American_Jihad
01-26-2009, 12:22 AM
When Environmentalists Legitimize Plunder
1/26/09
by Michael Barker
"For more than twenty years, we have empowered communities in jungles and deserts to make conservation part of their livelihoods. From early partnerships with Patagonia and Starbucks to our ground-breaking relationship with Wal-Mart, we've worked with companies large and small to make conservation part of their business model."
— Conservation International, 2008.
"[T]he big conservation organizations seem more like 'enablers' that are slowing down the corporate awakening to environmental and social responsibilities by providing the companies with easy ways to appear green without making significant changes."
—Christine MacDonald, 2008. (1)
(Swans - January 26, 2009) Conservation International assert that they have redefined conservation. Formed in 1987, Conservation International boasts of "single-handedly redefin[ing] conservation," and "pioneering" the conservation transition by "keeping places intact as relics of the past" and aiming towards encompassing a vision "in which people [live] in harmony with nature." A closer examination of Conservation International's agenda reveals that they have succeeded in promoting a working model of conservation that will most likely destroy more environment than it protects. (2) A brief perusal of their project affiliates reveals a campaign of greenwashing, (3) and so it is fitting that within six months of opening their doors for business, Conservation International made history by becoming the "first environmental group in the world to do a debt-for-nature swap." (4) Aiming to conserve nature in this manner benefits corporate partners, like Alcoa, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, Cargill, CEMEX, ChevronTexaco, and not the environment.
This article will provide a critical overview of Conservation International's organizational history. It will illustrate that rather than tempering environmental destruction, Conservation International's work serves the opposite purpose. This article will provide a historically informed analysis of Conservation International's global greenwashing agenda and extend former Conservation International media advisor, Christine MacDonald's, critique of her former employers and the environmental movement more generally. (5)
Capitalist Environmentalists
As recently demonstrated in an article titled "The Philanthropic Roots Of Corporate Environmentalism, " the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) -- well-known guardian of pandas -- is one of the leading corporate/environmental groups that is promoting eco-imperialism. Consequently it is fitting that the founding and still current president of Conservation International, Russell Mittermeier -- one of Time magazine's "Heroes for the Planet" -- had previously worked for WWF. At WWF, Mittermeier served as vice president for science (1987-89), and also as director of WWF's programs for Brazil and the Guianas (1985-89), Madagascar (1985-89), Species Conservation (1986-89), and Primates (1979-89).
Furthermore, before joining WWF in late 1970s Mittermeier had garnered elite credentials by working as a primatologist for the New York Zoological Society -- a group now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society. In 1948 this group gave rise to the influential corporate environmental group, the Conservation Foundation. (6) Mittermeier is a former board member of the Wildlife Trust (a group whose board members include representatives from Bear Stearns International and Goldman Sachs), (7) the former chairman of the World Bank's Task Force on Biological Diversity (1988-89) and, since 1977, has served as chairman of the Primate Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission.
Despite Mittermeier's elitist environmental background there were still disagreements between him and the other big-green corporate environmentalists in the United States. On this score, Christine MacDonald recounts how:
[Spencer] Beebe and a group of dissidents from The Nature Conservancy hired Russell Mittermeier to become president of a new group they had christened Conservation International. Mittermeier, then a senior member of World Wildlife Fund's U.S. staff, had been passed over for [Russell] Train's job leading WWF. "So he took the [Fund's] science department and he bolted and went to CI," remembers [Michael] Wright, who witnessed the coup from afar. (pp.9-10)
Unfortunately MacDonald spends little time critiquing the effects of liberal philanthropy on the environmental movement. However, she does acknowledge how, "Unlike philanthropists of bygone eras, who bequeathed their fortunes and didn't bother with the details of how it was spent, 'living donors' such as [Ted] Turner, the Walton [family], and [Gordon] Moore are deeply involved in deciding how best to use their money." For instance, she points out how the Walton Family Foundation gave $21 million in 2005 to Conservation International ("nearly a quarter of CI's total revenues that year"), while in 2002, Conservation International obtained a $261 million ten-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ("the largest conservation donation in history"). (8)
MacDonald also provides a useful service to the progressive community by highlighting the concerns of liberal foundations and their environmental protégés. She reveals how the president of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick (2001-07), "quit abruptly after a proposal to merge [The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International] was scuttled," to become the new president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. (9)
