Dreams of a Livable Future
Democracy, ecology, and cultural vitality depend on a new economic vision for the world
May / June 2003
By Paul Hawken, Utne magazine
By almost any measure, multinational corporations have failed spectacularly on their promise of fostering global democracy and prosperity. That’s why people all across the planet—from villagers in India to students in North America—are stepping up to challenge the abuses of big business. While corporate power is deeply entrenched, this new economic democracy movement is fueled by a fresh set of strategies about how people can regain power. —The Editors
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I was recently asked to give a talk in Melbourne, Australia, to a group of businesspeople to make a case for sustainable development. I watched them gorge on roast chicken and chocolate mousse and chardonnay and coffee, and by the time I got up to speak I didn’t think they wanted what I was going to serve. They were full. Instead of answering, I posed the opposite question: I asked them what the business case is for worldwide endemic poverty, for double-glazing the planet with greenhouse gases. I asked them how it came to pass that we created an economic system that tells us it’s cheaper to destroy the earth than to take care of it. Why do we get economic signals that are antithetical to our deeply held values and common sense? Why do we separate the benefits of industrial development to some from the cost to others? Why do our deepest aspirations for goodness, for inclusion and generosity not cumulate into a peaceful and equitable society? In short, I asked them why we live in two worlds instead of one.
All publicly held corporations live a lie. They believe that we reside in a world where capital has the right to grow and that that right is a higher right than the rights of people to their culture and what we hold in common. There is something incalculably wrong with this view. You can’t get to sustainability from an economic model that strives first and foremost to increase the amount of money large corporations have. You can’t get there if you’re destroying the world’s local economies. You can’t get there if you are McDonald’s and spend $2 billion a year to get children to eat your junk food. We cannot correct environmental problems if we don’t correct the assumptions that cause them. Most of the world’s economy and the behavior of the world’s governments are under the control of corporations. Corporations are striving to increase their control; at the same time, the world is increasingly out of control. There is a direct connection.
This new weight of corporate colonization is having disastrous results. Bechtel in San Francisco, Suez, and Vivendi of France want to privatize water the world over. Novartis, DuPont, Monsanto, and Bayer-Aventis want to control 90 percent of the germ plasm of 90 percent of the caloric food intake of the world. These are companies that make toxic aniline dyes, animal hormones, artificial sweeteners, explosives, and pesticides. Ted Turner said that in the end there will only be two media companies in the world, and he wants to have a stake in one of them. Rupert Murdoch agrees and wants to be the other. McDonald’s opens up 2,800 restaurants a year, and even the U.S. government has said that the doubling of childhood obesity and alarming growth in diabetes in the past 20 years is due to fast food. Right now one out of every five meals in the United States is fast food, and they want that to be the case everywhere in the world. Coke says that it has achieved 10 percent of the total liquid intake of the world, and its goal is to go to 20 percent. Or is it 30 percent? These are absurd and devastating goals for corporations.
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