The Great Disruption (4 page)

The politics and divisions within the business community around such shifts in direction are often complex and fascinating. So whereas in 1980 DuPont had spearheaded the creation of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, a lobby group fighting against regulation of CFCs, in 1986 with their change of heart they switched sides and lobbied the Reagan administration for action to ban them. DuPont's efforts culminated in the Montreal Protocol, a treaty President Reagan described as “a monumental achievement.”

Some argued this was primarily about business rather than ethics. The reality is it was both. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said, “The difficulties in negotiating the Montreal Protocol had nothing whatever to do with whether the environment was damaged or not. It was all about who was going to gain an edge over who; whether DuPont would have an advantage over the European companies or not.” I can well believe the negotiations at this point had become intensely commercial, with governments supporting their national companies' positions. U.S. and European companies were racing one another to capture the market for substitutes, but the business decisions involved were complex. DuPont, for example, had to commit to around $500 million of investment, so timing and competitive position would have been critical business questions.

This offers a very good example of the messy reality of business in relation to environmental decision making. There
are
deeply ethical issues involved,
and
they have enormous commercial consequences. This reflects the reality of how markets behave. Businesses often have a genuine, principled commitment to ethical behavior, but the evidence suggests it is only when change is profitable and in line with market reward that they shift behavior on a significant scale. This complexity continues today with climate change, where we see constantly shifting positions by companies and industries as they come to accept that change is both necessary and inevitable but then seek to gain commercial advantage by either accelerating or slowing down the transition.

As the CFC debate raged in the mid- to late 1980s, it helped trigger the rise of the corporate sustainability movement. Many companies like DuPont realized that resistance to the emerging world of increased environmental concern was both futile and poor business strategy. Such companies decided to get ahead of the curve and be proactive in pursuing better practices.

The 1980s also saw the spectacular growth of environmental organizations around the world and strong campaigning against corporate pollution, with individual companies targeted rather than just a general push for regulation. This was the birth of campaigns targeting brands, with activists deliberately using a company's focus on its brand as a point of vulnerability, as they did with Nike over sweatshops. Writer Naomi Klein noted: “Brand image, the source of so much corporate wealth, is also, it turns out, the corporate Achilles' heel.”
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The more a company is a brand image, the more vulnerable it becomes to activist campaigns targeting that image.

This was also the era when the seriousness of fighting for environmental protection came into sharp focus, with the murder of a Greenpeace activist by a Western government. On July 10, 1985, agents from the French government's intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, acting with the approval of French president François Mitterrand, bombed the Greenpeace vessel
Rainbow Warrior
in Auckland, New Zealand. The ship was about to sail for protests against nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific. The bombing killed crew member Fernando Pereira, photographer and father of two young children.

There had previously been many cases in the developing world where environmental activists were killed by criminal elements or secret police. However, this case, where a Western democratic government murdered an activist in a friendly Western democratic country, was a stark reminder for environmentalists everywhere of what was at stake. It was also evidence of protest groups' ability to have a significant impact on corporate and national reputation. Relatively small groups could now mobilize public opinion on a large scale with the clever use of the increasingly globalized media.

The
Rainbow Warrior
bombing and the broader public debate on the prospects for a nuclear war led me to reengage in activism from my then role as a serving member of the Australian military. I had joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1983.

Prior to that, I had worked as labor union organizer for a Communist-led trade union, the Builders Labourers Federation, in Sydney. While I felt I was making a contribution to society by protecting workers' rights and safe working conditions, in what was at that stage a pretty shoddy industry, I soon became disaffected with the ideological obsession of the leadership and their blind support of their political beliefs. There were too many examples where the leadership was focused more on the power and influence of the union rather than on the interests of the workers. At one stage, I even spent several weeks on a picket line in a dispute with another union over who covered the workers on that site. So I left that role in 1981, and after a year of unemployment (it being quite hard to land a job when your last one was as a labor organizer!), I joined the military.

This was a great surprise to my friends and family, who assumed my political leanings would prevent such a life turn. For me it was a consistent move. I was pursuing a life of making a contribution to society, and I saw the Australian military as doing just that.

While in the military and now with my second child, Asher, born, I became very concerned about the threat of nuclear war. Being in the military naturally led to great interest in matters of national and global security—after all, this was the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and a massive global movement against nuclear weapons.

I particularly remember a newspaper story from a science conference at the time reporting that an alarming proportion of teenagers believed there would be literally no future for them, as nuclear war was inevitable. They therefore felt there was no point in working toward a better life. It struck me that whether that assumption was accurate or not, the fact that we had a generation growing up with such a view was of great concern to me as a young parent.

I believe this period of global focus on the nuclear issue, when many came to understand that we had the capacity to destroy most of life on earth with a nuclear holocaust, was critical to later developments in society's collective thinking. It provided a deep and direct understanding of the idea of intergenerational impact and that we humans could easily and irreversibly affect the entire planetary system. I think some people today still struggle to believe we really have the power to damage the earth's environment as a whole. Sure, we could destroy a river here and a forest there, but the planet is
so
big, surely we couldn't wreck it all?

The prospects of a nuclear winter—a sudden global cooling triggered by a massive nuclear holocaust coating the planet with fine dust particles—showed that in fact, yes, we could, and with just a few buttons and phone calls. It was a sobering time. We had learned to understand the implications of Rachel Carson's comment that we had “now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature.”

