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CounterPunch
November
25, 2002
Adios, Jay Hair
A Corporate
Flunky Passes On
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
On November 15, Jay Hair, former boss of the National
Wildlife Federation, died of cancer at the age of 56. The New
York Times eulogized Hair as "a passionate defender of the
environment". But the Times's wistful cruise through Hair's
career managed to glide right by his real significance: he established
a corporate model for environmentalism that thrives to this day.
Whether the Hair approach amounts to
a defense of the environment from plunder is another question
altogether, a question that Hair himself didn't seem that troubled
about.
For grassroots greens, Jay Hair came
to personify nearly everything that's wrong with the mainstream
environmental movement: elitist, pr-driven, politically calculating,
and cautious. In fact, Hair helped to shape many of the more
odious excesses: the plush offices, obese salaries and cordial
affiliations with big business.
Hair was an environmental executive for
the go-go 90s. He didn't see unfettered capitalism a threat,
but an opportunity to cash in on the bonanza.
Hair perfected the art of environmental
triangulation long before Dickie Morris showed up at the backdoor
of Bill Clinton's White House with his black bag of trickery.
He never lost an opportunity to stab the knife in the back of
an environmental group (or idea) that he considered too radical
or impolitic-even the middle of the roaders at the Sierra got
tongue-lashings from Hair, their policies on wilderness and trade
publicly ridiculed as unrealistic. Hair was an insider and a
powerbroker. Usually, he got entrée to politicos such
as Al Gore by giving ground. It was the only thing he had to
offer.
Hair wasn't an organizer. He didn't led
a mass movement of outraged greens. In fact, there's every indication
that he despised grassroots environmentalism. He even tried to
suppress the independence of the chapters within his own federation,
sparking a rebellion of sorts that was put down forcibly by Hair's
lieutenants.
Hair embraced corporations without question.
He stocked his board with corporate honchos from companies with
dirty reputations, such as Waste Management. He took their money,
greenwashed their crimes and then often did their bidding on
the Hill.
His first big moment of betrayal came
when he offered to lobby his fellow executives in the DC environmental
caucus about the virtues of NAFTA. Not once, but twice. First
he hawked the trade pact for Bush, then for Clinton. Unlike many
of his colleagues, who operate as adjuncts of the Democratic
Party, Hair wasn't a partisan. He worked for whoever was in power
and for whoever paid the bills.
And they were big bills.
Hair believed that if he was going to
hang out with corporate execs, he should be paid like them. He
was the first environmentalist to crack $200,000 a year in salary
and benefits, setting a high bar that others have rushed to match.
(When he left NWF in 1995, his salary was $293,000.)
He once attended a press conference in
DC addressing the issue of global warming. As Hair pontificated
about hydrocarbons and SUVs inside, he ordered his chauffeur
to keep his limo idling outside the building, with the air condition
blowing full-blast so that the great man wouldn't break a sweat
on the drive back to NWF's lush headquarters.
After Hair was finally run out of NWF,
he landed in Seattle, where he got a gig doing PR for the Plum
Creek Timber Company, a logging outfit so rapacious that a Republican
congressman deemed it the "Darth Vader of the timber industry".
When the great David Brower at age 84
was on the streets of Seattle during the WTO's confab, cheering
on the protesters and cursing the police, Jay Hair was cashing
in whatever remained of his green credentials for hackwork with
the World Mining Congress and the World Bank. Gold mining may
be the most destructive and toxic industry on the planet, often
involving the use of cyanide and other poisons. But that didn't
stop Hair from fronting for the likes of Newmont Gold, one of
the industry's biggest and nastiest outfits. "Mining gold
can be a pretty
messy issue," Hair said last summer. "But the gold
industry, at least the
(companies) I've talked to, are sensitive about cleaning up their
acts." That's classic Hair.
His last big project was lobbying for
the completion of a giant dam in Chile. This monument of environmental
destruction dwarfs even Glen Canyon dam and will destroy nearly
nearly a 500-miles of river, hundreds of villages, drown thousands
of acres of forests and forcibly displace indigenous people.
Alas, Brower didn't outlive his younger
nemesis Jay Hair. Ever the optimist, CounterPunch bets Brower's
militant legacy does.
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