THE PERILS OF ACTING GREEN

No, it’s not easy being green, least of all for Hollywood A-listers living in jaw-dropping decadence. Solar panels on a 50,000-square-foot manse in Malibu just don’t scream “Live simply!” Ditto hopping onto a private plane to get to the Live Earth concert.

Of course, celebrities don’t let their lavish lifestyles stop them from preaching to the rest of us about temperance. Eco-friendly living isn’t about great sacrifice, they contend, it’s about making small but powerful changes. It’s about voting green. It’s about buying green. Besides, they say, they’re doing their part by using their fame to broadcast a pro-Earth message that reaches millions of people. Isn’t that enough?

It might have been, a few years back. But then, rather quickly, the green movement became part of the mainstream. For the rich and famous, the competition to stand out, to out-green the next guy, got so fierce that the next logical place to take the Greening of Hollywood was the exposé: sussing out the hypocrites. Every media outlet and website (green or otherwise) has upped its scrutiny of green-speaking stars. As a cause, environmentalism is now all about personal choices -- your teeth-brushing ritual is tied directly to our dwindling water supply, for example -- so the lives of green stars are expected to be especially transparent.

Even passive support of the cause -- say performing at a pro-Earth event -- is reason enough for a celebrity’s carbon footprint to be inspected. Laurie David, once a green beacon for the glitterati, is now a media target whose every perceived indiscretion is somehow undermining the veracity of her activism. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can adopt three children from impoverished nations, travel the world to promote humanitarian aid, and still have to answer for a helicopter ride they took last weekend from Manhattan to a Hamptons fundraiser for Pitt’s green-home-building project in New Orleans.

On the surface, celebrities have become prickly and defensive when the subject of their green habits comes up. The new standard mea culpa is “No one’s perfect.” “We’re all trying the best we can, truly we really are,” said an exasperated Leonardo DiCaprio in May. But even the subtext of that quote reveals a good bit of genuine confusion out there. When you’re extravagantly rich and high-profile, just where is the line between flat-out decadence and mindful, green luxury? Does one cross-country ride in a private jet cancel out the vegetarianism and the bamboo floors? Is the only answer total asceticism?

This is the next phase of Hollywood eco-chic: earnest self-assessment, with a side of anxiety. Everyone wants to find a comfortable place in the growing divide between the biodiesel-driving, rainwater-collecting Daryl Hannah-Ed Begley Jr. model and the carbon-offsetting, private jet-riding Laurie David-Al Gore approach. It’s no wonder the new Hollywood must-have is the eco-lifestylist. It takes a real professional to navigate the increasingly murky middle ground and guide an Earth-conscious star to his or her natural spot in the spectrum of green.

Eyeing every kilowatt

There’s no shortage of outlets eager to chronicle every green move a celebrity makes in the now-standard “green issues” of general interest magazines and green-centered TV shows and websites such as treehugger.com, dailygreen.com and grist.org, a well-established eco-news site. Some activists even say the increased scrutiny is actually a boon to the cause. Green gossip tells us that Julia Roberts brings her own metal cup to coffeehouses, that Pitt and Jolie bought an organic vineyard, that Rosario Dawson refuses to date non-recyclers, that Adrian Grenier is insulating his home with recycled denim, that Matt Damon bought his entire family Priuses and that Metallica is funding a rain forest reserve.

But to many, much of this now looks like mere window dressing.

Take the green website ecorazzi.com, which launched a year ago. The primary mission of the site, co-founded by Ithaca, N.Y.-based Michael d’Estries and Rebecca Carter in Miami, is to track the green habits of celebrities. “If people in the spotlight are going to get up there, they’re going to have to come prepared,” said D’Estries. “They’re going to have to look at their own lives first. Otherwise it’s just green washing.”

Ecorazzi.com is not a vigilante effort. D’Estries and Carter work hard to give celebrities the benefit of the doubt. But in June, the site landed some exclusive dish on the movement’s reigning mouthpiece. David, “An Inconvenient Truth” co-producer who had helped drive Hollywood eco-chic, was spotted cavorting at dawn on a boat dock with her building contractor, Bart Thorpe, shortly after her separation from “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David was made public. David’s neighbor Jackie Mendez-Diez cast off the tidbit about Thorpe and David in a tirade she posted on the site about David’s “Carbon Sasquatch” lifestyle. It was ecorazzi.com’s first big scoop, and one that two years ago would have gone completely unnoticed. Even the New York Post’s Page Six didn’t catch up with the story until days later.

D’Estries admits David’s personal relationships have nothing to do with her activism. But unlike other causes, environmentalism is all about shifting our private habits to help the Earth. So David’s personal life, more than other celebrities, is subject to especially intense scrutiny.

“Even if Ed Begley Jr. is the greenest person in the world, if something happened in his personal life, that would come with the entire package and people would judge and expose,” D’Estries said.

It’s hard not to see a strain of Puritanism in all this: Any kind of behavior that looks like self-indulgence or irresponsibility, it would seem, provokes a public stockading. And yet in the context of a cause that demands limits and personal responsibility, the extreme consumption habits of many green stars do boggle the mind. From afar, the life of any A-lister can look like one long bacchanal.

For her part, David has long defended her massive Martha’s Vineyard property with its heated pool and barbecue pit that encroach on protected wetlands (an honest mistake by David’s contractor at the time, a spokeswoman said). David has said she feels justified living this life because she uses her home to host “eco salons” that build mass awareness and raise money.

David declined to comment on the ecorazzi.com imbroglio. But she does have a point of view on the scrutiny facing ecologically conscious celebrities.

“If I have learned anything from my work, it is this: The gold standard is unattainable,” she said in a statement released to The Times. “There is always something to criticize in someone’s lifestyle and I have learned that it’s not about one person doing everything, it’s about everybody doing something. If everybody did something, we would be well on our way to solving our problems.”

