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...
Andrew Heintzman is the president of Investeco Capital, the first Canadian investment firm to invest exclusively in environmental companies. He is also author of The New Entrepreneurs: Building a Green Economy for the Future (House of Anansi Press, 2010).
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