By the
Pond Corporations - too big to be benign
By ARTHUR JONES
I have a new pond, about which more
in a moment.
Right now, pressing business -- saving the world. From business?
From capitalism?
Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute believes we may be on the
edge of an environmental revolution. In the past two years, Brown believes,
corporate attitudes toward environmentalism have changed so markedly that
the CEOs of some prominent corporations are beginning to sound like
spokespeople for Greenpeace.
He mentions but one by name, ARCOs chairman and CEO, with
nods to British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell. Brown could have mentioned Ray
Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface Inc. of Atlanta, which has sales of
$1 billion a year.
It was Anderson who told a roomful of business executives
recently, The largest, most powerful, wealthiest institution on earth
must take the lead -- the one doing the most damage -- the one were all a
part of: business and industry.
Commercial carpet-maker Anderson said his head was turned around
on the environmental issue by Paul Hawkens 1993 book, The Ecology of
Commerce: a Declaration of Sustainability (HarperBusiness). Hawken has a
new book coming out soon, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial
Revolution (Little Brown).
I approach this column seasonally. Its the fall and it was
October of 1997 when I wrote my first By the Pond column. Some time later, in
January of 1998, I used Stephen Scharpers book Redeeming the Time: A
Political Theology of the Environment to provoke much of that winters
conversation.
This season I intend to do the same with Hawkens new
book.
Ill begin by doing a precis of The Ecology of
Commerce, catch up with carpet-maker Anderson to see whats happening
within his corporation, and then delve into Hawkens latest offering. I
want to see if, as Worldwatchs Brown postulates, this is a trend to
catch, a change to welcome or gnaw on -- or to brickbat.
To this end, Id ask readers spotting incidents, items,
people or books, pro or con, that will broaden or deepen the conversation, to
pop them in the mail to me c/o NCR, 115 East Armour Blvd., Kansas City
MO 64111, or e-mail me (ajones96@aol.com).
It is right that capitalisms behavior worries us.
Corporate capitalisms control of Congress and the White
House, and even more so state and local governments, and its marked influence
at times on the regulatory systems intended to protect us, is one with the
environmental concerns. Its why were wallowing in toxics, why
Louisiana has a cancer alley.
Corporate behavior is never benign. Corporations are too big for
benignity. Collectively the corporate world is wealthier than the Soviet Union
was under Stalin, and for the rest of us, peaceful coexistence isnt
enough. So the Lester Brown trend speaks to something beyond that. If its
there.
I do have strong views on the topic. I believe business -- from
the job-creating spark of entrepreneurship to the well-managed good corporate
neighbor -- can be morally neutral and/or a force for good. I believe the local
garage owner can be (not saying mine is) as corrupt as the largest corporation
and just as environmentally careless or destructive.
Capitalism -- shifting the money around for the best returns -- is
not business. It is skimming the profit from the labor of others, without
laboring, without any regard except the immediate return. Capitalism in this
sense is destructive of business and labor. It glimpses a goal of 17 to 50
percent returns, buys up whatever might achieve it, carves up and kills what
might only be making an otherwise laudatory 8 to12 percent, and spits out the
detritus for whatever price it can get.
Then capitalism sits back with the money and -- more important --
the line of credit, waiting to pounce and swamp the next opportunity.
Business works. Capitalism preys.
The idea is caught in the 19th-century Scottish saying that
business and labor should combine against finance.
So when Hawken and Brown are saying nice things about
corporations, Ill be exploring their words -- looking to see the extent
theyre also whitewashing capitalism with businesss good brush.
Ralph Nader, in an introduction to the 1999 book Corporate
Predators: the Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy (Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Common Courage Press), puts the true raiment on
the skeletons I described six years ago in Capitalism and Christians
(Paulist) about capitalism the good, the bad and the ugly.
Where I was somewhat generous on the side of business, Nader
lassoes business (as in corporations and capitalism) more tightly together.