The other key person running Conservation International is its chairman and cofounder, Peter Seligmann -- an individual that MacDonald considers to be "perhaps the most audaciously successful of a new breed of corporate courtiers." MacDonald adds that Seligmann "comes from a long line of German Jewish investment bankers, known for handling the business transactions of 'high asset' individuals," and notes how his uncle, Henry Arnhold (who also serves on Conservational International's board of directors), presently acts as the "co-chairman of Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, the New York investment-banking firm that gave George Soros his start." (10) Seligmann's democracy-manipulating ties are extensive. He presently serves on the executive committee of a "humanitarian" group that was formed in 2000, which calls itself the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa. Although this group has many ties to "democratic" elites the most significant one is through its founder, the former US Agency for International Development Administrator, Peter McPherson (1981-87). In addition to serving on the board of directors of Conservation International, McPherson is a board member of the Inter-American Dialogue, (11) and serves on the advisory boards of groups like the Eurasia Foundation, and the "agricultural counterpart of the World Economic Forum," the World Agricultural Forum. (12)
Mining, Capitalism, and Forests: A Match Made in Heaven
Given the devastation that mining corporations exert upon the environment, it is unsurprising that they take action to ameliorate the negative reporting on their daily stock in trade -- that is, landscape consumption. (13) One corporation that worked closely with Conservation International and that MacDonald examined in detail is one of the world's largest producers of gold, Newmont Mining Corporation. (14) MacDonald reports that in 2004, Newmont joined Forest Trends' and Conservation International's newly formed Business and Biodiversity Offset Program (BBOP), "pledg[ing] to bankroll one of BBOP's first offset programs." (15) She notes how Newmont's Akyem mining concession (in Ghana) for a 3,665-acre open-pit mine is "particularly sensitive" because part of it is located inside the Ajenjua Bepo Forest Reserve. However, controversially MacDonald adds:
As it turns out, the BBOP project involving the Akyem mine won't attempt to minimize the biodiversity damage to the Ajenjua Bepo Forest. Instead, the plans call for the company to pay BBOP to carry on conservation work in the Mamang Forest Reserve, another protected area to the south of the mine. Conservationists would use the Newmont funds to hire more forest rangers charged with keeping the local people from invading the reserve, cutting down trees to plant crops and hunting the forest's fauna for bushmeat, a staple of their diets. While the funding may improve the health of the Mamang reserve, it will not change large-scale impacts from Newmont's open-pit mine nearby. And, it is destined to exacerbate local residents' resentments against Newmont, as well as the conservationists for limiting their rights to the forests. (pp.137-8)
An exploration of the background of Conservational International's BBOP cofounder, Forest Trends, highlights the problematic nature of the BBOP project. Set up in 1999, Forest Trends was created to "promot[e] market-based approaches to forest conservation," and their current president and CEO, Michael Jenkins, has a background befitting such an organization. In the early 1980s Jenkins acted as a technical advisor for the US government funded "development" group Appropriate Technology International (now known as EnterpriseWorks); he then worked in Haiti for US Agency for International Development as an agroforester (1983-86), followed this by serving for ten years as the associate director for the MacArthur Foundation's Global Security and Sustainability Program (1988-98), and in 1998, Jenkins held a joint appointment as a senior forestry advisor to the World Bank (an organization that has long served to "incentivise forest destruction.") (16)
In the same year Forest Trends was founded (1999), another project was launched under the auspices of Forest Trends known as the Katoomba Group. This group describes itself as an "international working group dedicated to advancing markets and payments for ecosystem services." Jenkins presently serves as the president of the Katoomba Group, and in 2005, this Group created an offshoot project called the Ecosystem Marketplace, which the Katoomba Group describes as the "world's first global market information service for ecosystem services." Headed by Jenkins, this project's advisory committee is closely related to those representing the BBOP project, as Forest Trends Director, Kerry ten Kate, serves on the BBOP's Secretariat, while other notable advisory committee members include Conservation International's Ben Vitale, former international banker with Chase Manhattan Bank John Forgach, the Nature Conservancy board member Gretchen Daily, and Forest Trends board member David Brand. (17)
As Forest Trends promotes market-based mechanisms for conserving the environment it is to be expected that its board of directors incorporates business representatives, like James Brumm of Mitsubishi International. However, it is interesting to scrutinize the background of their environmental representatives, which include Randy Hayes (the founder and president of the "Earth First!-inspired" Rainforest Action Network), (18) and David Cassells (the Director of The Nature Conservancy's Asia Pacific Region Forest Program).
