FRACK YOU - Innocent until proven guilty

There a couple of themes from previous posts I'd like to pull together with this post, namely proactive law, the precautionary principle. I just read another article in Orion about fracking, When Cowboys Cry, by Sandra Steingraber, in which she talks about the continuing efforts of oil and gas extraction companies, like Halliburton, Chevron, and Exxon to frack in places like plains of Montana, the south of France, the vales of England, and the forests of Poland. More disturbing, however, is the part when she writes,

That was the week that stories about fracking broke in the international press, and the European environmentalists were scrambling to figure out what laws in the European Union might apply to this new technology. Like the sons and daughters of Montana's cowboys, the sons and daughters of the Allied Forces were having a hard time finding legal traction.

The British journal The Ecologist reached a similar conclusion in an investigative report about the European plans of Halliburton, Chevron, and Exxon and others. Although fracking in the United States is linked to toxic pollution and social conflict, notes The Ecologist, the technology is being rapidly exported. Fracking "exceeds the government regulatory process." It is "set to continue." It is, perhaps, "too powerful to oppose."

My former lab mate Paul, who graduated just last week, and I would talk many times about socio-environmental issues. He always has insightful things to say, and he said one thing that put a different perspective on things I've written about previously (here, here), including trust and faith in large organisations such as government and corporations, I believe on the day of the one year anniversary of the BP-Macondo well blowout and oil spill. He said, with regard large companies and corporations, "The companies are innocent until proven guilty." This statement puts a twist on a commonly held legal dictum, particularly because companies are not just "potential" criminals - they have been implicated and proven guilty time and time again. Each time, they have paid a small fine, and have moved on to commit the next crime. These companies are serial criminals, manic criminals. The statement also lends credence to how the precautionary principle operates in our society today - it is not that a law is implemented if a bad socio-environmental outcome is possible; rather a law is not implemented if it maybe possible to hurt the profits of companies. Society and environment be damned.

It is clear that regardless of the future applicability of retrospective law, those with power have the ability to subvert the law. Indeed, it doesn't matter what the sentiment of the law is, loopholes in law are treated as not an overlook in the law, not a space in which the sentiment of the law can pervade, but rather a space within which detrimental activities we thought would be regulated against can operate freely and without conscience. It is as if the outcome is not criminal or regulated against, but rather the mode of crime. This is contradictory to how the law operates in other (related) arenas. When someone commits first degree murder, it doesn't matter how the murder was committed, but what is important that the crime occurred. There is no legal loophole that says, "Oh, you used a stone to commit the crime rather than a gun. You're okay. You're free." But with ecological degradation, it is not the first degree crime that is illegal, rather it is just the manners in which the crime is commited that are deemed to be acceptable or not. There is then a legal discrepancy, a cultural schizophrenia, that is obvious.

What might be an approach to prevent this from happening, given the legal system we have? I heard a provocative Speaking of Faith episode from a few years ago, Reflections on the Death Penalty in America, in which a guest said that we must look into laws that maintain the dignity of humans. This can be easily extended to the environment. Rather than have a legalistic framework that is full of loopholes, why not have a legal framework that is inherently holistic and inherently proactive. Given the arguments made for and against even well-worded laws, why not have debates on the heart of the problems?

FRACK YOU - Not learning from our mistakes

The issue of hydrofracking has all of the essentials of a prime example of how we treat the environment and other humans. It is a most visceral example of ecological degradation, too, because of the potential and already existing impacts it has resulted in. More on that later.

As with much environmentalism in this country, environmentalism is viewed under the lens of energy. There is a sense that if we can just find "clean energy," all our environmental woes will be things of the past. It is this mentality, coupled with our tolerance of high-risk corporate behaviour, that has led to the acceptance of hydrofracking as a way to find "clean energy." Add on top of this that this energy is not coming from the Middle East, and many have a reason to smile. Of course, it has helped the hydrofracking establishment that the hydrocarbon obtained from the process is natural gas, basically methane. As someone who has a little understanding of combustion, if you did want to burn something, methane is probably your least bad choice in terms of flame characteristics and the simplicity of the chemistry. What people are not thinking about is that the companies that are involved in the fracking are the very companies that have acted irresponsibly to people and the environment so far.

