Daniel Bryan Says He Was Told to Stop Talking About the Environment in Promos, Talks Eco-Friendly Merchandise

– Daniel Bryan spoke with My SanAntonio for an interview and discussed his environmentalist views, and how they could potentially work in his babyface run. A couple of highlights are below:

On if he thinks his environmentalist side could work as a babyface character: “I think so, but it has to be as a champion for the causes of the downtrodden. I like doing it and the lifting up the planet because that’s going to help our children. Actually, I’m working with the WWE and its merchandise team. In that whole run, while they did make a Daniel Bryan ‘Planet’s Champion’ T-shirt, I never wore one to the ring. One of the things I’ve always felt very guilty about is the amount of stuff that I’ve specifically sold to people, and I’ve never done it with the intention of, ‘Oh, I want to sell all these things.’ It’s just part of what you do. It’s like, okay, you wear your shirt to the ring, so that people see your shirt and buy it. Well, this was a good opportunity for me to be like, ‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t wear a shirt to the ring, because I’m the planet’s champion.’ And that’s one of the things that I can criticize other people for — they’re just out there for other people’s money. Now that I’m a good guy again, they’re like, ‘Well, we’d really like you to wear a shirt, and let’s get back to making T-shirts for you again.’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do that.’ And so now I’m working with them about that, and the next Daniel Bryan shirts are going to be made out of recycled materials. And I think five plastic water bottles will be used for every shirt. So they’ll be made out of plastic water bottles and recycled materials and that, to me, is cool, and that’s something that’s a good-guy thing that’s also kind of environmentally friendly.”

On being told to stop talking about the environment: “I’m also trying to get it — and this is where we’re coming into a little bit of a holdup here — where for every shirt that somebody buys, I would like for a tree to be planted,” Bryan revealed. “They’re balking a little bit on that. I don’t need to make any money on these T-shirts. If I’m going to sell anybody anything, or if somebody wants to buy something because it’s a Daniel Bryan something, I want it to not only not do harm, but I would like it to do something positive. So, with that kind of attitude, you could see where that would be a thing that people like. I’m not doing it so people will like me. I’m doing it because my guilty conscious of having sold X number of shirts yesterday that were made out of inorganic material — which is horrible for the planet — make me think, ‘No, I’m so bad for the planet.’ But that sort of thing is something you can see people getting behind. I think at the end of the day, whether you’re right or left, I don’t think the environment should be a right or left issue. I don’t think it should be like that. When I was doing the environmental thing, they actually told me to stop talking about the environment because they told me it was a political issue and we don’t want to deal with politics. I said, ‘It’s not a political issue. It’s a scientific issue, and the sciences pretty much prove it.’ So rather than looking at it from a right or left point of view, let’s look at it as, ‘Hey, improving the environment is a bulletproof idea to improve all of our children’s lives.’ And I think that’s also something that people can get behind, too. But how you do that in a wrestling format? I have no idea.”