Motivated by this threat to my children's future, I was by 1985 still serving in the military but spending my personal time active in waterborne protests conducted by an activist group, the Sydney Peace Squadron, on Sydney Harbour against visits by nuclear-armed warships from the United States and the United Kingdom. At that time, I still enjoyed serving in the military and continue to this day to have great respect for our armed forces.

While the Australia military exists in a clear democratic framework and was surprisingly tolerant of what I did on my own time, we did in the end agree that a long-term career in the military was probably not compatible with a personal life as an antinuclear campaigner, especially since our protests were against allied countries' ships. After some interesting (!) conversations with military intelligence, who came to check out my threat level, we amicably agreed to part company in 1986. I then committed myself full-time to my antinuclear campaigning; by that stage I was separated from my first wife and living with my two children.

Not being able to afford housing, the children and I occupied an abandoned government-owned house. It was badly dilapidated so we had to first rebuild the roof and put in doors and windows from scrap materials we collected. My income came from supportive activist friends and the government social-welfare payment for single parents. None of this posed a challenge as I was happily pursuing my life's purpose.

The anti–nuclear weapons movement had a great influence on the environmental debate, as it helped connect the dots on many levels. For example, it exposed the many linkages between the government military and security apparatus and the civilian nuclear power industry. It was perfect fodder for conspiracy stories and for dramatizations like the BBC's iconic TV series
The Edge of Darkness,
helping a whole generation grow up deeply skeptical about whose interests were being served by government.

After several years as an independent activist, I joined Greenpeace in late 1989 at a time when a great wave of growth had swept the U.S. and European environmental movements. Perhaps driven by the controversy around CFCs and the ozone hole on the back of the antinuclear campaigns, environmentalism had taken off in all Western countries. Membership and influence boomed as public awareness and media coverage exploded.

Companies ducked for cover as consumers railed against irresponsible behavior. This was the time when companies like Nike suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves embroiled in controversy. Nike thought their task was to make trainers and money but suddenly found themselves being expected to deal with complex social issues around social equity, workers' rights in developing countries, and different cultural expectations about the appropriate working age. It was becoming clear that some new competencies were going to be required to make money in the future.

Up until this time, environmental issues had been seen primarily as concerns in developed countries, where public support was high and regulation tightening. As a result, many companies had thought they could operate in developing countries where environmental standards were lax and wages cheap. But as the 1980s progressed, companies found that the globalization they liked because it lowered their costs was also creating a new interconnected world. Activists were joining together as a connected network, with cheap technology enabling anyone to send a message to corporate headquarters via the media. So suddenly behavior anywhere was public everywhere.

The best organization in the world at doing this in the late 1980s was without doubt Greenpeace. I joined them in 1989 to lead the Clean Waters Clean Seas campaign in Australia, which focused on exposing the more outrageous examples of corporate pollution. It was a classic Greenpeace pipe-plugging campaign, with our first direct action being to send divers to plug up the underwater discharge pipes that an oil refinery used to discharge toxic waste into the ocean. In Australia at the time, there was little effective regulation of industrial pollution. Our team secretly took samples from companies' discharge points that variously went into rivers, creeks, sewers, and oceans. Almost every discharge point we tested had levels of toxic waste way in excess of the legal limits specified in the companies' license agreements.

These were heady days for Greenpeace, with the media loving the combination of exciting and bold direct actions and the exposure of what we called “illegal toxic waste dumping” and the companies called “discharges temporarily in excess of license limits.” Our political influence skyrocketed, and our direct actions captured the public imagination. It was firmly positioning us as the environmental good guys against the corporate polluting bad guys.

Most of the companies involved were clueless in their response. An infamous highlight was when the corporate PR guy from BHP, Australia's biggest company at the time, put his hand across the lens of the TV cameras to prevent them from filming and had the journalists removed from the site by the police. This of course guaranteed sympathetic media for us, with blanket coverage of our protests, including our slogan rebranding BHP as Australia's “Big Horrible Polluter”! This incident became the classic case study at PR conferences over the next decade in how not to respond to environmental protests.

While our intentions were honorable and the company's behavior clearly wrong, not to mention illegal, I often grimace in hindsight at the delight I took in confronting corporate leaders on national television and humiliating them with the evidence of their “corporate vandalism.” Many of these were decent people caught by surprise with rapidly changing public expectations.

While most companies' responses were incredibly naive, one corporate CEO, Dr. Michael Deeley from the chemical giant ICI, called one day and asked if he could come and chat with me (I was by this stage CEO of Greenpeace Australia). It was a surprising move, and I immediately agreed. ICI was a key target of ours, as their Sydney chemical plant was an appalling example of poor environmental practices.

It was a fascinating meeting and started to shift my attitudes to the corporate sector and more broadly to the role of the market. It was a private meeting, and we were both candid about our situations. Deeley explained that while Greenpeace's campaigns were an issue for him, the much larger challenge was getting his organization to change its attitude toward environmental issues and to give them more priority. He talked about the old guard's attitude and the complexities of modernizing an old organizational culture.

He was clearly a decent man, and while it didn't stop us from campaigning hard against ICI over the years that followed, it certainly gave me an important insight into corporate behavior. It also made me think deeply about the dangerous psychology of “demonizing the enemy” as we had been doing to great effect. I understood he was coming to see me to avoid this, in his company's self-interest, but I started to doubt the ethics of what we were doing as well. I thought perhaps we needed to focus more on attacking the behavior and less on attacking the morality of the people behind it.