Beware of CGREPs (it's not THAT easy being green)

Greasy Socks and Certifications Recently I was doing research for a brief item about green education for "real estate professionals," that is, real estate agents, appraisers, house inspectors, and loan officers. I read about a new course being offered, covering global climate issues, green building, indoor and outdoor air quality, and, last but surely not least, using all this green material in marketing. Those who complete this course are allowed to add CGREP -- for Certified Green Real Estate Professional -- to their collection of post cognomenal letters. It sounded good until I discovered how much time was allotted to instructing prospective CGREPs in all this: three hours. Three hours? I would spend about that long finding out about the course and writing my 200-word brief. I began to perceive the stink of greenwashing. Soon I was feeling perturbed, then angry. I decided to talk to the person who developed this three-hour session, and while I knew I would be polite, I wasn't feeling very open. I thought of it as a confrontation. In the course of the interview, she told me about being diagnosed with emphysema, her subsequent keen interest in air quality, and her decision to end her real estate practice and devote herself to educating her fellow REPs about matters environmental. Realtors aren't interested in science or technology, she told me, they're in a hurry, they're money-oriented, and these days they are stressed out as they watch the market crumbling. She acknowledged that in such a short time it's only possible to give a superficial overview of some basics, but even that is more than most participants have had. She said that she hoped that she could influence real estate agents to suggest green upgrades when their clients ask what they should do to make their property more attractive, and that she wanted them not to fall for greenwashing and call a house green just because it has bamboo cabinets or low-VOC paint. She sounded sincere. Yes, a three-hour course on a bunch of complex subjects is ridiculously inadequate. But isn't some orientation to these subjects step forward? Given that real estate agents are required to take continuing education classes each year -- but only a small number of credit hours -- isn't it good that some of them learn at least a little about green building and climate change instead of the basics of real estate auctions or accounting made easy? The problem, the deception, is the certification. Well-meaning clients will see that an agent is a Certified Green Real Estate Professional and expect that agent to be well informed about ... uh, something "green." And many of the CGREPs are no doubt well intentioned, too, but who can blame them for using whatever marketing mojo they can, especially when it has been made so easy for them, with ARELLO, the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials, approving this impressive-sounding designation? If they are as ignorant and uninterested as my informant tells me, they may even believe themselves to be well informed. The result is everyone involved feeling happy to be doing the environmentally friendly thing, without really knowing what that might mean. It reminds me of a guy I knew in college, a fellow member of the campus environmental organization. In the dining hall, he wiped his fingers on his socks rather than use a disposable paper napkin. I didn't see any reason to go around with greasy socks just to avoid the paper napkins, so I brought a cloth napkin with me. But more importantly, while it was fine and admirable that he was saving napkins, what drove me crazy about him was he seemed to honestly think he was saving the Earth that way. I didn't believe it would save the Earth if the whole human population never used another paper napkin, and I thought it was a gross trivialization of the problems facing us to think that it would. That's still what I think. All the greasy socks or three-hour-class-taking CGREPs under the sun don't amount to a hill of shade-grown coffee beans if fundamental changes in how human beings (especially affluent ones) live aren't made, and thinking otherwise just induces complacency and simple-mindedness. We'd all like to believe we can save the world without going to a lot of trouble, and there are plenty of people with things to sell ready to assure us that we can. It's not PCB-soaked, radioactive, black rhino horn-based impotence remedies cloaked in the language of sustainability that pose the real danger of greenwashing, but modestly useful green goods and services that make overblown claims.