Million Dollar Pandas

This chapter analyzes the turn within mainstream environmentalism toward business partnerships, cause marketing, professional fundraising, and the co-branding of products. The chapter further examines the role of nongovernmental organizations in setting up and running eco-labeling and eco-certification organizations. WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wide Fund for Nature, is a leader in the nongovernmental embrace of business, markets, and certification as ways to conserve nature and improve environmental conditions. Certification standards, such as those of the Marine Stewardship Council and the Round Table on Responsible Soy, are creating some modest reforms to business practices. NGO-business partnerships, such as the one between WWF and Coca-Cola, are also producing some small-scale benefits. But partnering with business and relying on market solutions risks legitimizing business as usual as well as shifting responsibility for global environmental problems onto consumers, a weak global force of change compared to the forces of unsustainability.

Radicals and Rebels

This chapter adds to the book’s understanding of the shifting nature and great challenges confronting environmentalism, especially more radical strands. A glance at the history of Greenpeace reveals sharp differences as the organization was forming in the 1970s; even today the activism of Paul Watson, who left Greenpeace to spearhead the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, draws the ire of Greenpeace leaders. Since the war on terrorism took root after September 11, 2001, radical activists such as Watson have been increasingly marginalized, with the US government even declaring him an “eco-terrorist.” As this chapter notes, though, many environmentalists who challenge state and business interests face even greater threats, with hundreds murdered over the past two decades. State security agencies are not the only group sidelining radical environmentalists, however; so are business associations, media outlets, and mainstream environmental NGOs.

Gambling with the Future

This chapter brings to light the risks – and at times grave costs – for human health and ecosystems of companies introducing new technologies and products to compete for profits and markets. New technologies and products can cast dark ecological shadows onto distant ecosystems, poor communities, and future generations. Sometimes these shadows arise from genuine ignorance, as with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) drifting skyward from refrigerators, hairsprays, and air conditioners to deplete the ozone layer. But other times these shadows arise from arrogance and intentional risk-taking, as in the 1920s when Thomas Midgley, Jr., working for General Motors and DuPont, put tetraethyl lead into gasoline. As this chapter shows, corporations have a long history of deploying anti-environmental rhetoric to subvert calls for precautionary measures. Since the mid-2000s, however, the executives of multinational corporations have been avoiding straightforward greenwash, preferring a rhetoric of corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility. To some extent this eco-business strategy is improving efficiency and reducing waste (on a per product basis), but it is not translating into a stronger precautionary approach for the introduction of new technologies and products.

Consuming the Earth

The ecological footprint of humanity, as this chapter documents, is now over 1.5 times higher than the earth’s capacity to regenerate renewable resources and assimilate waste. This crisis is worsening as the biological integrity of ecosystems continues to decline and as the global ecological footprint continues to rise (with per capita footprints rising in most countries). This chapter documents some of the accompanying ecological costs of rising rates of unsustainable consumption for forests, oceans, freshwater, soils, species, and the global climate. More than half of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared since 1950, with loggers, ranchers, and plantation owners continuing to clear millions of hectares a year. The global climate is warming, glaciers are melting, and ocean currents are shifting. And each day another 10 to 500 species (of the earth’s 8–9 million species) are going extinct.

The Business of More

This chapter pans out from the islands of the Pacific to analyze the forces of unsustainable production and consumption underlying the global sustainability crisis. It demonstrates how, everywhere, inequality is increasing, as is conspicuous, wasteful consumption as companies pursue more sales and more profits. The chapter highlights how advertisers manufacture desires and needs, how big-box retailers and brand manufacturers claiming to be responsible and sustainable are selling inexpensive, nondurable products, and how governments finance infrastructure (e.g., subsidizing roads and bridges) to stimulate even higher levels of consumption. States pursue more consumption in the name of economic growth; multinational corporations for more profits for owners and shareholders; and the world’s billionaires to amass even more wealth. One result, as this chapter documents, is extreme and rising inequality, with 1 percent of the world’s population now controlling approximately half of the world’s wealth. Other results include rising ecological footprints, overexploitation of natural resources, and an escalating global environmental crisis – the themes of the book’s next chapter.

