When I visited Bangkok in March 1996, people there were still talking about it. They called it "the Mother of All Traffic Jams."

The occasion was a four-day national holiday marking the start of the rainy season in Thailand the previous April. Richard Frankel, an environmental engineer in Bangkok, recalled the scene for me: "On Wednesday night we figured we would try to beat the traffic and get out of town. We planned to drive to Chiang Mai, two hundred miles north, and spend the holiday there. So we packed up the car, fed everyone and took off from the house. Our plan was to drive on the expressway around Bangkok, continue out past the airport and then head north. We left the house at 10 p.m. The kids were asleep in the back seat, everything was perfect-until we hit the expressway. The traffic was backed up bumper to bumper for sixty miles. By ten the next morning, we had only reached the airport, just a few miles from our house. Some people abandoned their cars. We finally managed to turn around and spent the holiday at home."

Bangkok represents the extreme example of what can happen when a developing country opens itself to the rush of global investment without the necessary filters and surge protectors to regulate growth. Think of the problem this way: By the year 2000, there were about 5.8 billion people on the planet. Let's say 1.5 billion of them were living what could be called a globalization lifestyle. That is, they were in the lower middle,

280

middle or upper class of their societies, with a television, maybe a phone, some sort of vehicle to get around with and a home with a refrigerator and washer/dryer. They were, to put it another way, living a lifestyle based on heavy consumption of petrochemicals (from plastics to fertilizers), hydrocarbons (coal, gas and oil) and bent metals (cars, refrigerators, airplanes). In the next decade, if globalization continues to bring more and more people into this lifestyle, and if we cannot learn to do more things using less stuff, we are going to bum up, heat up, pave up, junk up, franchise up and smoke up our pristine areas, forests, rivers and wetlands at a pace never seen before in human history.

Visit Bangkok and see the future: rich city, poor life. Because of traffic jams, some Bangkok drivers won't leave home without a mobile phone and a portable potty in their car. Bangkok is a city of 10 million people with so little central planning that up until the late 1990s it not only had no subway system, it didn't even have a carpool lane. Many Bangkokers stopped entertaining on weeknights because of the uncertainty of when guests would arrive. "All the spontaneity of life is gone," environmental journalist James Fahn complained to me one afternoon as we sat in Bangkok's scraggly center-city park. "You can't just call up your buddy and say, 'Let's meet at a restaurant in fifteen minutes.' "

The traditional argument from developing countries has been: "We'll make our mess now and clean it up later when we can afford it." But as Bangkok demonstrates, when a city grows as fast and in as unbridled a fashion as it has, there may be no later. Many sidewalks are already gone. There is no room left for new parks. Canals have been cemented over for new buildings. The fish in the river are dead. Half the traffic cops have respiratory problems. In Bangkok, the free market and the Electronic Herd simply overran the government, or grew so much richer than the government that investors could evade every environmental regulation through corruption. As one American diplomat in Thailand remarked to me when I visited in 1996: "We've just opened a dozen or so new embassies in the former Soviet Union, and our job there is to explain to people that there is something called 'a market.' Our job in Thailand is to explain to people that there is something other than the market."

I was meeting in Jakarta once with Agus Purnomo, who heads the World Wide Fund for Nature in Indonesia, and I asked him: "What is it

281

like to be an environmentalist in an emerging market? Is it like being the May tag repairman, the loneliest man in town?"

"We are in a constant race with development." He sighed. "Before we even have a chance to convince 1he wider audience here that environ- mentally sound development is a viable way to do things, the plans to build roads, factories or power plants are moving ahead. We have a problem here with unemployment, so any developer who can sell promises of employment will get support. When that happens, we get labeled as against employment and get treated as outsiders."

But the devastation that is wrought happens now so quickly and is often irreversible, he added. "You lose a mountain, you lose it-you can't regrow it. If you cut the forests, you can grow them back, but you lose the biodiversity-the plants, the animals. I'm worried that in a decade, we'll all be environmentally aware, but there'll be nothing left to defend."

