In 1999, a Los Angeles court issued subpoenas to 17 U.S firms — including Wal-Mart, Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, and Sears — seeking more than one billion dollars in damages over garments supposedly manufactured in sweatshops in the Mariana Islands. In 2005, the state of Illinois passed legislation that would allow them to divest from corporations indirectly bankrolling the Darfur genocide, a gesture that would later inspire 105 universities, 11 U.S. cities and 15 countries to initiate targeted divestment campaigns in the Sudanese government and move 9 major oil, natural gas and infrastructural companies to cease or significantly alter operations in the region. In 2006, Victoria’s Secret pledged a moratorium on printing their 350 million mailed catalogues a year on non-recycled paper from Canada’s semi-protected boreal forests, promising to incorporate up to 10 percent post-consumer waste within a year.
We live in a world where market failures and corporate irresponsibility are often treated as givens; where sustainability and profiting are assumed to lie at odds. We think of sweatshops as necessary and use of recycled materials as exceptional; when corporations are found linked to violence we barely bat a collective eyelid. Assumptions are sometimes a product of intimidation; the sheer size of corporations today bears greater resemblance to the nation state than it does to a small or medium sized business capable of treading softly.
But what we overlook in the process is that with a private sector at scale comes damage and destruction at scale, but also potential for change at scale. When Victoria Secret decides to shift to 10 percent post consumer recycled waste, millions of old growth trees can be considered newly protected. When the world’s largest garment producers institute a pay raise for, or add a bathroom break to the daily allowances of subjugated sweatshop workers, quality of life improves for hundreds of thousands. When oil and natural gas companies cannot, in good faith, continue work in Sudan, money that would otherwise be channeled into arms trading and violence is cut off at the source.
These changes only really occur when consumer opposition to corporate negligence is voiced, both in the form of activism and purchase shifting toward more sustainable options. Constituent calls to congressmen motivated lawsuits against sweatshops; letter writing moved Victoria’s Secret to greater environmental sustainability; t-shirt campaigns and petitions on college campuses bolstered the cause for Sudan divestment. Meanwhile, increasing popularity of products like petroleum-free Seventh Generation laundry detergent, organic Stoneyfield Yogurt and domestically produced clothing indirectly ramp up the pressures on other careless corporations.
Recognizing the immense power of consumer awareness is both exciting and daunting. Because if we have the power to demand that the companies that produce our energy, clothes, electronics, shoes, food and entertainment maintain a triple bottom line — an accounting system that considers human, economic and environmental sustainability — there is no end to our obligation to spur greater responsibility within the private sector. Everything we need is predicated upon some contribution from natural capital, be it oil for shipping, mineral resources for electronics, pulp for paper — we could spend all our days attempting to change the various ways in which the things we buy exploit the planet and its people.
Personally, I’m completely dizzied by the whole thing. I have spent a significant portion of my time on hold with Coca-Cola, waiting to complain about the overuse of precious of water resources in India. It took me days to find a phone company that could assert that their coltan mineral purchases were not funding civil conflict in the Congo. I have no idea how many of the vegetables I eat began their lives as Monsanto-patented seeds — a protection that has ruined many small farmers’ attempted avoidance of genetically modified crops. I’m not particularly certain that FedEx cares that I think they should invest in natural gas vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions nor do I think Nutella has noticed my disapproval of their use of deforestation-inducing palm oil.
What it comes down to is whether we settle or not; whether we actively acknowledge corporate irresponsibility and move on, or demand better. And if we choose to not ask the most of ourselves and consumers, and of others as producers, fine. But we must realize that in the process, we will be passing up a great opportunity at justice and fairness; consumer awareness may be one of the only attempts at sustainability that has been met with successes at scale. And just as our needs are endless, we must remember: so too are the possibilities.
The customer’s always right, right?
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