Cassells demonstrates a concerning position regarding the environment, as The Nature Conservancy "champions an approach that doesn't threaten the rights of property owners to do what they want." (19) His background is worthy of note, as he serves on the board of directors of a group called the Tropical Forest Foundation. Fellow free-market environmentalists on their board include Bruce Cabarle (the director of the Global Forest Program of the World Wildlife Fund, and board member of Forest Trends), former WWF vice president, Gary Hartshorn (who heads up the logging industry front-group, the World Forestry Center), and WWF's former Director of Development Assistance Policy Frances Seymour (who is presently the director-general of the World Bank-supported Centre for International Forestry, and serves on the Asia advisory committee of Human Rights Watch). (20)
The most interesting environmentalist affiliated to the Tropical Forest Foundation is the renowned tropical and conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who served as the group's founding chair from 1990 until 1998. Like his environmental counterparts at the Tropical Forest Foundation, Lovejoy is intimately connected to WWF, having worked with them since 1973, spending his last two years there as WWF-US's executive vice president (1985-87) and he is still represented on WWF-US's board of directors. As well as working for the World Bank, he is a member of Conservation International's chairman's council.
Bettina von Hagen is another environmentalist serving on Forest Trends' board of directors. She represents a group called Ecotrust. Von Hagen joined Ecotrust in 1993 to "develop and manage Ecotrust's $26 million Natural Capital Fund." More recently she "helped launch Ecotrust Forests LLC, a private equity forestland investment fund." Significantly Ecotrust was founded in 1991 by Spencer Beebe, a key player in the founding, a few years earlier, of Conservation International.
Like Beebe (who had formerly worked at The Nature Conservancy before founding Conservation International), Edward Backus, the vice president of Ecotrust's Fisheries Program, also worked at both these organizations before joining Ecotrust (in 1993).
Finally, William Hutton, another Ecotrust board member and "[o]ne of the nation's leading authorities on the tax and financial aspects of land preservation transactions," was a founding board member of Conservation International. (21)
Three other significant members of Ecotrust's Canada Council are Peter Seligmann (the CEO of Conservation International) and David Rockefeller, Jr. (the eldest son of democracy-manipulator and corporate environmentalist David Rockefeller), and Peter Warshall (the editor-at-large for the Whole Earth magazine and former board member of the All Species Foundation -- where Russell Mittermeier also acts as a board member).
Given the free-market approach that has been adopted by Forest Trends and Conservation International, they make unlikely guardians of the world's forests. Moreover, as will become clearer later, Conservation International's intimate relations to other leading mining and military corporations suggests that they might in fact be the worst people to trust to safeguard our planets natural resources. The following section will now expand upon the conservation approaches that are promoted by leading environmentalist Thomas Lovejoy.
Free-Market "Conservation" Biology
As noted above, Thomas Lovejoy, the renowned conservation biologist, maintains critical affiliations to various corporate environmental groups including Conservation International. This suggests that it would be a useful task to cast a critical eye over Lovejoy's career and connections to environmental groups that ostensibly work to save the environment from corporate destruction. In this regard, his ties to the Society for Conservation Biology are perhaps the most significant as he served as the president of this international professional organization from 1989 until 1991.
Formed in 1985, the Society for Conservation Biology describes itself as being "dedicated to promoting the scientific study of the phenomena that affect the maintenance, loss, and restoration of biological diversity." On the surface these appear commendable aspirations; however, the elitist political assumptions that underpin the work of the Society, should be examined. Evidence of liberal foundation initiatives permeate the Society for Conservation Biology's work and is demonstrated by the founding president of the Society, Michael Soule. Soule, in the 1960s, attended Stanford University to "study population biology and evolution under Paul Ehrlich" -- a person with whom he co-authored (along with Richard Holm) his first book titled Introductory Biology (McGraw-Hill, 1969).
