“We all have a duty of care to ensure that from cradle to grave products are being used appropriately and do not do lasting harm.”
These are the words of Deborah Allen, director of corporate responsibility for British Aerospace, in an effort to define her company’s social goals. From this quote, we might expect Allen is in the business of health foods, or perhaps biodegradable cleaning products. But her company, astonishingly, is a weapons manufacturer.
In an article published by The Times of London, both the United States and Britain expressed a commitment to developing weapons of warfare that tread more lightly on the earth.
Among the developments are innovations such as low-emissions submarine rockets that “protect sea-life,” reducing depleted uranium in bombs, even using biodegradable or plant-based plastics in missile warheads. Apparently, in the rush to turn every product into something that can be sold to the “green” marketplace, someone forgot that warfare is not an environmentally sustainable activity.
It might be hard to imagine, from this place of nearly unfathomable absurdity, that I could attempt to make an argument that “greenwashing” – claims by corporations to promote their products as environmentally sound – could be anything but bad. Nonetheless, despite the sheer frustration and near outrage that ads for “clean coal,” hybrid SUVs, and “green weaponry” bring me, it is possible that greenwashing could be the smoke screen that covers a corporate retreat from the battle line drawn against environmentalists.
Capitalism, like humanity, is highly adaptable. It rarely is completely overthrown by the objections leveled against it, much to the dismay of revolutionary Marxists, and instead tends to change its practices such that it can survive in the face of overwhelming social opposition.
Yet to mainstream capitalism, the environmentalist movement is an unusual enemy. It is largely non-violent (a few cases of eco-terrorism exist, but do not represent the vast majority of environmental activism), it often reaches out to capitalism for solutions while simultaneously calling for its downfall, and it ultimately isn’t the effort of people so much of an increasingly obvious limit to our consumption and ability to pollute.
It is from this place that I might suggest greenwashing – again, as absurd as it might sound – is actually a good thing. While on the surface it might seem to reinforce capitalist ideas that consumption can be limitless and perhaps hopelessly confuse the consumer, it does change the frame of the conversation. It concedes that nature is no longer a resource to be exploited for economic gain, but instead a system that must be protected if we are to survive. Expounding this social understanding to the people who do not already grasp it might be worth the frustration brought to those environmentalists who do.
Every ad that claims the environmental benefits of liquefied natural gas, the need for cars that use less fossil fuels, innovations in oil exploration, as disingenuous as it may be, also claims more subtly that the environmentalists are right. These ads reflect that companies, no matter what their business, cannot ultimately escape their responsibility to protect the environment.
Environmentalists can see greenwashing as a concession by the industrial society that it too must trend toward eco-friendly goals. Persistence by those concerned about the environment is now necessary to force this concession to be followed to its ultimate conclusion: that environmental responsibility means there is no coal industry, there is no warfare, and that we stop using up resources that cannot be renewed.
It has long been argued by industrialists that corporations have no responsibility beyond economic profit for their investors. The series of greenwashed ad campaigns show that no matter how much corporations believe this limited concept of corporate responsibility to be ideologically true, the consumer does not agree and, so, neither can they. Environmentalists realize something that possibly traditional capitalists do not: Corporations have whatever responsibility their consumers and their investors say they have, no matter what they think about Adam Smith’s profit-motivated firm.
If the consumer and the investor, as well as the regulatory structures they pay for, demand that corporate structures adhere to environmentalist goals even to the point of their own destruction, they will do so. Greenwashing is just one example of how they are being forced to change their ideological tone.
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An increasingly ‘green’ market
Daily Emerald
January 7, 2009
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