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January
15, 2002
William
Blum
Atta
and the Times:
Follow the Changing Story
Edward
Said
Emerging
Alternatives
in Palestine
January
14, 2002
David
Vest
Open
Bag. Eat Pretzels.
Patrick
Cockburn
Collapse
of Georgia
Ignored by the World
Mokhiber/Weissman
Enron's
Accountants:
When In Doubt, Shred It
January
13, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
Why
We Kill People
January
12, 2002
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Forbidden
Truths
January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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bin Laden and Bush
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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January
15, 2002
Business of Betrayal:
Greens Who Defect
to the Corporate World Jeopardize the Very Survival of Environmentalism
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
Environmentalism as an argument has been comprehensively
won. As a practice it is all but extinct. Just as people in
Britain have united around the demand for effective public
transport, car sales have broken all records. Yesterday the
superstore chain Sainsbury's announced a 6% increase in sales:
the number of its customers is now matched only by the number
of people professing to deplore its impact on national life.
The Guardian's environmental reporting is fuller than that of
any other British newspaper, but on Saturday it was offering
readers two transatlantic tickets for the price of one.
The planet, in other words, will not
be saved by wishful thinking. Without the effective regulation
of both citizens and corporations, we will, between us, destroy
the conditions which make life worth living. This is why some
of us still bother to go to the polling booths: in the hope
that governments will prevent the rich from hoarding all their
wealth, stop our neighbors from murdering us and prevent us,
collectively, from wrecking our surroundings.
Because regulation works, companies will
do whatever they can to prevent it. They will threaten governments
with disinvestment, and the loss of thousands of jobs. They
will use media campaigns to recruit public opinion to their
cause. But one of their simplest and most successful strategies
is to buy their critics. By this means, they not only divide
their opponents and acquire inside information about how they
operate; but they also benefit from what public relations companies
call "image transfer": absorbing other people's credibility.
Over the past 20 years, the majority
of Britain's most prominent greens have been hired by companies
whose practices they once contested. Jonathon Porritt, David
Bellamy, Sara Parkin, Tom Burke, Des Wilson and scores of others
are taking money from some of the world's most destructive corporations,
while boosting the companies' green credentials. Now they have
been joined by a man who was, until last week, rightly admired
for his courage and integrity: the former director of Greenpeace
UK, Lord Melchett. Yesterday he started work at the PR firm
Burson Marsteller. Burson Marsteller's core business is defending
companies which destroy the environment and threaten human
rights from public opinion and pressure groups like Greenpeace.
So what are we to make of these defections?
Do they demonstrate only the moral frailty of the defectors,
or are they indicative of a much deeper problem, afflicting
the movement as a whole? I believe environmentalism is in serious
trouble, and that the prominent people who have crossed the
line are not the only ones who have lost their sense of direction.
There are plenty of personal reasons
for apostasy. Rich and powerful greens must perpetually contest
their class interest. Environmentalism, just as much as socialism,
involves the restraint of wealth and power. Peter Melchett,
like Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Engels, Orwell and Tony Benn, was
engaged in counter-identity politics, which require a great
deal of purpose and self-confidence to sustain. In Tolstoy's
novel Resurrection, Prince Nekhlyudov recalls that when he
blew his money on hunting and gambling and seduced another man's
mistress, his friends and even his mother congratulated him,
but when he talked about the redistribution of wealth and gave
some of his land to his peasants they were dismayed. "At
last Nekhlyudov gave in: that is, he left off believing in his
ideals and began to believe in those of other people."
Lord Melchett was also poorly rewarded.
There is an inverse relationship between the public utility
of your work and the amount you get paid. He won't disclose
how much Burson Marsteller will be giving him, but I suspect
the world's biggest PR company has rather more to spend on its
prize catch than Greenpeace.
But, while all popular movements have
lost people to the opposition, green politics has fewer inbuilt
restraints than most. Environmentalism is perhaps the most ideologically
diverse political movement in world history, which is both
its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There is a
long-standing split, growing wider by the day, between people
who believe that the principal solutions lie in enhanced democracy
and those who believe they lie in enhanced technology (leaving
existing social structures intact while improving production
processes and conserving resources). And, while the movement
still attracts radicals, some are beginning to complain that
it is being captured by professional campaigners whose organizations
are increasingly corporate and remote. They exhort their members
to send money and sign petitions, but discourage active participation
in their campaigns. Members of Greenpeace, in particular, are
beginning to feel fed up with funding other people's heroics.
As the movement becomes professionalized
and bureaucratized (and there are serviceable reasons why some
parts of it should), it has also fallen prey to ruthless careerism.
The big money today is in something called "corporate social
responsibility", or CSR. At the heart of CSR is the notion
that companies can regulate their own behavior. By hiring green
specialists to advise them on better management practices, they
hope to persuade governments and the public that there is no
need for compulsory measures. The great thing about voluntary
restraint is that you can opt into or out of it as you please.
There are no mandatory inspections, there is no sustained pressure
for implementation. As soon as it becomes burdensome, the commitment
can be dropped.
In 2000, for example, Tony Blair, prompted
by corporate lobbyists, publicly asked Britain's major companies
to publish environmental reports by the end of 2001. The request,
which remained voluntary, managed to defuse some of the mounting
public pressure for government action. But by January 1 2002,
only 54 of the biggest 200 companies had done so. Because the
voluntary measure was a substitute for regulation, the public
now has no means of assessing the performance of the firms which
have failed to report.
So the environmentalists taking the corporate
buck in the name of cleaning up companies' performance are,
in truth, helping them to stay dirty by bypassing democratic
constraints. But because corporations have invested so heavily
in avoiding democracy, CSR has become big business for greens.
In this social climate, it's not hard
to see why Peter Melchett imagined that he could move to Burson
Marsteller without betraying his ideals. It was a staggeringly
naive and stupid decision, which has destroyed his credibility
and seriously damaged Greenpeace's (as well, paradoxically,
as reducing his market value for Burson Marsteller), but it
is consistent with the thinking prevalent in some of the bigger
organizations
Environmentalism, like almost everything
else, is in danger of being swallowed by the corporate leviathan.
If this happens, it will disappear without trace. No one threatens
its survival as much as the greens who have taken the company
shilling.
George Monbiot
writes about environmentalism and politics for The Guardian of
London.
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