Soule's link to Ehrlich is significant because the previous year Ehrlich had released his bestselling book, The Population Bomb (published by the Sierra Club). (22) The message contained in this influential work was essentially a crude Malthusian one, reiterating the earlier work of other population control activists that had been funded by both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. (23) More recently, Soule has again worked closely with another leading neo-Malthusian, as in 1991 he helped found The Wildlands Project with Dave Foreman -- an environmentalist perhaps most famous for founding the Deep Ecology-inspired activist group Earth First! (24) Oddly, Foreman's work on this project appears to symbolize his return to the less radical politics that led him to form Earth First! in the early 1980s, as the project involves his close association with his former employer, The Wilderness Society. For example, the project's four-person advisory council includes the president of The Wilderness Society, (Bill Meadows), while former Wildlands Project president, Mary Granskou, was previously employed as the executive director of The Wilderness Society. (25)
Incidentally, another founding member and former president of the Wildlands Project (and their current secretary), David Johns, presently serves on the board of governors of Soule's Society for Conservation Biology. In 1990, David John acted as a cofounder of Wild Earth magazine -- other cofounders being Dave Foreman, John Davis (the executive vice president of The Wildlands Project, and former Biodiversity and Wildness program officer of the Foundation for Deep Ecology), (26) Reed Noss (the consulting editor of the Society for Conservation Biology journal Conservation Biology), and Mary Byrd Davis.
While these trends suggest that the foundations of conservation biology have been built on shaky theoretical ground, courtesy of liberal foundation boosters, in more recent years commentators have been critiquing conservation biology practitioners for their accommodation toward neo-liberalism. After attending the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, Bram Buscher wrote within the pages of the Society's journal Conservation Biology that "Conservation biology is actively reinventing itself to fit the neoliberal world order." (27) Buscher proposed two main points in his critique:
First, in their drive to conserve biodiversity, conservation biologists are too eager to realign their field with seductive neoliberal win-win visions. As a consequence, discourses are created that ultimately reinforce an ideological system that is inherently unsustainable. Second, this realignment leads conservation biology increasingly into the social sciences, whereby conservationists oddly seem to throw overboard scientific principles they have always held so dear: acknowledging and critically analyzing complex realities and grounding arguments with rigorous empirical research.
Additionally, Buscher draws the reader's attention to a couple of the "more subtle effects of neoliberal transformation" that were evident at the Society for Conservation Biology's meeting. These, he suggests, were (1) the "incessant need for consensus and the subsequent retreat of many people into the domain of nice-sounding yet often empty words," and (2) the "apparent need to always be positive and think in terms of compatibility." The implications of the adoption coercive harmony as a "mode of cultural control" is expanded upon within Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader's important book, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Mattei and Nader note how win-win situations as ostensibly promoted by Alternative Dispute Resolution practices are in fact harmony ideologies that "may be used to suppress people's resistance, by socializing them toward conformity by means of consensus, cooperation, passivity, and docility, and by silencing people who speak out angrily" (p.77). (This concept will be discussed at length in a forthcoming article.)
Buscher's critique of the Society for Conservation Biology meeting was published in April 2008. However, later that year, in the October issue of Conservation Biology, the founding editor of the journal, David Ehrenfeld, responded by writing how Buscher's "critique of the neoliberalization of conservation is right on the mark." (28) Ehrenfeld continued:
The reduction of all conservation problems to economic terms is counter-productive and dangerous. Trusting to market forces and the laws of supply and demand to correct inequities and restore healthy equilibria does not work in economics and certainly does not work in conservation.
Thus it is not surprising that the society at which Thomas Lovejoy was a former president should have other ties back to leading corporate environmentalists mentioned in the previous section.
For example, Jeff McNeely (who sits on the Society for Conservation Biology's board of governors) is the chair of the World Bank-supported Ecoagriculture Partners -- a group that "seeks to support the emerging global movement for ecoagriculture." (29) Sara Scherr, the president and CEO of Ecoagriculture Partners formerly served as director of ecosystem services for Forest Trends (2001-05), while Forest Trends' president, Michael Jenkins, also serves on the board of Ecoagriculture Partners.