I think the issue of hydrofracking is less about these companies and their behaviour, which will not change as easily as we would hope, and more about what we think about what our lives need, i.e. energy. Many people are "techno-optimists" - they believe that these "breakthroughs" in "clean energy" will come; we just need to sit tight and believe. Given this techno-optimism and our inability to function without copious and excessive amounts of energy, we are willing to give free reign to those who will provide us the energy. But we are then shocked that they would take part in actions that lead to contamination of aquifers and rivers and pools full of radioactive wastewater and seas full of leaked oil. It is easy for us to tell these companies that "...hydraulic fracturing must be done in a way that protects the environment and public health,” but it is much harder for us to accept our complicity in their behaviour. Each and every one of us can reduce our patronage of these degrading entities. We can show that it is possible not to be defined by their existence and by what it is they sell us.

On rights, conveniences and obligations

I want to continue my thoughts from my last post on obligation. I particularly want to focus on the obligations that we must assume given our rights and conveniences in this world.

I am no expert of history, and no expert of international affairs. I know little of the governance structures that exist in many parts of the world. Yet it is is undeniable, to me at least, that as time has moved on in our societies, the rights granted to people by their governments have on the whole increased. (Libertarians may not think so.) Women have the right to vote in most parts of the world now, and much of the world has adopted some form of democracy. The list of human rights has increased over time, it seems, and for good reason. I find it difficult to comprehend and swallow the many violations against the sanctity of the world propagated through war and similar crimes. Increasingly, rights have the character such that they are applicable to all people living in a jurisdiction, and that is an absolutely wonderful thing. These are rights that confer upon all of us the access and ability to partake governance, which affects our daily lives. (Many of us do not exercise these rights, but that is a different story.) At the same time, we have had a proliferation of "convenience" in our lives. We have made it a priority for ourselves to make convenience more convenient, to give more and more people more and more access to more and more things. We have become so accustomed to convenience that we think it a human right to have access to these conveniences. In fact, many people have said that access to the the internet has become a fundamental human right. 

The right to open a business that violently extracts natural resources exists for all of us, and although there are laws such as NEPA that do require us to "consider" the environmental impacts, the environment has been continuously degraded over time. In fact, as long as there is a "just" compensation to the affected people for pollution and environmental harm, such activities can go on. Our legal system is set up such that we have obligations to people, but no obligations to the water they drink, or to the land they stand on, or to the air they breathe. As long as the impacts of our actions can be monetised to a value that other people accept, those impacts can be made to occur. Given extremely toxic amounts of pollution, people may reach a settlement and leave to find a new home. But what about the old home? What about the river in which was dumped PCBs? Our right to compensation has come at the expense of the environment. Many of our rights and conveniences have come with increasing detriment to the environment.

As we have moved through time, we have continued to provide others with proxies to provide us the basic necessities of life - our rights and increasingly our conveniences. As the number of these proxies has increased, we have lost our connections with the elements that provide for us and sustain us. These proxies have been provided to the government and companies, and we feel that their only job is to serve us and to secure our rights and conveniences. Yet I do not believe that the list of our obligations, as citizens, has grown in proportion with the list of our rights and our conveniences. The right to vote has not come with the obligation to vote, at least in the US. No one can deny that the convenience of a new laptop is benign on the environment, regardless of whether or not we feel it is a human right to have access to the internet, and still we have no obligation to make sure it isn't harming people before we buy it, or after we are done using it. As I wrote a couple of days ago, our increased mental and emotional capacities place on us the burden of obligation. We must expand the scope of our obligations with every increasing right, with every increasing convenience. Rights exists only because there is land beneath our feet, water to drink and air to breath. Conveniences only exist because nature provides us the materials for them. Obligations will allow us to fully realise the impacts of these rights and conveniences.

On the fallacy "economic" sustainability

Thoughts on the notion of sustainability have grown exponentially it seems. Everyone is talking about it, whether they mean it or not. As you may have found odd, massive resource extraction companies talk about it and promote it, when their very existence is in opposition to it. In all honesty, I am not really sure what "sustainability" means fully, and probably no one can really put it fully into words without writing a tome. My notions of it are challenged day by day. What I do know is that such companies mentioned above do not practice it at all, whatever sustainability truly is, apart from "economic" sustainability - they are making absolutely sure that their viability and legitimacy as entities stays intact, and they are "sustained." They have all too easily kidnapped the word, and made it mean what they want it to mean.

