The following is mirrored from its source at:
http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=482
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Business of Betrayal
Greens Who Defect to the Corporate World
Jeopardize the Very Survival of Environmentalism
Greens Get Eaten
The environment movement is in serious trouble,
as it is losing touch with its ideals.
By George Monbiot
15 January 2002
The Guardian [UK]
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.
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