UNDERSTANDING AND TR ANSFORMING OUR WORLD
Vol. 5, No. 2. 1990.
A controlled burn following an explosion on Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling unit in the Gulf of Mexico.
A
t one point early in the environmental debate, there was a belief that corporate executives and their children, having to breathe the air, eat the food, and drink (or swim in) the water, might possibly feel a certain self-interested urgency about saving the planet on which they were the wealthiest inhabitants. Several decades later, the cultural and ethical degeneracy of unmitigated free-enterprise capitalism—ideologically justified in concepts of “deregulation,” “corporate competitiveness,” “cost- effectiveness,” and “personal freedom”—has produced a corporate elite that has shown itself thoroughly unable to grasp, let alone solve, the disastrous and at times irreversible effects of their production policies. Equally frightening is the manner in which corporate values have contaminated the politics of the environmental establishment. . . . While the environmental establishment may be very pleased with itself, the toxins are not impressed. As Dr. Barry Commoner has pointed out, “For the first time in the 3.5-billion-year history of life on this planet, living things are burdened with a host of man-made poisonous substances, the vast majority of which are now even more prevalent in
animal tissue and the elements than they were twenty years ago when Earth Day first imposed itself on the popular consciousness.” . . . While some naive environmentalists have fantasies of a new breed of yuppie capitalists grooving on the socially responsible job of cleaning up toxic wastes, the reality is that capital will go anywhere it smells high profit margins. Thus, we now have a new growth industry of toxic cleanup firms which rake in enormous profits from government superfund contracts. These do slipshod work and use the EPA to impose cleanup mechanisms on communities. The mechanisms include, for example, trash- and hazardous-waste-burning incinerators that exist because of the production of waste and toxics. Needless to say, the industry opposes all solutions that demand the elimination of such efforts. . . . The new “environmental” corporate establishment has managed to reduce both the production and cleanup of toxins to opportunities for profit and career, thus creating another layer of institutional control in which the problem will prove even harder to solve. As more radical demands for the elimination of the production of toxins become widespread, both corporations that profit from producing
eric mann is director of The Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and host of KPFK Pacifica’s Voices from the Frontlines www.voicesfromthefrontlines.com.
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Justin Stumberg | U.S. Navy
ERIC MANN
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Environmentalism in the Corporate Climate