Vanity Fair’s first Green Issue hits newsstands this week. The cover features Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hanging out in what looks like the empty shell of a brick building that is overgrown with ivy and spray-painted green. Robert and Al are in denim and fleece, as if they just stumbled on this place while hiking, whereas George is strangely overdressed for the locale and Julia looks like she just stepped out of a bad production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she’s cast as Titania, queen of the faeries.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Al Gore are basically poster children for the green movement. Most notable are Kennedy Jr.’s efforts as a lawyer fighting deep-pocketed polluters of the Hudson River ecosystem and Al Gore’s recent tour of stump speeches sounding the global warming alarm, featured in the upcoming film An Inconvenient Truth.
In the accompanying feature, Syriana star Clooney announces his plans to create Oil Change, a campaign to educate audiences and reduce dependence on oil. Meanwhile, Clooney has traded in his BMW for an eco-friendly Tango, which features in the photo spread inside the new Vanity Fair.
And Julia Roberts once pulled a dead frog out of a sewer to prove the dangers of hexavalent chromium in drinking water… Oh wait, that was just a movie. But, she’s prettier than Ralph Nader.
The issue includes glamour shots of luminaries in the eco-movement with VF’s signature silly people-labels (Chip Giller of Grist is one of The E-Gitators, Arnold Schwarzeneggar is The Governor Who Gets It.) It is, by no means, all-inclusive. Strangely absent are Robert Redford, Greenpeace, Leonardo DiCaprio and, most importantly, the creator of Sludgie. But it contains many good articles, including one on blast coal mining that is changing the topography of Appalachia, and a superb article by Al Gore that uses Chinese characters for chapter headings. Remember when smart people ran our country?