What to do? Can we develop a method of environmentally sustainable globalization? One hope is clearly that technology will evolve in ways that will help us preserve green areas faster than the Electronic Herd can trample them. As Robert Shapiro of Monsanto likes to say: "Human population multiplied by human aspirations for a middle-class existence divided by the current technological tool kit is putting unsustainable strains on the biological systems that support life on our planet. When three guys living on a lake dumped garbage in it, it was not a big deal. When thirty thousand do it, you'd better find a way not to make so much garbage, or to treat that garbage, or to have fewer people who make garbage-otherwise the lake is not going to be there."

That is going to require some real breakthroughs in information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology (miniaturization down to the molecular and atomic levels that enables tiny power sources to run huge systems) so that we can create value on a smaller and smaller scale, while using less and less stuff. For instance, it is an encouraging sign that, thanks to biotechnology, we can now go into a plant and change the base pairs in its DNA so that it naturally repels insects without having to use fertilizers or pesticides. It is an encouraging sign that, thanks to

282

information technology, things such as recording tape and film are now being turned into digits - 1's and 0's - which are not endangered, produce no garbage and are infinitely reusable.

But technological breakthroughs alone will not be enough to neutralize the environmental impact of the herd, because the innovations simply are not happening fast enough-compared to how fast the herd moves, grows and devours. You can see it just in the way environmental destruction statistics are now expressed. Time magazine reported in 1998 that 50 percent of the world's 233 known primate species are now threatened with extinction and that 52 acres of the world's forests are lost every minute.

Because of this, conservationists must also learn to move faster. They need to quickly develop the regulatory software and conservation- enforcing procedures to ensure sustainable development and to preserve the most pristine areas. They need to intensify work with local farmers and native peoples whose livelihoods depend on healthy forests and other natural systems. They need to quickly cultivate local elites ready to build and maintain parks and nature preserves that the new bourgeoisie and urban underclasses don't have the time, resources or inclination to bother with. And of course, they need to promote effective birth control, immediately, because unbridled population growth will explode any environmental protection filters. Howard Youth, writing in World Watch magazine about how the Caribbean nation of Honduras had developed a green consciousness over the years, noted that this whole painstaking effort was being undermined by a shortage of condoms. "Flying over the Honduran countryside," he wrote, "you can almost see the country grow: spreading brushfires, new towns, new roads, new swatches of forest cut from the slopes create a patchwork of human activity. . . The biggest population growth is occurring in the countryside - in villages scattered widely over rugged terrain-and in many of these places contraceptives are not readily available. . ."

But while it would be nice if conservationists were able to move faster in all these areas, it is unrealistic to believe they will. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with this fact: For now, the only way to run as fast as the herd is by riding the herd itself and trying to redirect it. We need to demonstrate to the herd that being green, being global and

283

being greedy can go hand in hand. If you want to save the Amazon, go to business school and learn how to do a deal.

It's not easy finding people who can combine a flair for greenmail and Greenpeace, but the closest I've ever met is Keith Alger.

I met Alger, forty-four years old, while on a tour of Brazil's Atlantic rain forest, where he was one of the leaders of a coalition that helped save what's left of the rain forest in Brazil's northeastern Bahia state, while also creating alternative employment there for some of the loggers. An American political scientist married to a Brazilian monkey specialist, Alger came to Brazil with the view that he would save the rain forest by helping educate Brazilians about its ecological significance. But he quickly learned that as long as he couldn't provide jobs for the loggers who would be put out of business by saving the rain forest, he would get nowhere. As Alger described it to me: "It is hard for people to be poor ~ and it's very embarrassing if you cannot take care of your own surroundings, The farmers here would tell me that they wanted to save the rain forest, but their jobs were also endangered species. If they needed to buy - a new car or send a son to college they would just have a logger take out a few hectares of their old trees, which they saved like money in the bank. If I wanted to save the rain forest, I had to help deliver jobs for them."

So Alger, who runs the Institute for Social and Environmental Studies of Southern Bahia, teamed up with the Washington-based Conservation International and a group of local environmentalists, and together they all became environmental entrepreneurs to save the rain forest. With one hand Alger and his Brazilian colleagues fought the loggers in a seven-year public policy battle that concluded in 1998 with the Brazilian government finally banning all logging in the Atlantic rain forest in southern Bahia. With the other hand, Alger's team and Conservation International built an ecopark through a dense swath of that very same rain forest. They hired a group of professional rock climbers, who used bows and arrows to shoot ropes over the hundred-foot-high trees and then weave the ropes and netting together to create a treetop canopy walkway, with connecting tree houses. The walkway, which is about a foot wide and does sway a bit as you step along it from treetop to treetop, is located outside

284

the town of Una, where the Atlantic rain forest once covered the entire coast. Today only 7 percent of it has survived loggers and slash-and-burn farmers.

