I saw this Op-Ed in the NY Times a few days ago: Will Big Business Save the Earth. It was written by Jared Diamond, the guy who wrote “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Check out the article. His thesis is this:
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
Diamond argues that big business is not as bad as people make it out to be. I first heard this view in college while reading a case study on McDonalds, which switched away from their styrofoam-looking Big Mac containers after environmentalist protests (according to the study, the styrofoam-looking containers were actually more environmentally friendly than the paper containers, but McDonalds just didn’t want the negative press).
I used to be against big businesses, but reasons to support big business go back to Aristotle’s discussion about talent (according to Sandel)–they are the ones who can afford to give the most and do the most, based on their size. They can dictate to their vendors how to do business, and they can ask them to do it in an environmentally friendly way. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m a big fan of Costco, which is pretty big.
What do you think? Should activists cut big businesses a break?
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I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
I do agree that even small changes made in the industry level can have HUGE environmental impact compared with even big changes made by individual consumers. But it takes a pretty severe PR blow (timed with the company even caring about their PR at that moment) for them to change their often heinous behavior…like Monsanto dumping toxic chemicals into public waterways (albeit POOR public waterways), or Smithfield ham producers leeching unrefined pig shit and remnants into the soil. That shit ain’t right, period.
I do concede that activists should probably pick and choose their battles based on overall impact, though.
Hi Julie,
Agreed! Yes, it does take a pretty big PR blow to make these big companies fix their act or get moving into action. I think that could be a good thing about the internet; news travels much faster these days. Actually, now that you brought it up, we couldn’t get Disney to do the right thing with Miley Cyrus. The frustrating thing about the big companies is that their impact is so big, whether they do right or wrong.
(Also, I didn’t know about the ham producers. That’s pretty gross.)