How Important is the Visibility of Intention to a Green Wedding?

Green Wedding

It's hard to place the growing field of "green weddings" under a single aegis: after all, many diverse motives are driving couples to have a greener wedding. Although few hard statistics exist regarding green weddings, we know anecdotally that wedding planners report widespread interest in the topic. Four years ago, a survey by Brides Magazine indicated that 33% percent of respondents were planning to have a green wedding, while more recently, wedding planners in progressive regions of the country are reporting eco-related wedding inquiries from up to half their brides.

Why the interest? In the wake of the recession, a reaction to overconsumption is one oft-cited motive. We also know that other impulses are driving couples. Some are material (a desire to directly benefit the earth by choosing from sustainable, recycled, or oxygen-producing items) or humanitarian (benefiting local farmers or underprivileged communities). Others are philanthropic (selecting from organizations that benefit NGOs or endangered species) or the more symbolic and evangelical, such as choosing plantable favors that do not themselves greatly bear on a green supply chain, but serve to remind the guests of the couples' green intentions where this intent might otherwise be invisible.

For example, you may not be able to taste the "organic" or "vegan" in a cake, or identify at a glance that the bride's wedding dress is crafted from hemp silk charmeuse or organic cotton. However, other aspects of the wedding more transparently broadcast the couples' ideals, such as a vegetarian dinner menu, eco-minded registries, or low-energy transportation alternatives — e.g., departing the ceremony in a Prius rather than the traditional gas-chugging limousine. Eco-friendly favors are similar in identifiably broadcasting a couple's desire to go green, as flower seeds and seed papers, small bamboo kitchen tools or unguents made from organic oils are effective at conveying a green slant.

Visibility is an important issue in the green wedding, because such a wedding does not most typically save the couple money; in fact, it usually makes the proceeding more expensive. This is perhaps one reason why eco-celebrations first took root in affluent Hollywood circles and have been more roundabout in expanding to middle-class events, where the wedding already constitutes a major expenditure to the average couple. Such a move on the couples' part — to pay more for fair-trade and organic consumables and conflict-free jewelry, while perhaps dipping into the pocket further to counterbalance their guests' plane trips with carbon offsets — requires commitment, so a couple can't be faulted for feeling the point is at least partly obscured when their efforts are rendered invisible.

As an article in the Washingtonian reported of two green-minded newlyweds in 2008, "many guests didn’t know they were attending a green wedding." One can hardly blame the couple, if after all their careful efforts, this anticlimactic response to their pains leaves them with a not-entirely-satisfactory feeling.

This is one aspect the evolving green wedding will have to reconcile: what if a tree is saved in the forest, but nobody sees it rescued? As time goes on, we may see more emphasis on broadcasting the couples' ecological beliefs more effectively to guests, foregrounding the evangelical aspect, even if the overall impact of going green for one's wedding on the larger environment is not always completely clear.