The Problem With the Big Green’s Naomi Klein Gripe

Counterpunch Weekend Edition

September 13-15, 2013

by Macdonald Stainsby

Stockholm Syndrome in a Three Piece Suit

Environmentalists are curiously the only people who are supposedly to act in the sphere of social justice who are supposed to never force but only persuade. And yet on climate, we are dealing with the largest and most powerful human forces in existence: energy corporations who are a part of the US military industrial complex. We can point out the obvious: Having the head of the David Suzuki Foundation also consulting for Shell Oil is like a peace activist consulting for the Marines– but what of groups ostensibly in opposition to the energy corporations? Is this an accurate reality, or is it a picture we have been given?

Climate change organizing has received a lot more attention than where it was a few years ago. Despite the people who retort against the body of what Klein is saying, it is not the long hours these primarily white, well fed middle class people spent justifying to Dow Chemical that they need to call for 450-550 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere (regardless of the fact such numbers are deadly to most life on the planet) that caused world attention to skyrocket. World events, and actual victims have changed the narrative.

The crimes of Shell were elucidated to the world by the resistance of people, mainly indigenous, doing the day to day dying in the Niger Delta; the people giving them awards were the WWF. The crimes of fracking operators in the United States northeast were highlighted by farmers and ranchers who needed the water and noticed it was catching on fire and their skin was burning right off of their bones, the people telling us we need natural gas from fracking have been the NRDC. The destruction of the tar sands in Canada is most well known because of indigenous refusal to disappear from history to cancer and the destruction of their traditional forests; those who want us to work with Shell & Suncor run the David Suzuki Foundation.

Greenpeace, at least in the ‘home’ province of British Columbia, Canada, has suffered the same fate of accepting the simple logic that, to quote Naomi Klein’s interview, “We now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, ‘sue the bastards;’ it’s, ‘work through corporate partnerships with the bastards’ There is no enemy anymore. More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. That’s the model that has lasted to this day.”

Klein then goes on to outline the history of the Green Groups jumping ship to embrace NAFTA, even when the non-staff public supporters of these groups said no. If this were the only bar to measure an organization, then her statement “It’s not every green group,” would be correct. Big Green for Nafta did not include the short list of exceptions she makes. However, she had outlined the far more important marker in her interview earlier of corporate-partnered outlooks.

The part of the story that is missing (and it was just an interview) from her critique is the fundamental shift that took place in Green Groups that signed on to the pro NAFTA ENGO declarations. That shift had not involved Greenpeace nor the Sierra Club as yet; that has since taken place for both organizations.

350.org not only is guilty of the approach, it owes its very existence to the fundamental shift– and that shift was towards authoritarian structures steered by non-group actors playing the role of sugar daddy.

In the days before NAFTA was signed, The Pew Foundation had begun funding the Greens who ultimately agitated for the Free Trade Agreement; the pro-Democratic elite liberal foundations were all also wedded to Free Trade and the Clinton presidency.

In other words, the base of decision making is now in the hands of those with capital. Small wonder that whatever the campaigns so devised call for it always avoids challenging the logic of capital dominance itself.

Many people have picked apart the history of Greenpeace; entire books written on the subject don’t need to be revisited in a short article. Let’s just hit the highlights of the descent of Greenpeace in practice (not rhetoric) over the past few years, as giant foundations have laid control upon perhaps the most recognizable green group on the planet, in the very place it was born.

There have been multiple deals and partnerships between Greenpeace Canada and corporations in the last couple of decades. In the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, Greenpeace not only signed a deal with 8 other green interests alongside nearly two dozen logging companies at the same time, but the announcements were a bit of a coming out party for the model of authoritarian capitalism taking the reins of green groups in Canada, much like Greens for NAFTA did in the United States almost 20 years before.

The agreement was a (destruction of the vital) watershed moment. It was roundly condemned by First Nations community members for supposedly signing off on final status and use agreements without their consent. It was described by some experts as a farce, as it did not actually have scientific backing for many of the claims, leading to the creation of a “real CBFA map²” for circulation.

Greenpeace has since left the agreement. They did not cite concerns over First Nations sovereignty, public democratic input or problematic forestry giveaways that had resulted from the deal. Indeed, the reasons the deal was scuttled by GP was stated as: “a lack of any tangible increase in permanent protection and conservation of the Boreal Forest,³” and not proceeding at a pace consistent with the agreements around protected areas and “sustainable logging practices” not yet being applied.

Richard Brooks was the public face of Greenpeace who made the CBFA announcement. When this announcement went out, he was referenced in an oft repeated quip by Avrim Lazar who was representing the Forest Products Association of Canada [FPAC]:“One interesting feature of the agreement here is with Greenpeace, David Suzuki, ForestEthics, Canadian Parks and Wilderness on our side– when someone else comes to try and bully us, the agreement actually requires that they come and work with us in repelling the attack and we’ll be able to say, ‘Fight me and fight my gang!’⁴” Brooks was then pointed at by Lazar.

Lazar’s point was a signed legal agreement to not only not support member companies forestry practices, but defend the corporations to their shareholders if other parties complained. Let’s say a woman from a Cree community doesn’t want to see an area that is part of a tree farm license held by an FPAC company logged– both because it is sensitive for fish habitat and also traditionally sacred to her nation. Greenpeace agreed to then intervene on the side of the forestry company. That’s more than capitalism, but outright eco-colonialism.

This same Brooks, still today working in forestry for Greenpeace (choice of words deliberate) has been given some rather remarkably blunt awards lately. He is currently feted (By GP itself) for winning the “Clean 50” award from “Delta Management” “corporate sustainability and clean technology search.” What’s that award for? “Honouring outstanding contributors to sustainable development and clean capitalism in Canada.”⁵ I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

However, let’s go over a little bit about the groups also standing with Greenpeace and Brooks at that press conference. There are 9 groups identified as environmental organizations in total.

