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TODAY Monday 4 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: More Crime, Please

In 1990, when I started work as the environmental person at a new grant-making foundation -- the kind of place that supports this Website -- I was urged to attend many meetings with my new professional colleagues so as to learn the lay of the philanthropic land. There were a number of well-informed, substantial program directors at that time, though not so many as today (of course), and a number of chucklehead ideologues.

There were and are chucklehead environmental funder ideologues of the right-wing variety, but they tend to avoid the trade and guild meetings that I frequented. Our meetings featured well-compensated Marxians who tended to the instructional voice. "Never forget," urged one of them, "that most of the environmental problems of the world are due to corporate criminality." Almost everyone nodded.

I've often thought of his remark, wistfully. Would that it were so. Beef up the enforcement divisions, convene a tribunal at The Hague, shoot a few malefactors pour encourager les autres. You would not find me wanting.

The problem, of course, is that the remark is deeply wrong. I'm reminded of this reading an account of a story by Frank Clifford in last week's Los Angeles Times. Clifford reports that the Lacandona rainforest of southern Mexico, one of the most biologically diverse places on earth, home to half of all plant and animal species in Mexico, is now being ravaged by land-hungry peasants looking for decent homesteads. The Selva Lacandona is nominally off-limits to human habitation, but the Mexican government is loathe to enforce the conservation laws in that portion of the country, where the Zapatista rebels still hold loyal followings. Population growth, coupled with colonial-era landholding patterns, impel young campesinos to seek out lands where they can set up their own farms to grow corn and graze cattle. As their counterparts do in Brazil, Sumatra, and Sierra Leone, men in their 20s and 30s fell the trees, burn the stubble, and import non-native plants, all for motivations that any American can admire and respect. It is, after all, what we did on this continent.

One can argue that deforestation is still largely a problem of corporate excess. Though the close-at-hand agent of destruction may be an honorable peasant, often he is placed in that situation by the occupation of more appropriate agricultural lands by large corporations. And in some places -- Thailand, Russia, Canada -- logging by multinationals removes much more forest than the expansion of farmlands. Still, when you tote up the figures, most deforestation is accomplished by poor people, most deforestation is perfectly legal, and most deforestation that is not perfectly legal is done by the poor. As Frank Clifford says, the kind of destruction occurring in the Lacandona "raises a different challenge for conservation groups used to claiming the high moral ground" by picking fights with oil and timber companies.

It's not so different in this country. On an important band of the spectrum of environmental problems -- particularly regarding the manufacture, use, and disposal of synthetic chemicals -- violations of the law by corporations is a huge issue. Federal and state watchdogs are understaffed and underfunded (see "The Environmental Non-Protection Agency"). But even within the case of synthetic chemicals, I would wager that more damage to humans and nature is done through socially-sanctioned means. And for other major environmental problems -- global warming, soil erosion, air pollution -- there is no question but that the great preponderance of the harm is occasioned by decent people acting in full compliance with the law. The laws need fixing and the corporations need reining, but it's hard to pin the environmental degradation rap on felons in the boardroom. The real challenge for many of the cleaved souls of American environmentalism is how to be a democrat and a conservationist at the same time.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Learn more about forests and their reduction from Brad Auer, who presides over the relevant territory in our In The Trenches section. No simple answers.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/01: Wise Use, Smart Use
7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf
7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening
7/24: Top and Bottom
7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess
7/21: Don't Know Much About Conservation

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