The canopy walk is spectacular. It is not every forest where a single hectare of land contains as many as 450 different tree species, all wrestling for sunlight. Tiptoeing through the treetops on the canopy walkway, you can look one of the rarest monkeys on earth, the golden-headed lion tamarin, right in the eye as he jumps from tree to tree. And you can examine termite nests as big as pumpkins hanging from rubber trees dripping with natural latex. Walking along the dirt pathways on the floor of the rain forest, which are also part of the Una Ecopark, you can march side by side with caravans of leaf-cutter ants carting away chunks of leaves to their anthill the size of a pitcher's mound.

With the help of Conservation International, Alger's teaIn lined up funding to build the Ecopark from Ford Motor Company and Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser), both of whom do a lot of business in Brazil, as well as USAID (the U.S. government's Agency for International Development) and Banco Real, the Brazilian bank, which owned the nearby Transamerica Hotel and whose president told the local Brazilian officials: "I want my tourists to see trees in the background when they look out the window, not some moonscape that has been logged." Anheuser-Busch actually sent one of their theme park designers, from Busch Gardens in Florida, to help design the Ecopark.

Along with the park, Alger worked with the mayor of Una, himself a logger, to create jobs in other ways. For instance, the Transamerica Hotel employs six hundred people, and now offers rain forest tours. Alger's coalition worked to increase farming within the rain forest with crops, such as cocoa and coffee, that can be harvested in the shade of the trees. Alger's team also wrote a professional grant proposal for the Una city government to the Brazilian federal government and won funding from the Ministry of Education for advanced teacher training for Una's school-teachers. Says Alger: "I put the mayor, who is a logger, out of business. I knew I had to deliver for this guy or they will say that we ran out on them." One other place Alger looked was to the high-tech community, which today has enormous credibility in developing countries, where every governor and mayor dreams of having a microchip plant in his backyard. Intel, at the urging of one of its founders, Gordon Moore, who serves on

285

the board of Conservation International, provided funding and computer hardware for Alger's team to properly map the rain forest and focus on what needed to be saved most. Using something called the Geographic Information System, Alger's team was able to feed maps into a computer and then ask it certain key questions.

"The most important thing we asked the computer was where are the key choke points and corridors between the different sections of the Atlantic rain forest," said Alger. "The GIS pointed us right to them. That was critical because these corridors connect two larger bodies of the rain forest and without them it just becomes a bunch of isolated fragments, which cannot support as many species, and therefore many of them will go extinct if these corridors are not preserved. We built the Una Ecopark on one of these corridors that the mayor had already licensed for logging."

Alger also enlisted the help of George St. Laurent, an adventurous, eccentric American entrepreneur, who had opened a computer factory for the Brazilian market, using an abandoned cocoa factory near Una. St. Laurent got tax incentives from the state government to open his high- tech plant there, but he told the local governor that he needed more than tax breaks if he was going to persuade 'computer engineers from Sao Paulo and Silicon Valley to move to northeastern Brazil. He needed some green, not just greenbacks. Maintaining a nice environment can be a critically important magnet for attracting high-tech knowledge workers, who often have many choices of where to live. Silicon Valley isn't in California for nothing. "I told [the governor] we need a nice environment," said St. Laurent. "I told him computer engineers can live anywhere. They want a high quality of life and places they can go on weekends. If they happen to live next to one of the most exciting biodiversity systems, they would rather be part of it than watch it be destroyed." To help Alger win the support of the local government, St. Laurent promised to donate some computers to the local schools.

