The language of Aspirational Vagary

I just attended a "lunch and learn" about the commercial carpet/flooring industry, and more specifically how the industry is becoming "green." The lecturer wasn't really able to tell me, but most of the industry seems to produce flooring from highly synthetic materials, and my suspicion is that this entire industry as a whole is geared around the surpluses of the petroleum industry. We have such a surplus of oil that we are trying to make all sorts of products from it.

What I find so typical of this in today's discourse is that it's being repackaged as "sustainable." We as a society have recently made being sustainable this important aspirational goal, but what tends to happen is that these aspirations become quickly reduced down to buzz words that eventually have a vague almost empty meaning.

The problem with this sort of language, is that it has real political power, and is used in a way to coax people into a moral binary albeit an artificial one. The language of aspirational vaguery is used almost to intimidate and coerce people into buying into a whole world view that might very well be direct contradiction to orginal intent of the cause. 

I would venture to guess that majority of flooring material now being used comes from petroleum sources, and it is to the exact exclusion of traditional carpets, traditional flooring, made from natural fibers. But they're able to say this is made from recycled content and bypass our radar for a moral purchase.