If you want to expand on something I wrote, tell us why - after >150 years of left critiques of (neo-)Malthusian warnings and >100 years of left critiques of Progressive technophilic "reform" (all of which Diamond has been confronted with and refused to engage) we should follow Diamond down his path of argumentation.
If you have an alternative take on the political ecological critique of the kinds of neoliberal ecological modernization that Diamond is advancing, then please present it to us. You are a grad student, there is a wide literature on this.
If you have an alternative tactical approach that the left should take to Diamond's praise of Chevron, Wal-mart and Coke please spell it out. Last Spring, either here or the envirosoc list, I unpacked Wal-mart's green certification standards fairly extensively - I have little or no use for them. Over the last 20 years, any number of critical geographers - Michael Watts perhaps taking the lead - have analyzed the social and ecological devastation Chevron's practices in Africa (you can start here, if you'd like: http://bowotovchevron.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/resources-on-the-delta-ethnography-engage/ Until the reference to the MR article, I have to admit I knew nothing about Coke beyond its ubuiquitousness.
If you can show me where my comments preclude any of the work I've done on the ecological contradictions of captialism and environmental Marxist engagements with Bookchin, Goodman and Redclift, Benton, Schnaiberg, Latour, Salleh, Foster and Burkett, please show me where in the comments those are and how such an analysis is precluded.
If you have an argument that shows that scale doesn't matter - beyond quantitative measures - in terms of ecological impacts and power relations please present it... I said nothing about that, I simply responded, in context, to Diamond's article.
If you can point to the place where I made an explicitly normative argument about the evilness of Wal-mart, Chevron or Coke, please unpack it, otherwise stop reading things into my quick and dirty responses and asking questions about exogenous points.
A
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:28 AM, brad bauerly <bbauerly at gmail.com> wrote:
> While everything you mention is true, Alan, I wonder if this isn't a false
> dichotomy. Diamond wants to claim that these large corps are good for the
> environment and I wonder if we should follow him down this path of
> argumentation to just simply invert it and argue that these large corps are
> in fact, the environmental problem. I have a real fear, valid or not, of
> the large corporations = evil and bad basis for a critique. While it may
> be
> tactical to use this rhetoric to draw people in and help them make
> connections and conclusions, it tends to over simplify the problem and lead
> to just a critique of big corporations and not necessarily capitalism.
> Isn't the difference between Coca Cola and some other smaller company
> merely
> quantitative (bigger corporation bigger environmental impact/footprint)?
> Or, are you claiming that it is a qualitative difference? If so, what is
> the basis of this qualitative difference, ability to influence policy,
> market share and horizontal/vertical integration (ie: monopoly power), or
> just sheer evilness?
>
> Brad
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319