Why Government is Not the Answer

Many in the environmental movement are angry. Angry at the excesses of big corporations, and their willingness to pollute and damage for the sake of profit. We love to point our fingers at suspendered, cigar-smoking executives. It’s all their fault, we say, and the way to fix the problem is for the government to ride into town and clean the place out.

What so many of my liberal-minded friends seem to forget is that if you hand the responsibility over to the government, sooner or later someone like George W. Bush gets elected. How have you liked having him control the EPA for the last seven years? Has that worked out well for you? Have you been pleased with him flexing all that power we have given to the government to allow logging in national forests, for the sake of “preventing fires?” We in California in particular have cause to rethink this approach, after the Bush-controlled EPA overruled our own hard-won stricter emissions standards.

Beware the Easy Scapegoat

The truth is that it’s simple-minded to suggest that the corporations are evil, and everything is their fault. The motivations of corporations aren’t all that hard to understand. None of them particularly want to destroy the environment, enslave people, or make people sick with their products. They really aren’t that evil, and we need not portray them that way, because the truth is bad enough. The truth is they just want to make money, and they don’t much care about all that other stuff one way or the other.

Face Facts

But this leads to something we must face up to, and it’s a hard truth. The truth is that we are ultimately responsible for corporate crimes. Every last one of them. How can that be? Because the very moment, the very instant that we, the market as a whole, demanded that these abuses end, they would. In a nanosecond. If we as a nation and a society resolved not to buy the products of any corporation that poisoned the environment, employed child labor, cut down rain-forests, or whatever corporate malfeasance you can imagine, these practices would end instantly, and permanently.

But we don’t. We want what we want. We want it quickly and cheaply, and prefer not to know where it came from. Even when we learn of corporate crimes, we are so quick to forgive, so long as the goods keep coming to feed our never-ending appetite for consumption.

They Aren’t in Charge, We Are

This may seem like a dark message, but it need not be. In fact, it means that there is hope, because at any time of any day we could just stop. You see, the corporations live and die by money. Our money. That means that ultimately they don’t control us, we control them. They act as they do because we have trained them to do so. We have demonstrated that we care more about plentiful, cheap goods than we do about the environment or equitable overseas labor practices. If we sent a clear message that we cared about those other things, and were willing to pay for them, corporations would react. Like I said, they don’t want to poison the environment, they just want to make money, and they do that by giving us what we want. And the market always gets what it wants. Always. Just so long as the government stays out of the way.

We Have Met the Enemy, and They Are Us

So don’t be so quick to point your finger at the corporate bugaboos of the world. Ultimately, they are not wholly to blame. It is our own culture of sloth, greed, and waste that brought this about, and we can stop it any time we choose.

The good news is it’s happening. Not as fast as some of us would like, but the trend is there, and it’s world-wide. The very existence of the companies we will be discussing on these pages proves it. So vote with your wallet. Join us and invest in green enterprise. Watch the story of stuff, and resolve to stop buying crap you don’t need. Walk the walk. Ask of the market, and ye shall receive.

Just don’t ask the government to come in and fix it. It’s our mess. We made it ourselves, and we can and ought to clean it up ourselves. Ultimately, any government regulation just creates a new line in the sand that corporations feel entitled to approach as closely as they possibly can, and the next administration will do its best to blur. We can do better on our own.

“Let him that would move the world first move himself.”
—Socrates