Posted on 20-1-2002

Green Defect
by George Monbiot* (picture shows cover of Sharon Beder's book Global Spin)

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
neighbours 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 organisations 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 professionalised and bureaucratised (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 behaviour. 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, pub 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 organisations.

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.

* Tuesday January 15, 2002. The Guardianwww.monbiot.com