Eventually, the pressure from the Brazilian government, and Alger's coalition, brought around the mayor of Una, Dejair Birschner - grudgingly. The mayor told me:

"When I first heard about these environmentalists, I thought they were going to persecute us. About two years ago I started to realize that they were worried about helping to develop the region. Una has 32,000

286

inhabitants and 1,700 square kilometers. The three biggest employers are the Transamerica Hotel, Unacaw (a large cocoa farm) and the municipality. [Life here] is awfully hard. Some forty percent of our people live in wooden shacks, and since the cocoa industry collapsed, things have got- ten really bad here. . . I don't blame Keith for telling us the truth-that logging was not sustainable. We will have to produce jobs ourselves. But Keith will have to play his part too."

The lesson that Alger learned from all this is that the only way to save the rain forest is the same way you save a country's financial system-by treating it not as just an emerging market but as an emerging society. Save the society and you can save the trees.

Said Alger: "We started by working with some of the brightest local Brazilian graduate students from around here to form the Institute for Social and Environmental Studies of Southern Bahia. Then we began training people and equipping them with the skills to be modem conservationists. That meant teaching biologists how to think about business deals and teaching economists about the most modem geographic map- ping techniques. Until recently, no Brazilian university taught this sort of integrated approach with these overlapping skills, which you need in order to be a successful environmental entrepreneur these days. We are now training a new generation in how to get the most bang from the buck, and the bang I'm talking about is both species conservation and economic and social opportunities for the human beings who live around those species. Without learning how to do both, we couldn't have saved a single tree."

The other method for greening globalization is to demonstrate to corporations and their shareholders that their profits and share prices will increase if they adopt environmentally sound production methods. Jim Levine, an environmental engineer who sits on the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and teaches companies to be both green and greedy, explained to me how it works: "What you have to do is get companies, shareholders and Wall Street analysts to realize that poor environmental performance equals wasted profits. Up until ten years ago, environmental performance in manufacturing was not a design objective. But now, with the government hitting companies

287

over the head with both new regulations and new tax incentives to be green, and with the SEC telling companies they have to start accurately portraying their environmental liabilities to shareholders-such as where they are being sued for dumping and what the cleanup could cost-there has been a paradigm shift. Companies are starting to realize that if they go into Bangkok and build a plant that pollutes the environment and then the Thai government finally gets around to passing the laws and regulatory software to clean it all up, it will be a lot more expensive to deal with later, rather than building in green procedures from the start."

One of the leading companies in this new paradigm is the Chicago-headquartered health products company Baxter International, Inc. In 1997 Baxter had sales of $6.1 billion, on output from its sixty manufacturing plants worldwide. As part of its annual reporting to shareholders, Baxter includes an Environmental Financial Statement for all its operations. Its 1997 Environmental Financial Statement reported that green production practices implemented that year had saved the company $14 million, which more than covered the costs of the programs. In addition, it said that cost avoidance from green production practices since 1990 had already saved another $86 million. "This means," the report said, "that Baxter would have spent $100 million more in 1997 for raw materials production processes, disposal costs and packaging if no environmentally beneficial actions had been implemented by the company since 1990."

Most countries right now don't have effective "polluter pays" laws, but one day many will. Which is why Baxter says in its 1997 annual report that "it is better to have all our international waste today go to reputable waste sites. Thus we can be in better shape to avoid big potential liabilities in the future." Executives who don't think this way are not taking care of their shareholders and are robbing themselves of higher bonuses.

Sometimes, though, even this profit motive can't get the job done. Sometimes it is just more profitable to overexploit the land and to sell out to rapacious global interests. That leaves one last strategy, and it's a powerful one-learning how to use globalization against itself.

I also discovered this in Brazil, not in the rain forest but in the Pantanal

288

wetland, which I visited with a team from Conservation International. We flew in a tiny prop plane to the Fazenda Rio Negro, a ranch and nature lodge on the Rio Negro, with a grass airstrip in its front yard. Our plan was to start our tour by interviewing Nilson de Barros, Superintendent for the Environment for Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sui state. I knew this was going to be an interesting interview when de Barros insisted that we conduct it in the middle of the Rio Negro. We boarded motorized launches at the Fazenda and set sail for the meeting point at a shallow bend in the river. There, de Barros and his team were waiting for us, standing in waist-deep water. Next to them was a boat with a cooler full of beer.

"First a beer, then a bath, then we talk," he said, cracking open a can of Skol as the river flowed by.

And I thought I had the best job in the world!

