On revisiting a blog I’d written about greenwashing, I felt a familiar sense of dread.

Learning to be ‘greener’ was another thing in society that started with great intentions and ended up on the pendulum of doom.

Being greener can only be good, right? We encourage businesses to do more and talk about what great things they’re doing. Customers are becoming more discerning with their choices, which naturally means there’s a commercial value attached to being seen to be green.

Sadly, whenever there’s commercial value, inevitably someone is going to take the mickey.

Enter greenwashing.

Quite rightly, we challenge it.

A picture of two hands cupping a plant and the word eco are no longer enough to convince everyone that you are the new Patagonia.

Good.

Except we just can’t stop pushing.

Businesses genuinely trying to improve have become so worried about being accused of greenwashing that some have now decided it’s safer not to talk about what they’re doing at all.

So now we have greenhushing.

We’ve somehow travelled from:

“Look how green we are!”

to:

“For God’s sake, don’t mention the recycling.”

Just why do we do this so often, without realising our mistakes?

And it’s not just sustainability. We seem to do it whenever we’ve eventually realised the old way wasn’t that great.

Something needs correcting, so we correct it, but rather than taking what we’ve learned and finding somewhere sensible to stop, we keep going until we’ve created a completely different problem. Then somebody points that out and…

Wheeeeeeee.

Off goes the pendulum again.

Maybe the extremes are simply easier. At either end, everything is wonderfully clear: something is good or it’s bad; you’re for it or against it.

The grey means accepting that something can have been a necessary correction and still go too far.

For example, a business can be doing something genuinely positive without being perfect.

Why can’t we accept that we can question part of an idea without rejecting the whole of it?

There’s no lovely, neat rule to sit behind. We just have to look at what’s actually in front of us and make a judgement.

I think I’d quite like to live in the land of the grey.

Not because I don’t have opinions. God knows, that’s unlikely to become a problem.

But because I don’t want every good idea to have to become an absolute before we’re allowed to support it.

There must surely be somewhere between giving a business a halo for changing its loo roll and gagging one that’s genuinely making progress because it hasn’t yet solved every environmental problem known to mankind.