Jeremy Bruno is a tech writer who blogs about ecology, evolution, conservation and culture at The Voltage Gate. Visit the 
Jenn over at Invasive Species Weblog wrote a brilliant post about corporations that are distributing seeds as a supposedly "green" gesture of peace and love straight out of 1969. Betcha they don't have answers to her questions:
...someone needs to tell Starbucks that "wildflower" is not the beautiful, perfect embodiment of do-gooding they seem to think it is (I tried, but they have yet to respond). What species are these? Where are they native to? Are they potentially invasive?[...]
But this is an environmental campaign - isn't anyone looking at the big picture? Sowing seeds from who-knows-where is equated with doing environmental good? The campaign is done in partnership with Global Green USA. They're an environmental organization, aren't they supposed to know better?
Are these wildflower seeds from invasive plants? Probably not. So why am I making a big deal out of this? Because by not informing the public about just what is in those little white disks, Starbucks is ignoring the issue of invasive species and encouraging its customers to do the same.
It does sound good. It's intuitive. Plant more flowers, beautify the Earth. Unfortunately, the real solutions are not based on intuition.
Like I said before, these "green" corporate campaigns are encouraging people to seek out simplistic solutions for our problems on a micro scale, usually involving purchasing something. What we need to grasp is that this is not a resurgence of the half hearted environmental campaign of the late 1960's (which was, according to many of that generation, an excuse to have sex and do drugs). We have hard ecological data to work with this time, and rash, uninformed, but seemingly harmless moves like the campaign from Starbucks are working against the evidence.
Comments
I was there in 60s-70s and we were not half-hearted, we were comparatively ignorant, and the connection to sex and drugs was only that we had a philosophy of spontaneity towards all subjects(i.e., rushing in where we knew little to nothing)-- we thought that goodwill would solve everything ("all you need is love").
The reason we have hard ecological data to work with now, adn a much better understanding of how the world works, is that the youngsters of that time, having their goodwill come into contact with the real world, set about to collect all that data and refine that understanding. And so on.
That being said, I picked up a wildflower mix packaged for California which was mostly nasturtiums, which are not only not native here but almost as invasive as periwinkle.
Posted by: Lucy Kemnitzer | April 21, 2007 5:03 PM
Hey, glad you enjoyed the post. I have yet to get a response from Starbucks or BP about their "green" campaigns.
I once contacted a company that makes that kind of grow-a-plant paper and the rep implied that it didn't matter whether the plants included were invasive because most people would just throw it away or mess up the growing conditions for seed germination. That did not make me feel better.
Posted by: Jenn | April 21, 2007 11:13 PM