Environmental Advocacy Quotes

I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions.

Joyfully we undertake our daily work.

To this end, industry think tanks recruited a handful of scientists to serve as climate skeptics and paid them to travel around the country to give speeches and press interviews that challenged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. As investigators discovered, ExxonMobil helped underwrite “the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign” waged since the tobacco days. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil funneled $16 million “to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) became particularly active.

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

Public policy formulation has gone a metamorphic change during the last three or four decades due to rapidly globalising world. There are at least four ways in which globalization is affecting the policy formulation in each country. Firstly, thanks to social and electronic media, small issues which a decade or so ago could only find place in the back page of a national newspaper become breaking news in major global channels creating advocacy and sympathy movements in different parts of the world. Secondly, with the rapidly globalizing world, global issues like environmental degradation, climate change, GMO, etc., which were only discussed in the corridors of power are being debated in the drawing rooms of countries and creating strong advocacy movements among the population. Thirdly, centers of actual power and decision making are shifting from local to global level with the outreach of domestic interest groups to their sympathizers in international organizations, multinational corporations and those in the governments of global powers. This outreach enables them to force their own government to accede to their demands because of economic and political clout of the global players. Lastly, whether approached by the domestic interests or not, global state and non-state actors are increasingly penetrating those domains which were henceforth exclusively reserved for the domestic state machinery. They not only interfere in the policy formulation but are now acting direct through their proxies in the form of nongovernmental organizations in domestic policy formulation and implementation.

Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization By Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz Center for Immigration Studies, Paper 18, March 2001 In the late 1990s, as in 1970, the problems stemming from U.S. population growth were huge news. But the underlying population growth itself and its causes were barely being mentioned. Al Gore, the "environmental vice president," gave it no emphasis in his national campaign against urban sprawl. In virtually a complete reversal of the 1970 conditions, U.S. population growth was treated by most environmental leaders and journalists as an implacable natural phenomenon, which, like hurricanes and earthquakes, we could not prevent but only adjust to. Historians may find that the key reason for that fundamental shift in the way the public learned about environmental issues through the news media was the behavior of environmental advocacy groups. Journalists tend to look to competing interest groups to define the issues they cover. Business groups always have defined one end of the growth issue spectrum as they pushed for ever more population growth. At one time, environmental groups defined the other end by calling for no growth. By the late 1990s, however, those groups no longer emphasized population growth as something a nation could choose or reject. Most of the scores of American environmental groups either ignored U.S. population growth altogether, treated it as a negative but inexorable force whose effects can only be mitigated, or even suggested that growth in human numbers is environmentally benign.

Though many taps are dry in Midtown Detroit, the region does not lack for water. In fact, Nestlé has large water bottling operations in the Great Lakes, drawing on the same natural water systems that feed Detroit. Nestlé paid a $5,000 one-time application fee to begin operations as well as an annual $200 permit fee for the groundwater well it operates in Michigan, but there is no meter running. The company draws water for free now—and sells it to consumers by the bottle. “Why does Nestlé get it for free . . . and make millions while the people in Detroit have been shut off because they can’t afford it?” asked Jim Olson, an environmental lawyer who founded For Love of Water (FLOW), an advocacy group dedicated to protecting the Great Lakes. “Everybody else on the system who is not selling it is subsidizing their profit.

Advocacy is a natural process that comes from within. It emerges when someone gets to the point where they are tired of witnessing the injustice imposed upon others and decide to do something about it. It is not something you can buy or pay for. It comes from the heart. That is where the fiercest warriors come from.

Interdisciplinary discussions that bring multiple perspectives to bear on a given problem have the power to challenge, corroborate, and thereby clarify competing truths. They can help us to see that fostering an ethical relationship with nature, one that respects both the human and the nonhuman members of the biotic com- munity, is not as simple as it seems. By bringing together the perspectives of history, science, advocacy, and the lived experience of those most affected by environmental policies, we can contemplate the paths that brought us here and reimagine the road ahead. That Janus-like approach, it seems, is the essence of public history.

the existence of environmental advocacy groups depends on a constant stream of environmental fears.

Nonhuman primates have been crowded out of diminishing forests, hunted for food or “medicine,” kidnapped for the lucrative pet/tourist trade, and bred for science. As a result, every primate species on the planet—aside from human beings—is either endangered or threatened.

Might does not make right; self-interest—even desperate self-interest—does not justify exploiting others.