Tuesday, March 09, 2010

On the perils of taking polluter's money

Recently there has been a series of contributions about the perils of taking money from corporation involved in heavy pollution and how in the authors view is affecting the behavior of the especially the large conservation organizations. It’s worthwhile read and contribution within CC's debate in Conservation Commons on how to deal with the extracting industry.

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters

"Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”"

The Wrong Kind of Green

"Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?"

Green Inc

"In this scathing indictment of the surprising profligacy and complacency of some of the world's top environmental organizations, journalist MacDonald, a former media manager at Conservation International, exposes the clubby, well-upholstered world of conservationists. The posh headquarters and six-figure compensation of top environmental leaders (from the Wildlife Conservation Society's $825,170 to the Sierra Club's $229,000) gall the author, but she's most outraged by organizations routinely accepting donations from oil, lumber and mining industries and corporate behemoths such as Wal-Mart without holding them accountable for ongoing pollution practices. MacDonald singles out BP's Beyond Petroleum campaign as a particularly egregious example of greenwashing (the label for corporations marketing themselves as green while paying lip service to environmental concerns) and lambastes Ikea for failing to ensure that the goods it imports are manufactured from sustainably harvested timber. Her lament at the loss of activist edge among top-tier environmental groups is heartfelt—MacDonald exhorts them to stop being such lapdogs and start acting like the watchdogs they were conceived to be—and her umbrage and ample evidence are impossible to ignore. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home