Uneasy Partnerships Form Over Environmental Issues
Greenpeace activists are coming in from the cold, occasionally trading wetsuits for pinstripes to lunch with oil company magnates as well as storm their tankers.
“It’s the whole strange bedfellows thing,” said Kaylee Kreider, 27, past U.S. director of the environmental group’s energy campaign, and part of a new generation of activists.
Kreider led a Greenpeace team that scaled the Atlantic Richfield building in Los Angeles in 1997 but has also met one on one with BP Amoco Chief Executive Officer John Browne.
Browne, 50, an avowed solar energy advocate, is an oil magnate for the new age, if there is such a thing. He broke ranks with his peers in 1997 by saying that global warming needed to be addressed, by agreeing to try to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from BP products in a joint venture with the Environmental Defense Fund, and by setting a goal of $1 billion in alternative-energy sales within 10 years.
Kreider and Browne are not alone. From frozen-food giants to lumber barons, businesses are heeding the call of a different kind of green. And activist groups that once defined “hostile takeover” as handcuffing themselves to trees are sitting down at boardroom tables.
Both are after the same thing: They want to win consumers’ hearts. In the U.S., where groups like Greenpeace have lost membership, partnerships with big business are a way to gain respectability. In countries that refuse to pass stiff environmental laws, activists hope that working directly with behemoth polluters will work. And corporations are eager to pair up as consumer demand soars for environmentally sound products.
The question is whether these partnerships represent bold change or public relations gimmicks. The pitfalls are many: interference from governments that aren’t interested in throwing taxpayer dollars into newfangled schemes; copycat programs that mimic environmentally sound ones in watered-down form; and just plain different cultures. Analysts say that it’s way too soon to tell but that it’s all worth a try.
“This is, on some level, a grand experiment. . . . But it’s an experiment we have to try,” said Anne Kapuscinski, a UC Berkeley professor who studies endangered West Coast salmon.
At the United Nations earlier this year, marine activists sat cheek to jowl with executives from Unilever, the corporate parent of Gorton and Birdseye frozen foods. Under the umbrella of the nonprofit, British-based Marine Stewardship Council, they unveiled a “sustainable fish” label for grocery store packages of salmon, haddock and other properly harvested catches, with ample young fish left behind for future seasons.
Fish Stocks Run Low
There is a powerful incentive for the fishing industry to change its ways: Their product is running out. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization statistics show that about 60% of the world’s 200 commercial fish stocks are either gone or severely depleted. Nearly 25% of all marine life caught annually--30 million tons--is thrown back into the ocean dead or dying because it is unmarketable or a maimed byproduct caught in choking-line or gill nets.
Unilever, recognizing this, and feeling the heat from European consumers, approached the World Wide Fund for Nature in 1993 and asked for help setting up sustainable fishing practices. Now the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based company has pledged to buy only “sustainable” fish within 10 years.
Anne Weir, Unilever’s community and nongovernmental organization affairs manager, said: “It’s a long-term growth decision, coming at a time in Europe especially when companies are thinking about the future. We saw the risk of lack of fish and started to look at solutions.”
By 2005, all the suppliers that the company contracts with will be required to prove to Marine Stewardship- approved monitors that they are using fishing methods that will not destroy future products. Suppliers will have to open their books to certified scientists, allow them on ships for spot inspections, and sign clauses agreeing to abide by proper fishing practices.
Still, the program is voluntary on Unilever’s part, and it will decide which packages should be labeled. Unilever will pay for the certification processes--and in turn probably charge a bit more for the fish.
That’s fine with some activists.
Vikki Spruill from the “Give Swordfish a Break” campaign said: “It happens that self-interest is compatible with conservation interests here.” The campaign is a partnership of SeaWeb and the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., that has persuaded hundreds of chefs to stop serving swordfish until it is properly caught.
For activists, a sense that the public wants success stories as well as the same old sit-ins is a factor. John Gummer, Marine Stewardship Council president and former British environment minister, said environmentalists need pragmatic strategies to meet their goals.
Saving fish, for instance.
“The trouble with fish is they’re not furry,” Gummer said. “If they were furry with big eyes, people would be keen to help them. But they’re not, so we need to think economically. There’s no reason [that] if we get it right, oceans shouldn’t teem with fish again.”
The Marine Stewardship Council is modeled closely on the Forestry Stewardship Council, or FSC, a nonprofit group based in Oaxaca, Mexico, that sets stringent international standards for timber practices necessary to earn a coveted “Sustainable Forest Product” label.
Nearly 100 European companies, including Britain’s largest do-it-yourself home improvement chain, B&Q;, have signed on. B&Q; executives have pledged to buy only certified sustainable lumber products by next year. Forests in 20 countries totaling 37 million acres have been certified.
Still, this represents only 1% of the world’s woods--most of them nowhere near the ravaging clear-cuts of Malaysia or much of Canada’s ancient-growth forests.
And Ashley Mattoon, who monitors forestry issues for Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., worries that while some monitoring groups use FSC standards, imitators with weaker standards are springing up. “It could just lead to mass consumer confusion,” she said.
Europe Leads Way
The trend of corporations thinking environmentally is strongest in Europe, all sides agree, where customers demand it.
“Maybe because they don’t have any ancient forests left,” said Mark Brune of the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco, “you have companies there that will quickly cancel a contract if they find out someone is getting wood from the Great Bear National Rain Forest in British Columbia.”
If good examples abound, Home Depot and Rainforest Action show how a partnership can sour. Home Depot won plaudits for pledging to use certified forest practices in 1992. But company officials say that with little “sustainable” wood available, it is impossible to meet customer demand.
“If we bought all the certified wood on the market today, it wouldn’t supply our 50 Los Angeles stores for a year . . . let alone 800 stores,” said spokeswoman Susan Apple, who handles environmental issues for Home Depot.
Rainforest Action members charge that Home Depot is still selling western red cedar, hemlock and other ancient-forest products. They’ve begun “Dead Rainforest” tours and chained and handcuffed themselves to lumber products in Home Depots from Minneapolis to Florida. Last month, they hung a giant banner outside corporate headquarters in Atlanta.
But Apple said Rainforest Action should haul down its young volunteers before someone gets hurt--and acknowledge what Home Depot is already doing.
“Our considerations are much bigger than just the age of the tree,” Apple said, adding that it was difficult and time-consuming to trace where suppliers were obtaining wood but that preference was being given to those using sustainable products.
“We’ve got 50,000 products, and we’re trying to turn this whole ship,” she said. “We are taking steps to identify the sources of wood in our stores. . . . We’ve sat down with all our suppliers and told them we expect them to do this. It’s not realistic to set target dates.”
Brune said that with two acres of forest disappearing each minute, the campaign will continue until Home Depot declares it will not buy old-growth products.
Seth Dunn of Worldwatch Institute said that despite the flurry of partnerships--some fruitful, some not--for the foreseeable future, both sides will hew to traditional roles.
“You’re still going to have Greenpeace nipping at the heels of big oil companies,” Dunn said, “and every once in a while, the oil companies are going to have to turn around and give them something.”
