Environmentalism in the Corporate Climate

A t one point early in the environmental debate, there was a belief that corporate executives and their children, having to breathe the air, eat the food, and drink (or swim in) the water, might possibly feel a certain selfinterested urgency about saving the planet on which they were the wealthiest inhabitants. Several decades later, the cultural and ethical degeneracy of unmitigated freeenterprise capitalism—ideologically justified in concepts of “deregulation,” “corporate competitiveness,” “costeffectiveness,” and “personal freedom”—has produced a corporate elite that has shown itself thoroughly unable to grasp, let alone solve, the disastrous and at times irreversible effects of their production policies. Equally frightening is the manner in which corporate values have contaminated the politics of the environmental establishment. . . . While the environmental establishment may be very pleased with itself, the toxins are not impressed. As Dr. Barry Commoner has pointed out, “For the first time in the 3.5billionyear history of life on this planet, living things are burdened with a host of manmade poisonous substances, the vast majority of which are now even more prevalent in