This month's Fast Company magazine has a fascinating article on whether former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach "sold his soul" by going to work for Wal-Mart. Since last year, Werbach and his company, Act Now, have been running a program to teach Wal-Mart's 1.3 million US employees about personal sustainability. Werbach's new job raises important questions about the environmental movement and whether it is better to pressure companies from "outside" or from within, as Werbach is doing.
I'm a long-time environmental activist whose first gig was with the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG), which is as activist and outsider as you get -- and, in my judgment, have also been quite effective. Activist groups have had substantial successes affecting corporate sustainability policies (how can you argue with the successful campaign to stop Home Depot from selling old-growth wood?), but other approaches deserve our attention as well. More collaborative strategies are gaining ground -- working with corporations to establish solutions, both short and long term, to improve our environmental situation.
Environmentalists need a seat at the corporate table not just to say, "change or else ..." but as part of an ongoing dialogue, making the business case on why tackling sustainability challenges makes sense.
Amory Lovins, the Johnny Appleseed of energy efficiency, has achieved enormous success working the inside game with Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and other Fortune 500 companies. One of his proposals to Wal-Mart was that the company's truck drivers use small, more efficient engines installed behind the fuel tanks of their rigs to air-condition their cabs while parked, instead of running their main engines. The change is expected to eliminate about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions and save $25 million a year for Wal-Mart.
This "inside" approach is a strategy I embrace. At Ceres, we hold quarterly meetings with companies such as Bank of America, Dell and McDonald's to discuss pressing sustainability challenges, and strategies for dealing with them. Participants at these meetings include investors, environmentalists and labor groups -- each bringing a different perspective that the companies need to hear. These outside stakeholders learn in turn about business challenges, and work on influencing the development of solutions.
Developing these close relationships takes time, but it does yield results: in one recent example, Dell's commitment to press its biggest suppliers to report their greenhouse gas emissions and reduce its own operational greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2012.
If we are going to have a real shot at tackling the magnitude of environmental challenges we face today, we need to use as many constructive approaches as we can come up with to get practical, get results, and keep pushing ourselves. And the more we can leverage each other's ideas, the better. Oftentimes, it takes a combination of external pressures and input from trusted outsiders to create positive changes within companies. By working with industry giants whose actions can create enormous ripples all across the world, the successes will outweigh the defeats.
Image Credit: flickr/Dilip Muralidaran