So Ill be matching Naders words, too, against Brown
and Hawken. Nader writes, The opportunities to control or defeat
governmental attempts for corporate accountability [Reader: Think environmental
responsibilities here] that flow from transcending national jurisdictions into
globalized strategies to escape taxation [Reader: and other forms of
regulation] appear to be endless.
Taken together the world is witnessing its subjugation to
the large corporate model of economic development, the large corporate model of
technology and the large corporate model of culture itself.
Hawken, in The Ecology of Commerce, is making some of the
same points by asking:
How do we conduct business honorably [Reader: business, mind
you] in the latter days of industrialism and the beginning of the ecological
age? The question is, can we create profitable, expandable companies that do
not destroy, directly or indirectly, the world around them.
Making matters worse, we are in the middle of a
once-in-a-billion-year blow-out sale of hydrocarbons. They are being combusted
into the atmosphere at a rate that will effectively double-glaze the planet
within the next 50 years, with unknown climatic results.
The cornucopia of resources that are being extracted, mined
and harvested are so poorly distributed that 20 percent of the earths
people are chronically hungry or starving, while the rest of the world, largely
in the North, control and consume 80 percent of the worlds
wealth.
Hawken contends that many corporations no longer accept the maxim
that business is business is business. So if, he says, a tiny
fraction of the worlds most intelligent managers cannot model a
sustainable world, then environmentalism as currently practiced by business
today, laudable as it may be, is only a part of the overall solution.
Rather than a management problem, argues Hawken,
we have a design problem, a flaw that runs through all
business.
There we have it, readers. Somewhere in there tectonic ecology
plates may be shifting in the minds of men (its the men who need
shifting). But its a tricky arena, and Im depending on you not only
to keep me honest, but also to argue at the margins and to spot the issues
others raise or overlook.
One cannot pass through September without noting that the
Corporate Crime Reporter has issued its Top 100 Corporate Criminals
List. Nader has long noted that the U.S. government nowhere keeps white-collar
crime statistics -- only crime statistics from crimes committed (generally
speaking) by the middle of the middle class on down.
Reporter editor and list compiler Russell Mokhiber once
again has urged the Justice Department to include a Corporate Crime in the
United States report along with its annual report on Crime in the United
States.
Thirty-seven of the top 100 crimes Mokhiber lists are
environmental. Good old Exxon is at the top of the list and gets a second
mention further down. Oil companies, cruise lines, pipelines, chemical
companies, manufacturers, waste management. Paper companies -- by their stock
market tickers you know them.
Lets hope Lester Brown is right.
Now for my new pond: its Walney Pond, two congestion-clogged
highways removed from my old neglected, overgrown and threatened patch of water
at Indian Run.
Quite simply, weve moved.
Walney is a beautiful park. Its nearly 700 acres of woods,
walkways, deer, 18th-century kitchen gardens and a center where kids can look
at old bones and stones under magnifying glasses. The customary amalgam of
facilities includes soccer pitches and a small open stage that takes advantage
of a natural miniature amphitheatre created by the sloping grassland.
The deer never have a minutes peace. Thats because the
jets landing at Dulles fly overhead every 20 seconds. So its possible to
walk in the woods, luxuriating in the escape from the urbanization barely a
shopping mall parking lots distance away, in short -- jet-engine free --
bursts.
Nonetheless, the entire area is charming and a place and a topic
to be returned to.
What Walney Pond cant be protected from is the drought. But
theres been enough drought coverage for one year. Thats a topic for
the spring.
Finally, hummingbirds. In an earlier piece I referred to my
troubles with hummingbirds and identified the red-throated ones whose vines
Id ruined as rufous. A withering letter from a correspondent said those
hummers would have to be 3,000 miles off-route. Think rufous, think West Coast.
(As mentioned, I never have luck with hummingbirds.)
If I can get it wrong with hummingbirds, I can get it wrong with
corporations and capitalism. Keep me on track, folks; were literally all
in this together.
Arthur Jones is NCRs editor-at-large.
National Catholic Reporter, September 24,
1999
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