hunt for new jobs. And some of us are gonna have to relocate. You know what that means?! Packing up everything we own in bubble wrap (again, the cheap, non-eco-friendly kind), loading up a giant U-Haul and traipsing hundreds or even thousands of miles for a job.

Guess what else: None of us can afford to shop at our eco-friendly, locally-committed grocery stores anymore. Everything we’re buying is from the nearest Wal-Mart. All of our goods are now being made by Taiwanese children, wrapped in non-biodegradable cellophane, shipped via diesel-driven ocean liners halfway across the planet, loaded onto fuel inefficient 18-wheelers and driven halfway across the country to where we’re spending pennies on the dollar for them. Buy local?! HA!

So, in your efforts to be more green, Jenn, you’ve not only destroyed the lives of scads of people, supported third-world child-labor, destabilized local agribusiness and welfare and polluted local landfills with eon-lasting refuse, but you’ve deprived your family of the chance to be a partner in a community effort to inform, educate and entertain thousands.

We can’t, in good conscience, let you do that, so we’re giving your copy to someone else. Happy Holidays! —French Davis