With healthcare reform moving at such a sluggish rate, we’ve all become pretty exasperated by the worsening creases in Washington.
In the face of so much disagreement, thank goodness the environmental movement is so unified. Who in their right mind can disagree on the war on global warming?
Not so fast. Johann Hari has just written a provocative, if not controversial, piece in The Nation on the divide within the environmental movement. In “The Wrong Kind of Green,” Hari takes a stab at environmental organizations that receive money from corporations, many of which are among the largest transgressors in the war on environmental pollution.
“Imagine if Amnesty International was dependent, just to write human rights reports, on funding from Dick Cheney… we’d all see that that’s a corrupt model of working,” explains Hari in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. “That’s how the big conservation groups have begun to work.”
His article tells a disturbing tale of diverted carbon offset projects, of money-grabbing environmental organizations “putting profit before the planet,” of Green groups that sit like lame ducks at the mercy of their far-right opponents. He targets Conservation International, the NRDC, and the Sierra Club–organizations known as bedrocks of the conservation movement
Hari sometimes goes too far to slash some of the decisions of groups such as the Sierra Club without acknowledging the importance of many of their actions. As Executive Director of the Sierra Club Carl Pope writes in an email response to Hari’s article, “it was the Sierra Club that brought the original litigation which led to the Supreme Court Decision that has spurred EPA to being regulating global warming pollution.”
Many also argue that environmental agencies can effectively push through conservation measures by functioning within a capitalist structure. By harnessing funds from for-profit companies, they might be more likely to reach the masses and be sustainable over the years. Perhaps this for-profit model is more sustainable, but the problem comes when the masses trust too much. The term “greenwashing” applies here; we are convinced that any environmental move must be a good one, and so we neglect to monitor the organizations making these sometimes tainted moves.
Devastated by the news? Never fear: Greenpeace and 350.org do not accept corporate donations, and therefore are still saintly in Hari’s eyes. But his whistle-blowing exposé might make you think twice next time you blindly support a “Green” cause.
