Healthy Business, Healthy Planet?

What is an environmentalist to do? Life used to be so simple. We knew who the bad guys were: large corporations like General Electric and Walmart that were leading the world toward inevitable collapse. The environmentalist’s job was to publicly shame them and to insist on governmental regulation for the public good. Simple.

Those were the good old days.

Today, things are not so easy. The black hats have been reinvented as white hats. Corporations that were formerly thought of as the baddest of the bad—companies such as Shell (which earned the wrath of activists for its activities in Nigeria), GE (which polluted the Hudson River with PCBs), Walmart (responsible for the growth of consumerism, car culture and the decline of small towns), Nike (accused of using child labour at its factories) and Nestlé (of the infant formula in Africa debacle)—have been reinvented as paragons of environmental virtue. It is like The Return of the Night of the Living...