Similarly, the former president of the Society for Conservation Biology (and now member of their board), John Robinson, who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, serves alongside Thomas Lovejoy on the executive committee of the aforementioned Tropical Forest Foundation. In addition, Robinson is a board member of a philanthropic foundation known as the Christensen Fund, (30) which sponsors an important international event known as the World Wilderness Congress. Nevertheless, as Conservation International is heavily involved in running this Congress the following section will explore the Congress's background.
The World Wilderness Congress and Elite Networks
The first World Wilderness Congress was held in October 1977 in Johannesburg, South Africa. It brought together 2,500 delegates from 27 countries and boasted of "introduc[ing] the wilderness concept as an international issue of importance" and of "incorporate[ing] economics and banking for the first time as major issues on the conservation agenda." Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the Congress counts among its patrons Conservation International, and government agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Canadian International Development Agency. According to their Web site, the two listed supporters of the Congress are the US National Park Service and The Wilderness Society, while benefactors of the Congress include the Ford Foundation, one of the world's largest global cement companies, CEMEX, (31) and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Perhaps not coincidentally the former chair of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Magalen Bryant, is a board member of the National Wildlife Federation, the Global Environment and Technology Foundation (a group that counts the leading defence contractor, Lockheed Martin, among its partners), (32) and the WILD Foundation. The latter group manages the World Wilderness Congress. So the people involved with the WILD Foundation will now be introduced.
The WILD Foundation was set up in California in 1974 by the former chief conservator of the South African Natal Parks Board, Ian Player, and according to their Web site, since then it has "worked around the world to protect highly threatened wilderness areas and wildlife." Player still serves on the WILD Foundation's board of directors, (33) and information obtained from their Web site in January 2007 demonstrates that three particularly distinguished members of their board of directors were Cristina Mittermeier (the wife of the president of Conservation International), James Dunlap (the former special advisor to the assistant secretary of state for African affairs at the US State Department, 2001-03), and Francine Kansteiner (the wife of Walter Kansteiner III, the former US assistant secretary of state for African affairs). The latter two individuals' connections to the US national (in)security apparatus are concerning to say the least... Furthermore, Dunlap is a principal at the investment banking behemoth the Scowcroft Group, which is managed directly by Brent Scowcroft, the former national security advisor to President George H.W. Bush; while Walter Kansteiner also serves as a founding principal of the Scowcroft Group, he is a board member of the democracy-manipulating African Wildlife Foundation, and WildlifeDirect, (34) and is a senior counsellor for the African Parks Foundation. (35) Keith Harmon Snow points out how Kansteiner is "the son of a coltan trader" (a valuable mineral that can be found beneath the forests of the Congo) and Kansteiner happens to be a board member of Moto Gold (which is "operating in [the] blood-drenched" Ituri province of the Congo).
Another "humanitarian" notable who serves on the WILD Foundation's board of directors is David Barron, the chairman of the PR firm Barron-Birrell (which is a member of the Kansteiner-linked Corporate Council on Africa). Although Barron's online biography suggests that he is a "prominent champion of democracy and human rights," it would be more accurate to refer to him as a prominent democracy manipulator "represent[ing] U.S. policies abroad." During the 1990s, his PR firm represented the former president of the Republic of the Congo, Pascal Lissouba; and in 2007, Barron was reportedly working on the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination of noted inhumanitarian warrior Sam Brownback (for further details on Brownback's "humanitarian" work see my recent article "The Project For A New American Humanitarianism"). In the past, Barron served as the chairman of a group called the Jefferson Educational Foundation, an organization that, according to William I. Robinson, "coordinated the [Reagan administration's] anti-Sandinista 'public diplomacy' programs" during the 1980s (p.100) (pdf). Last but not least, according to his online biography, Barron "played an important role (with explorer Michael Fay, a WILD Trustee) in establishing the new national park system in Gabon (West Africa), and in gathering support and momentum for the US-lead Congo Basin Tropical Forest Initiative." (36) Consequently, this connection to resource management in the Congo will now be explored.
