Getting the goods on green celebs
They’ve gotten plenty of mileage from the eco-bandwagon, but now no garbage can is being left unturned.
By Gina Piccalo
NO, it’s not easy being green, least of all for Hollywood A-listers living in jaw-dropping decadence. Solar panels on a 50,000-square-foot manse in Malibu just don’t scream “Live simply!” Ditto hopping onto a private plane to get to the Live Earth concert.
Of course, celebrities don’t let their lavish lifestyles stop them from preaching to the rest of us about temperance. Eco-friendly living isn’t about great sacrifice, they contend, it’s about making small but powerful changes. It’s about voting green. It’s about buying green. Besides, they say, they’re doing their part by using their fame to broadcast a pro-Earth message that reaches millions of people. Isn’t that enough?
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It might have been, a few years back. But then, rather quickly, the green movement became part of the mainstream. For the rich and famous, the competition to stand out, to out-green the next guy, got so fierce that the next logical place to take the Greening of Hollywood was the exposé: sussing out the hypocrites. Every media outlet and website (green or otherwise) has upped its scrutiny of green-speaking stars. As a cause, environmentalism is now all about personal choices — your teeth-brushing ritual is tied directly to our dwindling water supply, for example — so the lives of green stars are expected to be especially transparent.
Even passive support of the cause — say performing at a pro-Earth event — is reason enough for a celebrity’s carbon footprint to be inspected. Laurie David, once a green beacon for the glitterati, is now a media target whose every perceived indiscretion is somehow undermining the veracity of her activism. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can adopt three children from impoverished nations, travel the world to promote humanitarian aid, and still have to answer for a helicopter ride they took last weekendfrom Manhattan to a Hamptons fundraiser for Pitt’s green-home-building project in New Orleans.
On the surface, celebrities have become prickly and defensive when the subject of their green habits comes up. The new standard mea culpa is “No one’s perfect.” “We’re all trying the best we can, truly we really are,” said an exasperated Leonardo DiCaprio in May. But even the subtext of that quote reveals a good bit of genuine confusion out there. When you’re extravagantly rich and high-profile, just where is the line between flat-out decadence and mindful, green luxury? Does one cross-country ride in a private jet cancel out the vegetarianism and the bamboo floors? Is the only answer total asceticism?
This is the next phase of Hollywood eco-chic: earnest self-assessment, with a side of anxiety. Everyone wants to find a comfortable place in the growing divide between the biodiesel-driving, rainwater-collecting Daryl Hannah-Ed Begley Jr. model and the carbon-offsetting, private jet-riding Laurie David-Al Gore approach.It’s no wonder the new Hollywood must-have is the eco-lifestylist.It takes a real professional to navigate the increasingly murky middle ground and guide an Earth-conscious star to his or her natural spot in the spectrum of green.
Eyeing every kilowatt
THERE’S no shortage of outlets eager to chronicle every green move a celebrity makes in the now-standard “green issues” of general interest magazines and green-centered TV shows and websites such as treehugger.com, dailygreen.com and grist.org, a well-established eco-news site. Some activists even say the increased scrutiny is actually a boon to the cause. Green gossip tells us that Julia Roberts brings her own metal cup to coffeehouses, that Pitt and Jolie bought an organic vineyard, that Rosario Dawson refuses to date non-recyclers, that Adrian Grenier is insulating his home with recycled denim, that Matt Damon bought his entire family Priuses and that Metallica is funding a rain forest reserve.
But to many, much of this now looks like mere window dressing.
Take the green website ecorazzi.com , which launched a year ago. The primary mission of the site, co-founded by Ithaca, N.Y.-based Michael d’Estries and Rebecca Carter in Miami, is to track the green habits of celebrities. “If people in the spotlight are going to get up there, they’re going to have to come prepared,” said D’Estries. “They’re going to have to look at their own lives first. Otherwise it’s just green washing.”
Ecorazzi.com is not a vigilante effort. D’Estries and Carter work hard to give celebrities the benefit of the doubt. But in June, the site landed some exclusive dish on the movement’s reigning mouthpiece. David, “An Inconvenient Truth” co-producer who had helped drive Hollywood eco-chic, was spotted cavorting at dawn on a boat dock with her building contractor, Bart Thorpe, shortly after her separation from “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David was made public. David’s neighbor Jackie Mendez-Diez cast off the tidbit about Thorpe and David in a tirade she posted on the site about David’s “Carbon Sasquatch” lifestyle. It was ecorazzi.com’s first big scoop, and one that two years ago would have gone completely unnoticed. Even the New York Post’s Page Six didn’t catch up with the story until days later.
D’Estries admits David’s personal relationships have nothing to do with her activism. But unlike other causes, environmentalism is all about shifting our private habits to help the Earth. So David’s personal life, more than other celebrities, is subject to especially intense scrutiny.
“Even if Ed Begley Jr. is the greenest person in the world, if something happened in his personal life, that would come with the entire package and people would judge and expose,” D’Estries said.
It’s hard not to see a strain of Puritanism in all this: Any kind of behavior that looks like self-indulgence or irresponsibility, it would seem, provokes a public stockading. And yet in the context of a cause that demands limits and personal responsibility, the extreme consumption habits of many green stars do boggle the mind. From afar, the life of any A-lister can look like one long bacchanal.
For her part, David has long defended her massive Martha’s Vineyard property with its heated pool and barbecue pit that encroach on protected wetlands (an honest mistake by David’s contractor at the time, a spokeswoman said). David has said she feels justified living this life because she uses her home to host “eco salons” that build mass awareness and raise money.
David declined to comment on the ecorazzi.com imbroglio. But she does have a point of view on the scrutiny facing ecologically conscious celebrities.
“If I have learned anything from my work, it is this: The gold standard is unattainable,” she said in a statement released to The Times. “There is always something to criticize in someone’s lifestyle and I have learned that it’s not about one person doing everything, it’s about everybody doing something. If everybody did something, we would be well on our way to solving our problems.”
Al Gore too has come under fire. The day after “An Inconvenient Truth’s” Oscar win in February, political blogger Matt Drudge posted an item from an obscure conservative think tank claiming that the former vice president’s 20-room mansion and pool house in Nashville, Tenn., consumed 20 times more energy than the average American home. Gore’s camp didn’t deny the claims but quickly issued a press release explaining that he offsets with carbon credits and solar power.
At the Cannes Film Festival in May, DiCaprio couldn’t secure a hybrid, so he insisted his driver drop him off out of sight of reporters so he could walk up to the premiere of his new eco-crisis film, “The 11th Hour.” A British reporter still asked him whether he’d taken a private jet to France.
“No,” he quipped, “I took a train across the Atlantic.”
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