Environmentalism as an argument has been comprehensively won. As a practice it is all but extinct. Just as people in Britain have united around the demand for effective public transport, car sales have broken all records. Yesterday the superstore chain Sainsbury's announced a six per cent increase in sales: the number of its customers is now matched only by the number of people professing to deplore its impact on national life. The Guardian's environmental reporting is fuller than that of any other British newspaper, but on Saturday it was offering readers two transatlantic tickets for the price of one.

The planet, in other words, will not be saved by wishful thinking. Without the effective regulation of both citizens and corporations, we will, between us, destroy the conditions which make life worth living. This is why some of us still bother to go to the polling booths: in the hope that governments will prevent the rich from hoarding all their wealth, stop our neighbours from murdering us and prevent us, collectively, from wrecking our surroundings.

Because regulation works, companies will do whatever they can to prevent it. They will threaten governments with disinvestment, and the loss of thousands of jobs. They will use media campaigns to recruit public opinion to their cause. But one of their simplest and most successful strategies is to buy their critics. By this means, they not only divide their opponents and acquire inside information about how they operate; but they also benefit from what public relations companies call "image transfer": absorbing other people's credibility.

Over the past 20 years, the majority of Britain's most prominent greens have been hired by companies whose practices they once contested. Jonathon Porritt, David Bellamy, Sara Parkin, Tom Burke, Des Wilson and scores of others are taking money from some of the world's most destructive corporations, while boosting the companies' green credentials. Now they have been joined by a man who was, until last week, rightly admired for his courage and integrity: the former director of Greenpeace UK, Lord Melchett. Yesterday he started work at the PR firm Burson Marsteller. Burson Marsteller's core business is defending companies which destroy the environment and threaten human rights from public opinion and pressure groups like Greenpeace.

So what are we to make of these defections? Do they demonstrate only the moral frailty of the defectors, or are they indicative of a much deeper problem, afflicting the movement as a whole? I believe environmentalism is in serious trouble, and that the prominent people who have crossed the line are not the only ones who have lost their sense of direction.

There are plenty of personal reasons for apostasy. Rich and powerful greens must perpetually contest their class interest. Environmentalism, just as much as socialism, involves the restraint of wealth and power. Peter Melchett, like Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Engels, Orwell and Tony Benn, was engaged in counter-identity politics, which require a great deal of purpose and self-confidence to sustain. In Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, Prince Nekhlyudov recalls that when he blew his money on hunting and gambling and seduced another man's mistress, his friends and even his mother congratulated him, but when he talked about the redistribution of wealth and gave some of his land to his peasants they were dismayed. "At last Nekhlyudov gave in: that is, he left off believing in his ideals and began to believe in those of other people."

Lord Melchett was also poorly rewarded. There is an inverse relationship between the public utility of your work and the amount you get paid. He won't disclose how much Burson Marsteller will be giving him, but I suspect the world's biggest PR company has rather more to spend on its prize catch than Greenpeace.

But, while all popular movements have lost people to the opposition, green politics has fewer inbuilt restraints than most. Environmentalism is perhaps the most ideologically diverse political movement in world history, which is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There is a long-standing split, growing wider by the day, between people who believe that the principal solutions lie in enhanced democracy and those who believe they lie in enhanced technology (leaving existing social structures intact while improving production processes and conserving resources). And, while the movement still attracts radicals, some are beginning to complain that it is being captured by professional campaigners whose organisations are increasingly corporate and remote. They exhort their members to send money and sign petitions, but discourage active participation in their campaigns. Members of Greenpeace, in particular, are beginning to feel fed up with funding other people's heroics.

As the movement becomes professionalised and bureaucratised (and there are serviceable reasons why some parts of it should) it has also fallen prey to ruthless careerism. The big money today is in something called "corporate social responsibility", or CSR. At the heart of CSR is the notion that companies can regulate their own behaviour. By hiring green specialists to advise them on better management practices, they hope to persuade governments and the public that there is no need for compulsory measures. The great thing about voluntary restraint is that you can opt into or out of it as you please. There are no mandatory inspections, there is no sustained pressure for implementation. As soon as it becomes burdensome, the commitment can be dropped.

In 2000, for example, Tony Blair, prompted by corporate lobbyists, publicly asked Britain's major companies to publish environmental reports by the end of 2001. The request, which remained voluntary, managed to defuse some of the mounting public pressure for government action. But by January 1st 2002, only 54 of the biggest 200 companies had done so. Because the voluntary measure was a substitute for regulation, the public now has no means of assessing the performance of the firms which have failed to report.

So the environmentalists taking the corporate buck in the name of cleaning up companies' performance are, in truth, helping them to stay dirty by bypassing democratic constraints. But because corporations have invested so heavily in avoiding democracy, CSR has become big business for greens.

In this social climate, it's not hard to see why Peter Melchett imagined that he could move to Burson Marsteller without betraying his ideals. It was a staggeringly naïve and stupid decision, which has destroyed his credibility and seriously damaged Greenpeace's (as well, paradoxically, as reducing his market value for Burson Marsteller), but it is consistent with the thinking prevalent in some of the bigger organisations.

Environmentalism, like almost everything else, is in danger of being swallowed by the corporate leviathan. If this happens, it will disappear without trace. No one threatens its survival as much as the greens who have taken the company shilling.

Around the country, Greenpeace activists wept into their organic cornflakes last weekend, as it emerged that Lord Melchett, former head of Greenpeace and hero of the anti-GM movement, has disappeared off to join the Dark Lord in Mordor, in the earthly form of PR villains Burson-Marsteller.

