The author of Guns, Germs and Steel, geography professor Jared Diamond has a New York Times op-ed stating his recent softening of attitude toward big business and their role in environmental salvation. He confesses to a former dislike of big business’ environmental destruction and greed but describes his change toward a more “nuanced feeling”. This feeling came about from serving alongside many business executives on the board of the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International. Diamond’s top three corporate picks that have seen the light are Wal-Mart, Chevron and Coca-Cola. These businesses are, he says among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability. He must see them as a sort of positive Guns, Germs and Steel of the enlightened corporate crowd.
I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability. The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
Few would argue that avoiding oil spills isn’t good and lower consumption doesn’t save money but that has long been the case. No nuance here at all, it has gotten so bad that even Wal-Mart, Chevron and Coca-Cola see the writing on the wall.
Look at what Coca-Cola is doing as one of Diamond’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
First off Coca-Cola gave $20 million to the World Wildlife Fund in 2007 and entered into a long-term funding partnership with them in 2008. Diamond notes correctly that Coke’s main ingredient is water.
Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own. Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture.
Making its plants water use “neutral” by replenishing to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used to make soda.
About water offsets from Guardian UK. Coke is not promising to be water neutral wherever it operates – which is bad news for the Indian villages that have been complaining that Coca Cola bottling plants are emptying their wells. Instead, it will "replenish" that water somewhere else.
How is not so clear. One route will be by funding WWF to protect watersheds round the globe.
All so they can continue to make and sell sugar water worldwide. Is the continued existence of Coca Cola Corporation so vital to the earth that we need to laud them for stage managing their own survival?
Coca-cola is using massive amounts of life required water to produce high fructose corn syrup laden drink that has no beneficial use as a food.
And we’re supposed to laud them for taking a minute fraction of their massive corporate profits and doing a tiny bit of the right thing.
I’m not buying … sounds more like Diamond is surrendering.
Actually, this perspective comes much more out of Diamond’s work on his more recent book, Collapse, a topic on which I just finished writing a paper (last night, as it happens). I’d say that he is simply recognizing that corporations now have more power for good or ill than the public sphere, in the environment just as in other areas.
The problem with his book, and with this approach, is that he never really engages the anthropological study of collapse, in which the simplistic view that it is all or nothing for a society went out with systems theory orthodoxy. It is clear that “collapse” affects different parts of a society differently, depending on the causes — it is really just a dramatic term for social change.
If Diamond understood collapse better, he’d see that we need certain societal actors to collapse to avoid a much more widespread disaster — and that includes global corporations that are more powerful than governments, profit-driven, and selling a product that nobody needs. Coke, Chevron, and Wal-Mart may be more “green” than their competitors, but nothing they could do would benefit the environment more than no longer existing.
Maybe it’s fun to live in a world where you can believe that Wal-Mart, Coke, etc., have the agency to force millions of people to do things they don’t want to do. Especially for people who don’t prefer those choices, the corporate overlord theory helps resolve the cognitive dissonance. It also betrays a profoundly elitist attitude towards people who do make those choices.
I understand that the set of options is naturally limited by the corporate ecosystem. (In no other economic system, however, is there any more choice) These options, however, are extremely responsive to changes in desires of the people making choices. The rise of widely distributed organic products, in a space of only 5 years, is an example of people acting within the corporate framework and forcing change. With our dollars, we lead corporations to make choices and act the way we want…or we take our business elsewhere.
If Wal-Mart disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, some other corporation would quickly take over the niche — because many, many people LIKE to shop there. If Coke stopped selling in India, can you really believe that suddenly people will drink purified rain-water? What kind of people do you know? Any real ones? Or are they all victim actors in your dramaturgy? I’m just asking for some balance here — people have agency, and make choices based on their culture and information. If companies want to appeal to people by being “green”, and they can back that up, this seems like a good thing to me.
The question is, do we want corporate boards and CEOs to have a neutral-pro environmental outlook, or do we want them to continue to abuse resources, spread garbage and poison wherever they can get away with it, and claim that any other attitude is a breach of their fiduciary duty? I choose #1. I don’t know why you wouldn’t, even if you don’t trust the companies. But, if they don’t get any credit for being “relatively” better, (credit in terms of $$$), they’ll simply go back to the old attitudes (through firing the CEOs that are pro-environment.) They are, of course, laughably imperfect…but this is a case where the perfect will drive out the good, and we need a LOT of good.
Buying stainless steel knives or Barbie dolls at Wal-Mart exports our pollution to China … the individual stores may be cleaner Stateside, but the worldwide impact is worse, as their pollution standards are worse than ours. Worse yet is the consumer culture that Wal-Mart spawns. How many Barbie dolls do we need to buy? Clearly, to be more earth friendly, buying less stuff would help a lot. Somehow, I don’t think Wal-Mart agrees.
Walmart has indeed seen some writing on the wall, but it has nothing to do with being a good world citizen. It has everything to do with re-branding and the economics of environmental efficiency. Walmart has always been big on corporate efficiencies, mostly at the expense of the planet, but recently the recognition that they could spin some of these efforts in order to re-brand themselves as good guys became a major push. I believe they have even created a department devoted to environmental re-branding of Walmart; and they have been complimented ad nauseum on how responsible this is by a lot of “green” or quasi-green entities that have also sprung-up opportunistically, having also recognized the sea-change in public sentiment.
As has been pointed out abundantly here, these corporations are all about exploiting whatever they can get away with in order to satisfy the stock-holder’s bottom line. We should indeed recognize their tremendous power to shape consumption patterns in the modern world, but the fact is that they are still moving on a very selfish and destructive trajectory and to allow ourselves to be even temporarily distracted from that fact by moments of twirly shiny mock-altruism,as Diamond appears to have been, is extremely foolish.
… ensuring it gets the water it wants, when it wants it, for the price it wants to pay. Being a tiny bit nicer to the earth while killing people who prefer to be paid for their labor isn’t really being a good company.
Bribing the WWF with $20 mil in hush money to turn a blind eye to the effects of draining aquifers to send a scourge of plastic bottles full of caffeinated sugar water from one continent to another, can’t even begin to equate to “embracing” environmental sustainability. Heck, it would be easy for them to “add” water to certain areas (say the drenched Northeast US), while continuing to rob desperately-needed water from people in drought-stricken areas, to fulfill their pledge and greenwash their image, all while continuing to kill people for profit, sometimes, even directly:
Diamond needs to take another look at what he’s promoting, before “nuance” becomes just another word for “look the other way.”