At Thu, 4 Mar 1999 15:52:07 EST, you wrote:
>
>In the dominant celebrity culture, explanations of societal phenomena that
>focus on institutions, laws and processes tend not to resonate with the
>public.
>
>Increasingly, it seems, events and trends are understood and reported as
>the products of individuals: Bill Gates creates the computer revolution,
>Boris Yeltsin leads Russia to a purported democracy, Treasury Secretary
>Robert Rubin, flanked by Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and Deputy
>Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers guide the world economy through
>turbulent times to a prosperous future.
>
>Well, say reporters James Ridgeway and Jeffrey St. Clair, let's apply the
>personification-of-social-developments approach even-handedly.
>
>In A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (New York: Thunder's
>Mouth Press), Ridgeway and St. Clair name names of the worst polluters,
>deforesters and despoilers of the wild, and the top lobbyists they employ
>to pass laws, gut regulations, broker deals and win tax breaks to
>legitimize their poisoning and destruction of the environment. (For more
>on the book, see www.essential.org/orgs/ecobadguys.)
>
>"You can focus on institutions and laws until you're blue in the
>face," Ridgeway says, but no one will pay attention.
>
>"While there has been a plethora of books on how the environment
>is getting better," he says, in fact things are getting worse. And the way
>to grab people's attention is not by waving statistical trends on
>deforestation or global warming or any of a myriad of other environmental
>ills. People respond when they can put a human face on problems.
>
>There's another reason to identify the "bad guys," Ridgeway says.
>"You need to know your enemy," Ridgeway explains. "How they operate, what
>they eat, what their styles" of doing business are.
>
Excellent info, and the point of view I was espousing when I posted the info I was
originally attacked for making available to EcoFem. BTW, James Ridgeway also wrote
"Blood in the Face", the neonazi skinhead and kkk history I recommended to Donna in
order to more fully understand what she was up against in Idaho.
>
>So who do Ridgeway and St. Clair identify as the bad guys? Here's
>a smattering:
>
>* John Bryson, CEO of Edison International. Ridgeway and St. Clair list
>Bryson's "most imaginative sideline" as co-founding the Natural Resources
>Defense Council. Edison's subsidiary Mission Energy is building dirty
>coal-fired plants in Indonesia.
>
>* Charles Hurwitz, CEO of Maxxam, who just managed to ransom the
>Headwaters redwood grove in northern California for nearly half a
>billion dollars. Faced with threats that Maxxam saws would chew the entire
>forest, the Clinton administration agreed to pay $480 million to
>acquire Headwaters -- even though the government estimated the market
>value at less than $100 million and even though companies owned by Hurwitz
>owe the government nearly $2 billion for the collapse of a savings and
>loan.
>
>* Jim Bob Moffett, head of Freeport McMoran, the mining giant that
>operates the world's largest gold and copper mine in Indonesia. Local
>indigenous communities charge the company has polluted local rivers,
>killing fish and forests, and that the Indonesian military has committed
>brutal human rights abuses to crush anti-Freeport protests. Moffett's
>"quotable quote," according to Environmental Bad Guys, refers to Freeport
>pollution at the Indonesian mine: "[It's] equivalent to me pissing in the
>Arafura Sea."
>
>* Ira Rennert, who is now building the largest residence in the United
>States, on Long Island, and controls 95 percent of Renco Group, which in
>turn owns Magnesium Corp. of America, "the largest source of air pollution
>in America."
>
>* Donald Pearlman, a former high official in the Reagan Energy and
>Interior Departments, who "is by far the energy industry's most effective
>lobbyist in fighting climate control rules."
>
>Identifying the bad guys is Ridgeway and St. Clair's entry point, but it
>is not the entirety of their handy Pocket Guide. In addition to peeling
>away corporate greenwashing to reveal how dirty Big Business really is,
>they highlight the critical work being done by thousands of grassroots
>groups in the United States to put the bad guys in their place.
>
>Ridgeway and St. Clair have subtitled Environmental Bad Guys "(and a Few
>Ideas on How to Stop Them)." The most important of these ideas, Ridgeway
>explains, is that hope for saving the environment lies not with "the large
>environmental groups which sit in Washington, and don't represent anybody
>or anything," but with the smaller groups that have maintained their edge,
>practice a combative politics and are directly confronting corporate
>power.
>
>It turns out that while highlighting individual bad guys may be a key to
>focusing the public on environmental degradation, the key to blocking them
>is not to rely on individual celebrities, but garnering public support.
>Prominent environmental good guys -- people like David Brower, founder of
>the Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and Lois Gibbs, made
>famous at Love Canal and now heading the Center for Health, Environment
>and Justice -- have made their mark not as backroom lobbyists, but as
>effective organizers and crusaders for environmental justice.
>
>Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
>Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
>Multinational Monitor.
>
>(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
>Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
>and Robert Weissman.
>
>
>
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher
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