UPDATE: The following essay has been slightly revised to take into account a reader’s correction.
Should we be on tip-toes waiting for big business to save the earth? How long can we hold that pose? My feet hurt already.
Jared Diamond (Wiki, UCLA bio 1, UCLA bio 2), often mistaken by the media as an anthropologist, published the op-ed “Will Big Business Save the Earth” in The New York Times on December 5.
He makes a pitch that big business will save the earth. Stating that his current feelings are “nuanced,” he notes the acceleration in the “embrace” of “environmental concerns” by “chief executives” and offers evidence for this in Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron.
He provides three paragraphs extolling the virtues of Wal-Mart and one describing the problems Coca-Cola faces in securing a local supply of clean water. Nothing at all about Chevron. This is bad, I think. I can count to three: What’s going on?
Okay, so he can’t count, and he lost track of his third example. Never mind that his first two examples are not convincing.
In the case of Chevron, he describes one oil field project in Papua New Guinea on which Chevron lavished huge expenditures as a showcase of its moral high ground. It can never be replicated in every situation due to the impossibly high costs involved. It is a practice dubbed by enviro critics as “greenwashing.”
How about timing? Does he not pay attention to major events in the world related to large corporations and what havoc they have wreaked? Like, Bhopal?
The New York Times published Diamond’s op-ed almost exactly 25 years after the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India: December 3, 1984.
Union Carbide has still not done the right thing by the people of Bhopal in all these 25 years. And it’s difficult to imagine what the “right thing” is considering the devastation at the time and the fallout, in all respects — human, environmental — that continues to the present.
Has Jared Diamond heard of Bhopal? Or has he been bought? If so, that’s not nuanced.
For more information, see this special issue on Bhopal from Global Social Policy. Image: “Clean up Bhopal Now” by Flickr user Joe Athialy, Creative Commons licensed.
anthropologyworks 
Thank you for pointing out this op-ed — I missed it when it was first published, and I share your disgust after reading it now.
One note about Chevron — perhaps you missed the final page of the op-ed, but he does indeed add his praises of Chevron. Interestingly, what does not get mentioned in the op-ed is that the WWF (whose board he is on) had a $3 million-dollar contract with Chevron in the early ’90s. (my source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/08)
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Zoe, Thanks for your excellent comment. Indeed, I must be missing part of the op-ed where he praises Chevron. So, right, he can count to three. As in $3 million, maybe…! Barbara
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