If you know a little bit about "sustainability," you'll know that the world has basically defined three pillars of it - environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of optimisation of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Our world has a tendency to compromise on the pillars of environmental and social sustainability, because there is very little willingness to change the economic foundations of how we live our lives, the foundations that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

The way sustainability is currently defined involves the considerations of economic structures that are counter to the notion of sustainability, just like the economics practiced by corporations. The economic structures I am talking about are those such as capitalism, communism, or any mix of anything of that sort. Such economics are by their very definition destructive to both the environment and people. In fact, there is no way you can have equality in any capitalist or communist framework - there are losers, human and non-human, always. There is never a Pareto-optimal decision if you also consider the environment and justice.

The issue is this: the problem is over-constrained, because we have decided that our current economic structure trumps people and the environment. We have limited our conceptualisation and imagination of sustainability by limiting the options we have available to us, because we are unwilling to change our economies. (In order to maintain the economic viability of our nation, jobs are being created in sectors that necessarily involve violence against the land, air and water. Such jobs are clearly not sustainable.) There is no way you can be remotely sustainable unless you define a new economics. Economics should in fact not be its own pillar at all, but should rather be a fluid, moving and dynamic outcome of our definitions of society and the environment. Such economies might better be able to address chronic problems that face our society today, such as bad food, homelessness and poverty. The goal of any social structure should involve justice and equality. In this light, society itself should be dynamically defined based on environmental constraints and environmental sustainability. There is no getting around it - we live on Earth.

More to come.

The effectiveness of boycotting - point/counter-point

Back to boycotts. As I mentioned previously, it seems like boycotting trash means boycotting consumption, which means, in a way, boycotting popular culture and trends. It means much more than just boycotting some company because I don't like how they treat their employees. Many people have asked me whether what I am doing can make a big difference. Probably not, but I am sure that at least come people have been affected by it, hopefully positively. I wonder if you have any thoughts on how to measure "success" of this boycott. Let me know. But for now, I would like to present a point/counter-point on the effectiveness of boycotts. The match up: Geov Parrish (Seattle Weekly News) vs. Todd Putnam (a guy that wrote a response to Parrish's article on democracycellproject.net)

First up, some passages from Parrish: 

The Futility of Boycotts  

Planning to boycott Microsoft? Get in line.

The flamboyant pastor of the Eastside's enormous Antioch Bible Church, Ken Hutcherson, has announced a nationwide boycott of multiple corporations. Microsoft, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, and Nike are among the companies that signed a letter this month supporting a statewide gay-civil-rights bill, legislation that conservative Christians virulently oppose. Hutcherson says he is launching a boycott campaign targeting the letter's signers.

I'm glad that progressives aren't the only people who waste their time with this crap.

...

Boycotts can be successful. But it's very, very rare. For every success story—grapes, Nestle, South Africa—there are many thousands of failures.

...

Political activists of all stripes are often eager to find a handle with which to influence the perceived sociopathic actions of big corporations. The problem is that when you target a company as large as Microsoft or Boeing—both of which have earnings greater than most of the world's countries—even if their retail products can be boycotted easily, it's virtually impossible to imagine a circumstance in which enough people join the boycott to cause a perceptible drop in earnings. Even then, unless participants tell the company what they're doing (which most don't), sales fluctuations can and usually are attributed to a thousand other factors first.

...

Boycotts are almost always a waste of time. So, alas, are minority shareholder resolutions. Corporations are not democratic institutions, and by definition, they do not have a social conscience. They exist solely to make money for their owners or shareholders, and they spend far more polishing their image than any boycott campaign does tarnishing it.

It's fine and well to shun a product or company because of dislike for the company's policies...But don't expect to influence the company's behavior.

This is why the growing economic and political power of big global corporations is so dangerous. With government, there's not much accountability, but at least there's a little. By contrast, the number of times big companies have been held accountable by ordinary consumers for social policies can be counted on two hands. And even then, after the campaign closes up shop, the behavior often resumes.

This is why, noxious as it is, for left, right, or center the only institution powerful enough to consistently influence corporate behavior is government. That's one of the reasons corporations work so hard to influence governments.

