While Pollan is right in citing China, the fact is that there are many evil twins right here in the US itself. There is an emerging ‘green’ movement all right, but it will be a while before it truly becomes ‘mainstream’. The issue of China (and also India) is a vexing one- as sovereign countries they have all the right to argue for development and modern facilities- and it is the same path as the US and other Western countries followed. While the SUV, and not the Prius is the dominant mode of personal transport here, it is difficult to preach to others about going green.

One factor is that the Chinese growth is largely being driven by Western demands- and this is where the US consumers can coax a change in their practices. But while the dollar value of the product remains the bottom line, the consequences are largely hidden and transferred in invisible ways, in the form of environmental changes. The US consumer shopping at WalMart may be happy (I confess to being one of them at times) for the low prices, the repurcussions are right now being felt by the factory workers in China, and people who live around those areas. Thousands of those factories are being built, and will become the key drivers of environmental change, whose ramifications will only be known in the coming decades. Which brings me back to the WWF ad. The point here is that bottom up change is truly possible, as Pollan shows, but it might be too little, and too slow. A thousand LEED certfied parking structures may not be helpful if we are almost crossing the tipping point.