Owing to his ties to the Congo Basin Tropical Forest Initiative, it is fitting to initially expand upon the background of the National Geographic's explorer-in-resident (and WILD Foundation trustee), (37) Michael Fay. Before joining the National Geographic team, Fay completed a gorilla-inspired doctorate, then worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society (from 1991 until 2004), and now serves on the advisory board of the International Conservation Caucus Foundation (which is presided over by David Barron and sponsored by corporate behemoths like JPMorganChase and ExxonMobil). (38) Here it is critical to acknowledge that as well as helping set up the US government-funded Congo Basin Tropical Forest Initiative -- whose partner organizations include groups like Conservation International, Forest Trends, WWF, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the logging industry front-group the Society of American Foresters (39) -- Fay's work is "currently focused on the redwood forests of Northern California" where last year he completed a new project known as the Redwood Transect. This was a joint project of the National Geographic Society and the Wildlife Conservation Society, and involved documenting a walk of over 1000 miles along the "range of the redwood tree, from south to north." (40)
Fay's involvement with resource management in the Congo and environmental protection in California's redwood stands is ironic to say the least given his former employer's fixation on population-control strategies. This is because since the founding of the influential California-based Save-the-Redwoods League (in 1918), "eugenic guidelines of selective breeding and species endangerment" have been central to its conservation work, and the "three men at the core of the American eugenics movement, John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Madison Grant" also served as the founders of Save-the-Redwoods League. (41) On top of this, Henry Fairfield Osborn founder of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and his son, Fairfield Osborn (who served as one of their trustees from 1923 until 1935), went on to cofound the Rockefeller-backed offshoot group, the Conservation Foundation (which eventually went on to merge into WWF). Seeing that these latter two groups are part of the Congo Basin Tropical Forest Initiative it is reasonable that one might start harbouring some concerns over the underlying motives for the Congo Initiative, that ostensibly aims to "enhance the sustainable management of the Congo Basin forests and improve on the standard of living of the inhabitants of the region." Furthermore, the involvement of the military-linked Jane Goodall Institute should exacerbate such worries as Jane Goodall serves alongside Paul Ehrlich as a patron of a British Malthusian "think tank" known as Optimum Population Trust. (42)
Alarm bells continue to sound when it is known that the Congo Basin Tropical Forest Initiative counts amongst its partner organizations a number of logging front-groups -- that is, the Society of American Foresters (see footnote #39) and the American Forest and Paper Association. The board chairman of the latter group, John Faraci, is in turn the CEO of International Paper (the "largest forest products company in the world") and a board member of the US defence contractor United Technologies. (43) As one might expect, the American Forest and Paper Association also harbours a number of connections to other extractive industries, thus their former director of congressional affairs, Rich Nolan, serves as the vice president of government affairs for the peak industry group for major US mining corporations, the National Mining Association. In addition, the former president and CEO of the American Forest and Paper Association, Red Cavaney, served as the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute (from 1997 until 2008), and has just been replaced by Jack Gerard (a former head of the National Mining Association).
Returning to the WILD Foundation's World Wilderness Congress, as noted earlier one of the supporters of the Congress is The Wilderness Society: thus in addition to WILD Foundation representatives, two of the three other people serving on the Congress's executive committee are indirectly connected to the work of The Wilderness Society. These are Harvey Locke (director emeritus of Dave Foreman's The Wildlands Project), and David Parsons (who is a science fellow at the Rewilding Institute -- another Foreman-related conservation project). (44) However, one yet to be mentioned is Cyril Kormos (WILD Foundation representative who serves on this executive committee is their vice president for Policy), an individual who in 2005 co-authored a coffee-table book with Russell Mittermeier and his wife Cristina, titled Transboundary Conservation: A New Vision for Protected Areas -- published courtesy of the cement giant, CEMEX.
Finally, other than Russell Mittermeier, the only Conservation International representative who serves as a senior advisor to the World Wilderness Congress is emeritus director Sylvia Earle. Presently acting as the executive director of Conservation International's Marine Programs, Earle, as mentioned earlier, is an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, and a board member of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. However, like many of her other "conservation" colleagues, she maintains problematic connections to the corporate world as from 1999 until 2006 she was a board member of Kerr-McGee Corporation -- an energy company that was involved in the exploration and production of oil and gas resources and that has now been acquired by Anadarko Petroleum. Notably, during her years of service at Kerr-McGee, the lead director of the company was William Bradford, a person who had until 2000 served as the chairman of the most influential member of the military-industrial complex, the Halliburton Company. (Halliburton's former CEO, Dick Cheney, also left the company in 2000 to become vice president of the U.S.)