Al Gore too has come under fire. The day after “An Inconvenient Truth’s” Oscar win in February, political blogger Matt Drudge posted an item from an obscure conservative think tank claiming that the former vice president’s 20-room mansion and pool house in Nashville, Tenn., consumed 20 times more energy than the average American home. Gore’s camp didn’t deny the claims but quickly issued a press release explaining that he offsets with carbon credits and solar power.

At the Cannes Film Festival in May, DiCaprio couldn’t secure a hybrid, so he insisted his driver drop him off out of sight of reporters so he could walk up to the premiere of his new eco-crisis film, “The 11th Hour.” A British reporter still asked him whether he’d taken a private jet to France.

“No,” he quipped, “I took a train across the Atlantic.”

(DiCaprio added that he’d flown commercial to the festival.)

This summer, the backlash was deafening in response to Gore’s Live Earth concerts, held to raise awareness of global warming. Reporters merrily calculated the tons of garbage, CO2 emissions and mammoth energy consumption the event would generate. They dug up arcane anti-environmental details about performers. (Snoop Dogg once appeared in a car commercial!) And days before Madonna took the stage, she was savaged for even participating in an eco-friendly cause when she owns nine homes and a fleet of cars. Through a spokeswoman, the star later said she’d committed to educating herself and her family and vowed to “make changes” in their lives.

Media skepticism was so palpable at one Live Earth press conference that singer-songwriter John Mayer told reporters right up front: “If you want to peg me as not being completely eco-friendly, you’ll win. I’ll give it to you right now. That’s not the point, you know?”

Many levels of compliance

The varying shades of celebrity green are emerging.

Last month, Radar magazine’s Jeff Bercovici dubbed DiCaprio and celebrities like him “eco-hypocrites,” arguing that if Barbra Streisand touts environmentalism but tours with a convoy of carbon-spewing trailers, why should we change a thing in our own, much more modest lives?

“The implication of the hypocrites’ behavior is that we must take all measures to fight global warming short of those that would reduce our quality of life,” he wrote. “But a reduction in quality of life or at least a redefinition of it is exactly what Americans are going to have to accept to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas levels.”

Many assert that to be truly green, a celebrity must not just carbon-offset or advocate for the cause, they must relinquish things: the private jet travel, the massive square footage that must be heated and cooled, the second (and third and fourth) homes, the garages full of cars.

Ecologist and green activist Glen Barry, a Wisconsin-based blogger and occasional media spokesman for green causes, criticized Live Earth and its star-studded performances as “shallow reformist tokenism [that] reinforces current blind faith in technology, capitalism and corporatism that has brought us to our current situation.” He has targeted DiCaprio in particular, he said, because the actor hasn’t given up private jet travel. One hour flown in a private jet emits the pollution equivalent of driving an SUV for a year, Barry said, so any benefit from DiCaprio’s Prius and home solar panels is more than canceled out every time he travels by private jet.

“We’re sending the wrong message that you can consume opulently like a movie star and still protect the planet,” said Barry. “You can’t.”

In an odd twist, Barry grew so worried that his past struggle with substance abuse might hurt his activist image that he came clean in a posting on Aug. 20 on his personal website, earth meanders.blogspot.com. “As I become more of a spokesperson for the global environment, I have no doubt that my opponents will not hesitate to dig for dirt,” he wrote. “I am telling you of my ‘bats in the attic’ before others do.”

Others aren’t so hard-line.

Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Assn., a nonprofit that promotes eco-living in Hollywood, agrees that scrutiny around celebrity is unavoidable. “We’re deciding who they date and if that’s good or not. So if they’re claiming to be eco-giants, why wouldn’t we look into their homes?” Levin said. Nevertheless, she doesn’t see the point of making standards some can’t reasonably reach. “It’s important to be authentic in your lifestyle, but it’s most important to admit that nobody’s perfect,” she said.

Levin represents the lighter, more comfortable shade of green. She made it her mission in 1999 to put “celebrities together with stuff” as a way to advance the cause. Her group championed the Prius early on and put as many celebrities into the car and onto red carpets as possible. By her measure, it worked. Eco-consumerism is now mainstream.

“I’m a big proponent of changing the world through shopping,” said Levin. “I remember when I started eight years go, I thought, ‘This is an elitist thing. How can you promote organic food when nobody can afford to buy it?’ Now it’s in Wal-Mart. It’s in Target. It’s everywhere. That wasn’t happening before.”

In this context, the paparazzi are useful PR agents. When Jessica Biel was photographed carrying Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” to a farmers market, dailygreen.com wrote “That’s a twofer: eco bag and buying locally sourced food.”

Perhaps the root of the problem lies in the movement’s narrow focus on personal choice. Some argue that celebrities could inspire everyone on the planet to drive Priuses and it wouldn’t stop global warming. Little lifestyle changes are great, but the real paradigm shift has to come from governments and corporations.

In a testy Aug. 17 column, grist.org’s David Roberts dismissed celebrities as virtually irrelevant to the cause. He wrote that scrutinizing their lifestyles trivializes the issue and acts as “a shot of schadenfreude to the lizard brain.” But Roberts dialed down his ire a notch during an interview later, acknowledging that celebrities do “raise the noise, the salience of the issue.”

“And that,” he added, “is an unambiguous good as far as I’m concerned.”

Still, you have to wonder whether celebrities will keep up the eco-conscious pose now that the public has grown so sophisticated on the issue. If the same mass awareness the stars brought to the cause has boomeranged into a backlash, if mass cynicism, even fatalism, becomes the automatic response to their green-speak -- what’s really in it for them? And what exactly have we gained?

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gina.piccalo@latimes.com