Restraining global corporations

[dArKeR]

By George Monbiot
THE GUARDIAN , LONDON
Saturday, Apr 10, 2004,Page 9

Beside the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamist terror campaign and the battle over immigration policy, the survival of the black-browed albatross may not look like the most pressing political issue. For many of those on the left, environmentalism is at a best a distraction, at worst a regression. As Christopher Hitchens said in a debate last week: "Environmentalism and ecology ... are conservative positions. They may be honorable ones, they may be defensible ones, they are not radical ones."

This was once true. The modern European green movement began as a response by landowners to the rise of the middle class and the industries which empowered it. Industrialism threatened both the landscapes which reflected an unchanging social order and the aristocracy's economic control.

Today, it would be foolish

to claim that this tendency has entirely disappeared. Much of the movement's funding in the UK is provided by people with inherited wealth.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/04/10/2003136114

[struggle4progress]

1. This is a strange debate.

I do not understand why conservatives have largely abandoned environmentalism and ecology (which would seem to be intrinsic issues for conservatives) to market forces that have repeatedly despoiled the environment. Neither do I understand why some leftists have largely abandoned environmentalism and ecology as bourgeoise issues.

The frightening fact is that issues of environment and sustainability, which ought to be key issues of our time and which should be producing major life-style changes in the developed nations and should be affecting the aid-relations between developed and under-developed nations, are largely neglected in American politics, except obliquely: the VP can convene an energy task-force to examine world oilfield maps (and then keep the discussions secret); we can subsequently invade one of the countries discussed by the VPs group (with an ever-changing mix of reasons), and set out to build a 4000-person hardened command-and-control "embassy" there; and to say any of this in public is regarded as a shocking impropriety and evidence of a conspiratorial turn-of-mind.

"Liberal" and "conservative" labels have almost nothing to do with the problems we face. A more penetrating analysis is needed.