Environmentalists can best effect change from inside corporations
Des Wilson Wednesday January 16, 2002 The Guardian
How sadly predictable and, above all, strategically illiterate are the attacks on Peter Melchett and others who, after years of consistent and courageous endeavour on behalf of the environmental movement, have decided they have a better chance of promoting change by working with business and industry, instead of engaging in the kind of invariably useless confrontational activity enjoyed by the punk end of the movement.
Critics have been guilty of far worse than shameful slurs on the records of Melchett, Jonathan Porritt, Sara Parkin, David Bellamy and others; they're also guilty of encouraging the environmental movement back into the strategies that have so conspicuously failed the cause on one issue after another, and of encouraging the petty abuse, stereotyping of business and unproductive, often juvenile demonstrating that are the real reason environmental victories have been too few and far between.
Not that Melchett, Porritt, Parkin, Bellamy and co should not be defended in their own right; they've been campaigning on the frontline with consistency and integrity for more than 25 years. They can claim to be the founders of the environmental movement, a challenge and an inspiration to a generation. To charge them, as George Monbiot did in yesterday's Guardian, with betrayal, moral frailty and defection because they've had the integrity - yes, integrity - and courage to choose an alternative course, is an outrage.
The issue is: how do we create change? Yes, the environmental record of business and industry was until recently completely unacceptable - and in some cases still is. Yes, there are still major offenders, polluters and wasters. Yes, significant changes in business strategy and behaviour are still called for.
But much has changed, some of it because of the damage to their reputations that major companies have rightly suffered when their negligence, waste and insensitivity have been exposed, and some because a new, younger generation of managers is emerging, educated to the needs of their fellow citizens and the planet, and anxious to do the right thing.
What has been happening is that the more intelligent environmentalists have become convinced that there is a way whereby environmental results can be achieved, but it calls for a more enlightened approach than just confrontational posturing. They don't pretend it has been easy to work inside and with business, but equally they know that business alone holds the key to real and rapid change.
Sara Parkin, for instance, has been running a scheme to inject environmentally-concerned students into companies. Should she not be doing that? Porritt and Elkington have been encouraging the independent auditing of companies' environmental performance. Should they not be doing that? Bellamy has been running award schemes to boost companies that practice conservation and keep them on their toes. Should he not be doing that? Should they all be out on the streets with placards? Or writing sanctimonious columns for newspapers in order to "take the shilling" (Monbiot's words) for attacking their fellow environmentalists?
I know how Melchett feels. When I went to BAA, the Guardian called me "a former Green". I knew that airports were noisy neighbours, that planes were energy-wasteful, that the industry's environmental record was weak. Within four years, BAA was committed to a 10-point sustainability plan and had won the award for the best environmental reporting worldwide. It cut energy use by over 10% and introduced recycling plants at its airports; BAA built, with its own resources, the Heathrow Express, the most efficient railway in the country, and took 3,000 cars a day off the road.
Is BAA perfect? No. Is there still a case for aviation to answer? Yes. But I was able to work within the company at the highest level, encouraged by the receptivity of many enlightened managers, and the changes have been much greater than I could have achieved with placards, press releases, and pretentious carping in newspaper columns.
Companies are reducing energy waste, some by huge percentages. More and more are turning to recycling and more careful use of resources. Others have spent fortunes on cleaner technologies and less destructive ways of doing things. These companies are at the forefront of a revolution in business behaviour that the environmentalists who depend on campaigning for a living (a shilling?) dare not acknowledge. They are the ones Melchett and company are determined to encourage and increase in number. Thank God for them. They are the environmentalists who will get the results.
· Des Wilson is ex-chair of Friends of the Earth and former corporate affairs director of BAA. His and John Egan's book Private Business Public Battleground is published by Palgrave in March.