‘We don't understand - he's given us no reasonable explanation.’ said one. ‘ Why would he compromise his integrity like this? It’s not as if he needs the money…If Melchett had joined a supermarket to advise them on organic purchasing, we could just about understand him snuggling up with corporations, but Burson Marsteller, come on...why would anyone want to associate with them?’ This is the PR company that advised the vicious Burmese military junta, the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), to change their name because it just wasn't cuddly enough. They now torture, kill, repress and exploit under the name of the State Peace and Development Council ? much nicer for everyone concerned. Other clients include Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, the Saudi government after September 11, and Union Carbide in the wake of the Bhopal disaster. Burson Marsteller are simply evil incorporated. They work on behalf of the bullies against the weak, and get paid for maintaining the status quo.

But Melchett has consorted with the devil before. At Greenpeace he was openly keen on corporate engagement. Speaking last summer at the ‘Getting Engaged’ event organised by corporate engagement gurus, The Environment Council, he stated that environmentalists have moved on since their early campaigning days in the 1970s and 1980s, when their primary mission was to ‘raise the issue’ of environmental problems. Now, he argued, environmentalists have to look more at solutions and focus more on business than politics because of ‘a shift in power from politics to business.’ Which rather loses sight of the fact that many environmentalists consider that precise shift to be part of the problem …

Jonathan Porritt, where are you now.

Jonathan Porritt was one of the most prominent environmentalists of the 1980's as spokesperson for the Green Party. Then he disappeared off to work for the government and engage with industry thinking that somehow he would wield more power by helping corporations to tinker around the edges. Instead, he has disappeared into obscurity and no longer poses a threat to the big corporate bastards destroying our planet. Mekchett’s case is similar: everyone knows that Greenpeace and Melchett destroyed a GM test-site, and that, therefore, GM crops must be bad. This powerful oppositional act is surely far more influential in building a real change in public consciousness than the occasional chat with Shell or Nestle that will make him feel important, but do little else.

Engaging the moderates and isolating the radicals is one of the oldest tricks in the PR book. Another is helping to organise 'green' sounding industry front groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), whose members include Chevron, Volkswagen, Ciba-Geigy, Mitsubishi, Dow Chemicals, Du Pont and Shell. Set up in the early 1990s, it had considerable success in watering down the environmental treaties that came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Issues concerning the environmental impact of these large companies and issues of corporate responsibility and accountability were not discussed or even circulated to delegates. Does Melchett really want his name associated with a company whose middle name is 'greenwash'?

Whilst some in the biotech industry are rubbing their hands with glee, other rabid anti-environmentalists, for whom Greenpeace is the key target for their bile, see it rather differently. A posting on the pro-GE email list, AgBioView offered the following rather warped logic: ‘So now former Greenpeace director Peter Melchett, after lining his pockets from organic supermarkets whose profits he surged with his (proven false by the UK advertising standards authority) food fear campaigns against biotechnology, is now going to work for Burson Marstellar (BM). BM, which happens to represent biotech-leader Monsanto, should be ashamed of itself for succumbing to Melchett's thuggery and apparent protection racket. The lesson for other corporations under the gun from Greenpeace and the like is simple. Whatever they say they don't really mean it. They really just want you to write them a big check. It's a protection racket.’

The Greenpeace/ PR revolving door

Melchett is sadly not the only environmentalist sell-out. One of the advisors for the Environment Council's magazine, for example, is Jonathan Wootliff, who is also Managing Director of Edelman Public Relations Global Stakeholder Practice. Before Edelman, he worked for Greenpeace; before that, the Hill & Knowlton PR firm. In his current job at Edelman, he ‘provides support to corporations in building productive relationships with non-governmental organizations, pressure groups and activists so as to minimize vulnerability.’ Edelman's clients include Home Depot, Ocean Spray, Taco Bell, Boeing, Nissan, Manpower, Dairy.com, Roche's, Nissan, Pharmacia, Microsoft, Apple, Kraft, Kimberly-Clark and AHP.
Paul Gilding, the former executive director of Greenpeace International has set up his own corporate consultancy in Australia called ECOS.

Des Wilson, after decades of working for NGOs including Friends of the Earth UK, the Campaign for Lead Free Petrol, the Campaign for the Homeless and the Campaign for Freedom of Information, moved to Burson-Marsteller and then to the British Airports Authority to fight for the expansion of Heathrow airport. Makes you wonder what Burson Marsteller does to its new recruits!

Something is rotten…

As if to add insult to injury for the poor Greenpeaceniks, a leaked internal memo from Greenpeace UK’s media director reveals that not only had Melchett taken this move with their full consent, but that they thought it wasn’t too much of a change; ‘since GP has been giving advice to business for years it is no surprise that Peter will be giving the same advice in a different capacity.’ The whole thing reads like a rather flaccid and hopeless call to keep a united front, stick to the party line and pass on media enquiries to management. However, there’s hope for the Greenpeaceniks yet ? someone leaked the memo…

STOP PRESS: Melchett has been forced to resign from the board of Greenpeace International, following severe criticism.

Further reading

"Corporations ‘Get Engaged’ to the Environmental Movement"
by Andy Rowell
PR Watch, Vol. 8. no. 3. Autumn 2001
<www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q3/engaged.html>.

Andy Rowell
"Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement"
Routledge, 1996.

Corporate Watch #2, Winter 1996
‘What's Wrong with: Burson-Marsteller?’
<www.corporatewatch.org/magazine/issue2/cw2f2.html>