This may sound harsh, but I found this to be the lamest version of environmental activism I’ve ever heard: Promotional materials for the MTV show Trippin’ describe how “Cameron Diaz and a group of her close, personal friends think globally and act globally too as they travel to unlikely getaways…from Chile to Yellowstone, on a quest to safeguard the environment.”

How is getting on an airplane and flying all around the world a “quest to safeguard the environment”? Is Cameron Diaz’s entourage actually doing something substantial enough to compensate for its burning of fossil fuels, jetting all over the planet, or are they just providing information on what other people are doing to safeguard the environment?

I know that Cameron Diaz’s heart is in the right place, but the fact is that information about environmental activism happening around the world is already available - on the Internet, where we can get information about it without having to get on an airplane to film public service announcements about it.

The time for people to just be educated about the environmental crisis, through efforts like Act Green, another project with Cameron Diaz, looking very cute with Gwyneth Paltrow, is over. It’s time to sign people up for concrete actions - personally and politically. Yet, Act Green doesn’t do that. It’s organized by the Environmental Media Association, with the mission “to mobilize the entertainment community in a global effort to educate people about environmental problems and inspire them to act on those problems now.”

So, we get Paltrow and Diaz in public service announcements on TV.

We need to get meatier than this. Watching people talk about the environment is not enough. For political environmental activism, go to Action Network. To support a carbon-trap program, donate money to CarbonFund.

Then downshift. Yes, downshift.

Being an environmental activist is like exercising. Watching an exercise show doesn’t do you any good. You’ve got to do the work yourself. In the case of the environment, a lot of the work has to do with cutting back on the most wasteful luxuries, and figuring out what you really need as opposed to what you’re used to having around.

That’s not a cute face for environmentalism, but it’s what we need to do. So, are you ready to get serious, or are you just adopting an eco-pose as an excuse to watch Cameron Diaz bounce around?