by Murray Hogarth
When I was a young journalist a giant-sized, long-bearded veteran environmentalist known as “Tiny” took me on a tour of development threats to the tropical rainforests of far north-east Australia. Turning philosophical, Tiny told me: “We’re going to win, you know. Because I’ve never seen a greenie become a redneck, but we’re converting some rednecks.”
I’ve been reminded of Tiny by the mini-storm over news that Lord Peter Melchett, the former head of Greenpeace UK and a leading figure in Britain’s rather radical anti-genetic engineering movement, is to work part time with the global public relations giant Burson Marsteller. That’s not to suggest that the spin-doctors of Burson Marsteller, nor their rich and powerful clients, are a bunch of rednecks. They are much more sophisticated than that!
But is Melchett now captured by those he once fiercely resisted, or is he still fighting the good fight?
The debate about leading activists “getting into bed” with the enemy as traditional environmental campaigners like Tiny might very well see it is highly relevant to the people I work with now, and to the work that we do. My boss Paul Gilding has a life-ring from the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior hanging on the wall of our office, a reminder of his and other team members’ origins in the activist world.
Gilding was head of Greenpeace International in the early 1990s, being pushed out in an internal power struggle in 1994. Over several years he’d come to believe that the “power, adaptability and positive attitude” of business could be harnessed to change the world for the better. But for many in the activist movement he’d been too enthusiastic about advocating engagement with the corporate world. Although much has changed since then, the Melchett controversy carries echoes of his case.
Respected British journalist George Monbiot, who comments on environment issues for the admittedly left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, was moved by Melchett to write a piece arguing that green fusion with business has gone too far. Monbiot cites the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) theme as a kind of honey pot (or money pot) trap for environmentalists. They go to work with business thinking they’ll change it, but business uses them in a cynical bid to persuade governments and the public that it can regulate its own “dirty” behavior.
Monbiot wasn’t pulling punches on Melchett’s job: “It was a staggeringly na? 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 a trace. No one threatens its survival as much as the greens who have taken the company shilling.”
It has to be said that Melchett, a former British Labour Party MP, was far from being a conservative environmentalist. His history is on the radical end, including getting arrested for tearing up GMO crops. So the idea that someone’s whole belief system suddenly changes because they change the organization they work for is a rather absurd one, as though people with strong values like Melchett suddenly lose them overnight.
So what are the issues here? What is lost and what is gained if civil society’s activists take their campaigning zeal, energy and ideas into the heart of the business beast? Are they sell-outs? Or is this one of the ways that meaningful change and better social and environmental campaigns will be achieved? Business people move in and out of politics without killing democracy, but on the other hand lawyers are less likely to rotate on and off the judicial bench so are environmentalists more like politicians or judges?
In our personal lives most of us learn how mutually self-defeating the old circular argument becomes. If neither party shifts their ground – and comes to understand, if not endorse, the other’s position – then solutions are unlikely. It’s true of domestic squabbles and its true of the great global arguments of our times. The old greens v. capitalists stand off, with both sides doing a lot of shouting at each other and very little listening, hasn’t done a lot to help anyone.
Environmentalism won the war with the public, as Monbiot himself acknowledges, but business is still growing unsustainably, consumerism is rampant and the great challenges like climate change, species extinctions, poverty, emerging diseases and others grow worse. All the environmentalists of the world standing outside of a corporate monolith and shouting at business to change its wicked ways won’t change this equation. Certainly not quickly enough to make enough difference and it hasn’t yet.
Whatever was true in the past, many business leaders do now accept that their companies have social and environmental responsibilities as well as financial ones. Outright opposition and anti-green intransigence are no longer the main reasons for business inaction on sustainability, especially in regard to big corporations, although there are always some exceptions. For the many companies that have accepted that “we need to do something”, the blockage has more to do with questions like: What do we do? How do we do it? And will it create value?
It’s no longer good enough for sustainability advocates to preach to business about the virtues of changing their strategies, policies, operations and products without helping to find solutions to the “what”, the “how” and the “show me the money”. So the world needs top environmentalists, like Lord Melchett, who are prepared to engage with business, to work inside it, to learn its ways, to promote better performance where they can AND to keep their green flame burning.
The world also needs new cohorts of radical activists who are prepared to expose business inaction, government duplicity, public apathy, “greenwashing” and all the other reasons why not enough is being done to protect the environment and society. The green movement is becoming more diverse in a more complex world. In simpler times the mythology was that whatever their ideological backgrounds, that all greens wanted the same things and were following the same path to get there.
It this was ever true, it is no longer so. Nor should it be. Call me an optimist, but I hope that Tiny could be persuaded that this doesn’t mean the rednecks are winning.
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