Corporate Influence

I know this is a few weeks late but it's an important and interesting issue that continues to arise and will only become more common as park budgets continue to suffer from the misguided axe of austerity for a department with a $10.8 billion maintenance backlog that could easily provide work for thousands of unemployed Americans as was done during the Great Depression. A small amount was done, but it was a mere drop in the bucket and that funding is largely out of the system and cuts are back on the agenda. While some groups like the National Parks Conservation Association do fundraising and provide other forms of support, there is only so much they can give and in the absence of governmental support for public goods, it comes to panhandling to corporate America. However, once that money is taken, it should be no surprise that there are strings attached.

This is clearly the case (though the NPS denies it) at the Grand Canyon where the NPS killed a proposal to ban the sale of bottled water in the park after Coca Cola objected. Other bottled beverages would be unaffected and there are ample free water stations in the park to refill reusable bottles so concerns about visitor safety in a desert climate are clearly pretextual. When you also consider that the holder of the concessions contract in the park was in favor of the ban and that bottled water is an inherently ridiculous, wasteful, and predatory "commodity" designed to scam the stupid, it becomes even more obvious that Coke is calling the shots on at least some park management issues and overriding decisions made by local administrators who are veterans of the system.

I know the NPS needs money, but it is important to be wary of the sources it is able to find and vigilant about making sure that such "philanthropy" is just a way to get good press and not a backdoor into influencing policy. In this age of misguided budget cuts it would be all too easy to lose our parks to private speculators and profiteers, if not in name then certainly in character and practice.

The LATimes also jumped on this issue and was appropriately harsh and wasn't shy, like the NYT was, about drawing the connections (especially confusing since the NYT had emails essentially confirming the need for Coke's permission). It also connected this to the increasing commercialization of state parks and the spread of noxious outdoor advertising that can accompany their perpetual need for cash. The actions in California's state parks are troubling enough, there is no need to expand them and multiply them across the entire country and through the crown jewels of America's natural heritage.

Update 12/2: Thanks to FOIA some more information has come out about this and it makes the NPS look even worse.

Amazon in Danger

This is an excellent Op-Ed by a Brazilian journalist about the threats the Amazon faces. What makes it so interesting is that it goes beyond recitation of distressing facts about rate of destruction, assassinations of activists, displacement of indigenous people, soil depletion and erosion, and the myriad other disasters the relentless expansion of sugar, cattle, and soy have caused. What caught my attention was the argument currently playing out in Brazil about its sovereign right to develop autonomously without interference and how the author used Brazil's history to counter it quite effectively.

While the "right to develop" is a common argument by some development theorists, and one that has a large amount of moral suasion--after all, why should the world's poor stay poor because rich countries now value the environment they spent centuries destroying as they developed--it is ultimately unsatisfactory. For starters, we now have technological options that can help developing nations bridge the gap over some of the dirtiest technologies. This is particularly true, ironically, in some of the least developed nations, such as Laos, where there is very little infrastructure that needs upgrading or replacing. One of my friends just finished a year working with a Laotian company that is working on installing small, locally assembled solar panels for off-grid villages. There are many other efforts do similar things on both small and large scales. There is also the substantial question of whether it is right to say that societies must develop, need to develop, and, most importantly, need to follow the pattern of the Industrialized West. While that is a very interesting and complicated philosophical and ethical question, it is not really what I want to discuss right now. Besides, there are much better places you can get a thorough examination of it.

Really what I wanted to highlight is the way Leão Serva takes the argument and demolishes its purported moral and nationalistic force by exposing both the corrupt corporate interests behind it and comparing it to another shameful piece of Brazil's experience: it's reluctance to abolish slavery and its claims that outsiders who condemned it had no right to meddle. He does it well, with grace but to devastating effect. Perhaps this will help clear the eyes of some who are less responsive to environmental concerns for their own sake (or their very real human consequences).