A Valentine to Adam Smith

Mary Katherine Ham blogs about a NYT piece on "green weddings," which are apparently all the rage now.

Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours. Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.
Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.

Apparently I was green without trying --we used hydrangeas from the back yard and I wore a vintage dress. Only my reasoning was "black," as in trying to stay in the. Which dovetails nicely with the point Ham makes that I liked so much:

these stories are delightful both because of the extent to which the Lefty lifestyle can parody itself, and because they're the perfect example of the market working efficiently, creatively, and unexpectedly to respond to even the most outlandish predilections of the very people who doubt the market's ability to do any such thing.

The story continues with a look at "green" honeymoons:

“You used to have to go camping,” said Ted Ning, the executive director of the Lohas Journal, a resource guide for businesses that serve the environmentally conscious market. “Now you have these amazing luxurious spas in Africa or Fiji. You can look at different animals while getting a massage in a tree.”

Ham writes:

I don't mind this kind of development in these countries, by which the folks who live there can benefit and earn a living by catering to the self-absorbed honeymoon plans of Western environmentalists. That's good stuff, economically speaking, but aren't evironmentalists generally opposed to it? Until they need somewhere to go on their honeymoons that'll produce the requisite number of Peace Corps-style photo ops to please their friends back home, I guess.

It is delicious, all these folks who fancy they're dropping "off the grid" with organic, free-range, sustainable-farming products --they've created a market!

UPDATE: In a real valentine to Smith, the UK's going to put him on a new £20 note. Curtsy: instapundit.