Also of conservation interest, the former chairman and CEO of Kerr-McGee, Luke Corbett, presently serves on the board of Anadarko Petroleum: the president and CEO of Anadarko Petroleum, James Hackett, is a board member of both Halliburton and the Fluor Corporation; while two other significant board members are Robert Allison, Jr. (who is a board member of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, a mining corporation that has operations in the Congo), and Peter Fluor (who is the chairman and CEO of Texas Crude Energy, and the lead director of the Fluor Corporation). As Fluor Corporation gets a double mention it is important to note that serving alongside the two Anadarko Petroleum board members is Suzanne Woolsey, the wife of the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey.
These are alarming military-mining-conservation connections. However, they are not likely to be reported by one of The New York Times' most influential "journalists," that is, Thomas Friedman. Indeed, in his recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), he acknowledges that not only has he spent the last decade "travel[ling] throughout the world with Conservation International" but his wife, Ann, is also a board member of Conservation International. (45) So it is fitting that Ted Glick should point out, in his review of Friedman's latest corporate think-piece, that it "presents pretty much a top-down, elite perspective on the [environmental] crisis." No surprises there. However, more critical writers like Christine MacDonald also appear to play down the military ties that Conservation International maintains, as she writes that "[s]ometimes frustrations" with leading environmental groups connections to global elites "lead to conspiracy theories. For instance, CI has been accused -- among other things -- of spying on the Zapatista Rebel group in southern Mexico for the U.S. and Mexican governments. Although unsubstantiated, such reports have been published in the Mexican press." (46) Yet given the evidence presented in this article it would make sense if MacDonald's conspiracy theories turned out to be true.
Uprooting Conservation Multinationals
As critical as this article is of Conservation International (and of big green non-governmental organizations more generally), it does not question the sincerity of their staff to the incredibly important goal of facilitating international conservation. That said, depending on their staffs' individual democratic preferences, there may of course be more effective and ethical ways for them to contribute towards saving the environment.
In our vastly unequal and interconnected society, which provides so well for many, while ensuring that so many more are stranded in poverty, it is necessary for all potential do-gooders (environmental or otherwise) to ensure that their well-meaning efforts are not further oppressing those they wish to aid. Do-Good-all's -- like Jane, or Conservation International supporters -- may well have altruistic intentions, but when their work serves elite conservation priorities they are deluding themselves into assisting the elites to achieve the opposite. Consequently, it is hoped that the contents of this essay will inspire those truly democratically minded supporters of Conservation International to transfer their allegiances to organizations that counter, not bolster, elite domination.
In our age of endless crises, critical thinking is a phenomenon that ruling elites fear. What for instance would happen if a sizable proportion of humanity decided to reject the elite multinational "conservation" agenda and replace it with a humanizing alternative, like social ecology? The answer is obvious: people would regain control of all aspects of their lives, replacing the debilitating destructive demands of elite-driven prerogatives with those that respect life, not simply the demands of capitalist power mongers. (47)
The strangling ideological roots of corporate environmentalism have grown strong, embedding themselves in all manner of groups, both mainstream and radical. Consequently, loosening their hold over popular thinking by exposing their roots to the cleansing light of day is of utmost importance. This will enable alternative environmental groups to thrive in the newly created interstices between the old rotting roots of corporate environmentalism. Such newly invigorated groups can then grow, guided by ideas incorporating critical thinking and cooperative behavior, rather than values conforming to capitalist growth imperatives.
A progressive non-capitalist future is possible. (48) However, the groups needed to sustain such a future will only flourish if we are sincere in our attempts to expose all of capitalism's tenacious ideological foundations: naturally this means unearthing its liberal roots along with the conservative ones. In turn, when this network of noxious ideologies is gradually teared apart, much needed resources will be freed up, which can then be used to nourish projects built upon life-giving cooperative foundations. Elites are well aware that "we [the people] are the ocean that can embrace and swallow up all else. When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the earth shall bite the dust." (49) All we need to do is act, and act together.
Notes (http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker12.html)
http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker12.html
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.1.7 Copyright © 2012 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.