What can ordinary consumers do? Buy local. Get involved in the political process. Create alternative institutions. By all means, use your hard-earned money to patronize big companies only when you want to support them. It'll make you feel better.

But usually, they won't feel a thing.

And now in response, Putnam.

 

Geov Parrish’s speculation that for every boycott success there are many thousands of failures is a baseless, ridiculous and an irresponsible assertion. During the 10 years that I tracked boycotts for the National Boycott News, it wasn’t one in a thousand boycotts that succeeded; it was more like one in two. Of course, in those days boycotts tended to be launched by organizations. Today with the internet in full swing, anybody can simply post their call for a boycott. And they do, by the hundreds.
 

...Geov states that boycotts are almost always a waste of time. I think it would be more accurate to say that with boycotts, what you get out of them tends to correspond to what you put into them. Nobody can really expect Microsoft to stop its donations to Republican politicians because a handful of webpages has endorsed a call to boycott Microsoft for its past donations to Bush. It obviously takes much more than that. Successful boycotts require campaigns, strategic planning, coalition-building, persistence and patience.

Contrary to Geov’s assertion, that more than a dozen boycotts he listed had “absolutely no effect”, in fact, some of the cited companies (McDonalds, Shell, Starbucks, Mitsubishi) gave in and met boycotters’ demands, while others on Geov’s list suffered notable economic repercussions...

By the early 1990s, about half of all boycotts eventually succeeded at getting the primary changes they were demanding from the targeted corporations. For serious boycott campaigns, I doubt this ratio has changed much.

Boycott failures can’t simply be blamed on the tactic of boycotting, but rather, other factors such as message clarity and simplicity, the level of public interest or sympathy, creative and effective publicity, media coverage, and the availability of comparable substitute products are all critical factors in determining the success or failure of a boycott.

Also, boycotts have proven an excellent way to help educate and involve the public about issues –particularly because people are slow to inform themselves about issues where they have no impact. Instead of sounding like whiners, boycotters top off their complaint with action –not buying a product, which in itself can feel empowering and thereby lead to an increased level of personal involvement.

As corporations have grown evermore enormous the strategy for boycotting them has also evolved. Instead of being fixated on the company’s bloated bottom-line, sophisticated boycotts target the all-important corporate image as a means of exerting leverage. These days, most smart corporations settle long before they begin to feel the pinch in sales. They simply look to see which way the trend seems to be moving, and if it looks as if over time their image might suffer from a particular campaign, they take steps to settle before much harm can be done. Protracted boycott standoffs against Nestle and Coors in the 1980s did such lasting damage to the companies’ images that now most companies don’t wait until their image begins to get tarnished. After only 2 years, Heinz sat down with boycott organizers to discuss how it could avoid becoming forever labeled the “dolphin-killing” company, and quickly implemented measures and verification to make its Star-Kist brand tuna –and all other Heinz foods-- the first major brand to be certified as “dolphin safe.” As a result, Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee, feeling vulnerable, quickly followed suit.

Heinz had guessed the change to dolphin-safe would cost them a nickel on each can of tuna. But even when their polling indicated that the public was only willing to pay two cents more for a “dolphin-safe” brand, they saw the trend moving in that direction and took proactive steps to stop any more negative publicity.

...I utterly disagree with his view that the government is the best and proper arena for dealing with issues of corporate behavior. Boycotts have historically served as an important tactic when political options proved fruitless or were nonexistent. The numbers of boycotts exploded in the 1980s during the Reagan years, when there was no way to get government to address corporate behavior. Growing frustration and cynicism with government led groups to go directly to the public to address social issues and corporate misbehavior. (During that same period, boycotts began succeeding in greater numbers and in less time than ever before.) In the years since, government has only grown less responsive.

Ironically, I’ve found that when you complain to corporations about their behavior, in addition to extolling their many virtues they typically tell you that they are not the appropriate target for such concerns, and to instead contact your government representatives.

...
In an often-cited survey of business leaders, boycotts ranked at the top as a major headache for a corporation; even a greater concern than class action lawsuits.

The greatest drawback of boycotting is pervasive myth that it is ineffective. By badmouthing boycotts, Geov has done the corporations’ work for them.