There are uniting threads to these groups. Not one of them hold annual general meetings where policy is set by memberships, and a few of them aren’t actually Environmental NGO’s. This is the part of the story of the CBFA that seems to have been overlooked at the time.

The Canadian Boreal Initiative is one that does not exist, except as a program from Ducks Unlimited (DU). Ducks Unlimited itself, while they may send you a neato calendar or whatever is the Christmas mailout this year, is primarily funded by US foundations, and gets it through a route that goes through the US wing of the same organization. DU Canada then spends money on a project called “Canadian Boreal Initiative” that does not have a society, board of directors or public mandate of any sort.

The CBI is there to crush the notion of adversarial relations in the environment in favour of capitalist solutions in tandem with the most powerful corporations on the planet. The CBI advertises partnership with multiple industrial corporations, including Suncor, Canada’s largest energy company and original non-conglomerate tar sands developer. Further, Suncor was originally owned by Sunoco– and the founders (and still majority of the board) of the Pew Foundation // Charitable Trusts (and their splinter groups) also got their money from US big oil in their original endowment– today’s Sunoco.

Small world, isn’t it?

The CBFA marks the blurring of lines between all the various Green groups and fronts and foundations. The Pew Environment Group is directly funded by Pew, of course, but so are all the remaining groups.

The bigger uniting Foundation, however, is Tides Canada.

Immediately after the CBFA was announced, Tides Canada –formed as a legal entity separate from but related to the large US foundation, originally almost exclusively funded by none other than the Pew itself– began to work publicly extolling the agreement. Tides has gone into other areas as well, giving Greenpeace an award for the CBFA, citing the agreement as “showing the world how forest companies and environmental organizations can work together to secure a more sustainably managed Boreal Forest…”⁶ Tides also began to go public about Canadian tar sands organizing and other environmental issues. Backroom no more, the media treats them as just another group.

Greenpeace is supposedly the one grouping on this list that doesn’t receive oodles of corporate funding, and comparatively speaking, that’s the case. However, Tides has now begun earmarking major financial contributions to Greenpeace for campaigns: Prior to now around the CBFA, but more often for the North American Tar Sands Coalition, currently run by former Greenpeace activist but now favourite of green capitalists, Tzeporah Berman.

Now the rule has become this: If you have staff and are an environmental organization in North America, you are funded and directed by foundations who see “saving capitalism from itself” as the goal of environmentalism today. So what are we left with? Unfortunately, more of the same. South of the border, Bill McKibben’s outfit, 350.org, is a new face of this game. If only they were not.

Bolivia, with its president Evo Morales, hosted a People’s Summit in April, 2010 to bring in social movements, governments and social justice advocates from around the world who were attempting to go beyond the capitalist (and industrial) framework that has handcuffed both negotiators and grassroots activists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks, supposedly designed to determine a framework to tackle climate globally.

Almost all the major corrupt ENGOs were not there; however, 350.org was one of the invited groups and McKibben was a special guest. There were various peoples who wore 350 t-shirts and the like, positioning themselves as facilitators of various groups, and using that role to steer the conversation towards why people needed to adopt 350ppm as the goal. I want to avoid a long talk about the science– suffice to say the arguments were of “practicality”: “There is simply no way that one could (as of 3.5 years ago) call for 300ppm and get action from other governments to achieve this” to roughly paraphrase 350 interventions.

Since then, 350 has fared much better than the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba. In a recent piece⁸, I wrote a little on the history of 350 in the US. Suffice to say, they are now very well-funded, by the very same people who fund not just Big Green, but the very people in North America it is most deadly to hand direction of social justice struggles to: The US Democratic Party, especially the Hopey Changey variety of brand Obama.

It has been noted for quite some time now that Obama didn’t save the people of Iraq, or the workers in their over-mortgaged homes. Instead, he saved the bankers and the industrialists who have created the mess in the first place, through giving a large segment of the population a reason to “trust” again, and handing over trillions of US Dollars to the richest people on the planet. Bill McKibben’s 350.org, Greenpeace and all the other green groups mentioned or alluded to in Klein’s original piece have performed the same role for capitalism inside the environmental movement. Giving people reason to trust structures and look to corporations as “partners” in solutions to the problems created by– corporate capitalism.

At the end of her original interview, I have to say I agreed with Naomi Klein on the overwhelming bulk of what she said about the “Big Greens” and how they have (either by design or default) been better at creating complacency among climate activists and the population at large than the corporations. Who could possibly deny to themselves that oil or coal magnates have a rather vested interest in denying that climate change is as dire as the predictions of science?

But what happens when the advocates of “climate action” propose actions that are doomed to failure, being wrapped in false economic logic, rather than demands that deny the right of capital first and foremost?

Is the problem that we have gone so far down the “collaboration” model, the pro-capital model? The model where democratic decision making is an alien concept existing only outside of the environmental movement? It is excellent that this analysis is being re-fleshed out thanks to Naomi Klein making a few off the cuff remarks in an interview.

What do we do when Greenpeace signs agreements to try and silence any environmental criticism of corporations they enjoy partnerships with? Who do we criticize if we have been forced into bed with the Obama administration and John Kerry?

Finally, just a curiosity: Did not Naomi Klein herself join the 350.org board of directors awhile back⁹? Given her stated opinions on the corporate influence on ENGOs, it should be a great time to agitate for a new, democratic and honest movement: One that dares speak the name of capitalism, the creator of industrial climate change– and the failed corporate responses– today.

[Macdonald Stainsby is an anti-tar sands and social justice activist, freelance writer and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to the better world, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at mstainsby@resist.ca]