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By Root 940 0

economies in the world, over half are corporations—ahead of most countries.2 When corporations control such a huge percentage of global resources, it’s pretty hard to reign them in when they start trashing the planet, as far too many do. In 2007, the 60,000-plus multinational corporations controlled half the world’s oil, gas, and coal and generated half the gases responsible for global warming.3 In the United States, corporations are legally beholden above all else to make profit for their shareholders. So entities with a number one goal of short-term profit control much of the world’s energy resources, the unbridled use of which is throwing our entire global climate into disarray.

In addition to their size and influence, corporations benefit from a number of legal and structural mechanisms that grant them powerful rights while allowing them to avoid many responsibilities. For example, U.S. corporations enjoy the same protection of rights under the U.S. Constitution as individuals—aka “personhood.” At the same time, legal mechanisms exist that protect corporate shareholders with what’s known as limited liability.

Even with these structural challenges, some corporations have taken steps to protect people and the planet while still making a profit (which, again, they are legally obligated to prioritize). Some corporations have made good progress toward using fewer resources, eliminating toxics, creating less waste, and respecting workers and host communities.

Yet voluntary codes of conduct or the good intentions of those currently in charge have proven not to be enough. Both the corporate structure and the surrounding regulatory system need to be changed: we should do away with limited liability and “personhood” under the Constitution and demand an increase in corporate accountability, stronger antitrust laws and international liability, the extraction of corporations out of the political process, extended producer responsibility, internalized (vs. externalized) costs, and total stakeholder responsibility (and it should be recognized that stakeholders include workers, fence-line communities, consumers, vendors, etc. All these will facilitate corporations becoming less of a problem and more of the solution).

Development:

Intuitively we understand that “development” has to do with things getting better. Unfortunately, too often development has come to refer to progress toward implementing a fossil-fuel-intensive, toxics-laden, consumption-driven economy. Thus, small towns in Costa Rica with high life expectancy, literacy, and life satisfaction may still be considered less “developed” than U.S. cities with higher rates of environmental degradation, social inequality, and stress.

The international “development” institutions, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, have too often pushed policies and projects that promote a model of economic growth that makes things worse, not better, for people and the planet.

We need to keep our eye on the goals: human and environmental well-being. If new infrastructure, urbanization, and resource consumption contribute to those goals, great, that’s real development. But if they start undermining well-being, then that’s destruction, not development. Some advances, especially in medicine and communication, are clearly positive. Other things that generally come when a country advances down this path, like toxic body burdens and greenhouse gas emissions, are anything but.

Throughout this book, I’ve used the terms “developing” and “developed” as shorthand and as they are commonly used. I don’t mean to imply a value judgment: so-called developed countries are not better than those designated as developing. The same global socioeconomic divide is sometimes described as the Global North or OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) versus the Global South or nonOECD. (North versus South are not strict geographical references; for example, the wealthy nations