Sailing into the Anthropocene

Chapters 2–6 survey the political and socioeconomic forces underlying the global sustainability crisis. Understanding the scale and depth of contemporary forces of capitalism and consumerism requires a close look at the consequences of imperialism and colonialism on patterns of violence and exploitation. This chapter begins this process of understanding by sketching the history of ecological imperialism after 1600, seeing this as a reasonable starting date for the beginning of what many scholars are now calling the Anthropocene Epoch (or the age of humans, replacing the geologic epoch of the Holocene beginning 12,000 years ago). It opens with Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean in 1605–06 to “discover” modern-day Vanuatu, before turning to look more globally at the devastation of imperialism – and later colonialism – for the South Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Over this time conquerors enslaved and murdered large numbers of indigenous people; cataclysmic change came as well, however, from the introduction of European diseases, plants, and animals. This chapter’s survey of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization sets the stage for Chapter 3, which explores the devastating history of the South Pacific island of Nauru after 1798.

Mindbombing the Wealthy

Despite the dangers and risks, as this chapter demonstrates some international NGOs are continuing to challenge oil, mining, and timber companies with confrontational, direct-action campaigns. Chapter 10 opens with the story of the Greenpeace campaign against oil drilling in the Arctic, once again demonstrating the courage and conviction of “eco-warriors,” to use the phrase of Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter. Yet, as this chapter also reveals, Greenpeace is increasingly turning to social media activism, employing humorous videos to call on consumers to boycott well-known brands, such as Kit Kat, Barbie, and Head & Shoulders. In response, some brand manufacturers and retailers, including Nestlé, Mattel, and Procter & Gamble, have discontinued contracts with a few suppliers (such as ones caught clearing tropical forests to produce cardboard or grow oil palm). What Greenpeace is telling consumers is a “victory,” however – such as getting Mattel to package Barbie in a different box – is revealing of how limited eco-consumerism is as a force of global environmental reform.

Fighting for the Rainforests

To further the understanding of the diversity and complexity of environmentalism, chapter 8 opens with the story of Bruno Manser, who in the 1980s left Switzerland to live with the Penan people in Sarawak, Malaysia. Before long he had joined with the Penan to oppose the logging of Borneo’s rainforests; in the 1990s he would emerge from Sarawak and bring the plight of the Penan to the world’s attention. Manser fought against the moderating tendencies within rainforest activism. Yet, as is true across the mainstream of environmentalism, these moderating tendencies within rainforest activism have only strengthened since 2000, with increasing support from nongovernmental certification organizations to export rainforest products. Examples include the Forest Stewardship Council (founded 1993) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (founded 2004). As Manser worried, however, over the past two decades these market mechanisms have done little to help indigenous forest peoples or end tropical deforestation.

The Rise of Environmentalism

Chapters 7–11 explore why environmentalism is failing to make more headway against the global forces of unsustainability analyzed in chapters 1–6. Chapter 7 sets up the analysis by reviewing the global history of the environmental movement, highlighting the diversity of thought across cultures and time. Diversity characterizes contemporary environmentalism, from environmental justice movements in Africa to environmentalism of the poor in Asia to anti-capitalism in Latin America to conservation in North America. This diversity remains a source of strength and environmentalism is best thought of as a “movement of movements.” Around the world protests continue to rage; communities continue to rise up; radical organizations continue to fight capitalism; and, as the Goldman Prize reminds the world, individual environmentalists continue to win local battles. Still, over time the mainstream of environmentalism has increasingly come to reflect the values of those with money and privilege, supporting policies and prescriptions that arise primarily out of moderate Western environmentalism: conserving wildlife and natural settings; sustaining productive yields; improving eco-efficiency; and reducing pollution for prosperous citizens.

By No Means Pleasant

This chapter surveys the ecological and political history of the South Pacific island of Nauru after 1798 – a microcosm of the globalization of unsustainability. In the 1900s Nauru became a major source of high-grade phosphate fertilizer, especially for Australia and New Zealand. The history of phosphate mining in Nauru illustrates how deeply colonial and postcolonial forces can disrupt sustainability even in places far from the centers of power, and how over generations these disruptions can build into an ever-greater crisis. At the height of Nauru’s phosphate boom in the mid-1970s average income of the Nauruan people was the second highest in the world. But this wealth was an illusion, as Nauru was being strip-mined with little planning for a future without phosphate. Today, Nauru’s economy is in tatters, and with hardly any phosphate left it is now serving its former colonizer Australia as a detention camp for asylum seekers who had been hoping to reach Australia.