De Barros explained that the Pantanal region, located along the borders of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, is the largest freshwater wetland in the world (the size of Wisconsin) and is home to the jaguar and a host of other endangered species. The Pantanal nature reserve, where we were standing in the middle of the river, is a sort of Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs. Along the river we passed scores of caiman lounging onshore, giant river otters bobbing up and down, with egrets, hyacinth macaws, toucans, ibises, marsh deer, spoonbills, jabiru storks, ocelots and rheas (ostriches) all poking out from the forest at different points. Unlike the Amazon, de Barros explained, the Pantanal is not threatened by poor residents who want to destroy the habitat to relieve their poverty. Indeed, the culture in the Pantanal is a rare example of man and nature thriving in harmony through an economy of ranching, fishing and now ecotourism. The danger to this region comes from globalization: There are the soy farmers on the plateau above the Pantanal basin who are eager to feed a rapidly expanding world soybean market. Pesticides and silt runoff from their farms are fouling the rivers and wildlife. At the same time, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia have formed a trading bloc to make them more globally competitive. And to get their soy products to global markets from this region faster, they want to dredge and straighten the rivers-so barges can navigate them more easily and swiftly-but in ways that could seriously harm the ecosystem. Finally, a consortium of international energy companies, led by Enron, is building a potentially

289

environmentally dangerous gas pipeline across the Pantanal from gas-rich Bolivia to energy-starved Sao Paulo.

But while globalization is the main threat to the Pantanal, it is also its main hope for salvation. For one thing, the residents of the Pantanal now have a chance to safeguard their traditional way of life, which is based on keeping the land natural, by selling ecotours and naturally fed beef to world markets ready to pay a premium for ecofriendly products. More- over, having cutting-edge global companies involved here can be an asset. The soybean business has attracted the big global barge companies, which unlike many local firms can afford to use highly sophisticated technologies that are less harsh on the environment-such as modem barges that can navigate sharp river bends with high-tech propellers so the rivers don't have to be straightened.

But where globalization is really an asset is in the fact that it is creating "Super-empowered environmentalists," who, acting on their own, can now fight back rather effectively against both the Electronic Herd and governments. Thanks to the Internet, environmentalists in one country are quickly relaying how a multinational behaves in their country to environmentalists in other countries. Therefore, more and more multinationals are realizing that to preserve their 'global reputation and global brands in the face of Internet activism, they need to be more environmentally responsible. What happened in the Pantanal, in fact, is that local fi environmentalists engaged environmentalists in North America to put pressure on the Inter-American Development Bank, which was planning to fund the dredging and straightening of the river system. The Development Bank, sensitive to its global reputation, responded by pressuring the local governments sponsoring the project to scale it back and to do a full-blown environmental assessment. In the end, the governments involved figured out ways to improve navigation of the rivers in the Pantanal without altering their shape.

"This is such a contrast from just fifteen years ago," says Glenn Prickett, vice president for corporate partnerships at Conservation International. "Think about a country like Brazil. Fifteen years ago the generals were in charge there, and when foreign environmentalists criticized economic development in the Amazon, the generals just told them: 'Butt out. This is our sovereign territory. It is none of your business.' But then globalization and the Internet come along and the Brazilian government

290

begins letting in, in fact inviting in, all these big global companies to invest. This creates a new dynamic. The power driving development has shifted to global companies and institutions, who by definition do business globally, need access globally, and therefore need to be concerned about their global environmental reputations. If Brazilian environmentalists get on the Internet and tell their colleagues in the United States and Europe that this global company is spoiling the environment in Brazil, the environmentalists in these other countries will get activated. Pretty soon this company could be facing a global campaign that would affect its business, not just in Brazil but worldwide."

With so many democracies around the world now, sometimes it only takes one environmentalist waving an E-mail message on the floor of his or her parliament to hold up a major power plant project or some other environmentally sensitive deal. Global companies are learning that by supporting conservation programs they can improve the image of their global brand among customers, who increasingly value the environment.

"There is no hiding place anymore for bad corporate behavior in a world of globally interconnected activism," said Prickett. "Customers, regulators and shareholders everywhere can now reward or punish companies for what they do in faraway places. For those who behave well, they can open doors and for those who behave badly they can close them."

The best companies have learned this lesson. As Charles O. Holliday, Jr., the chairman of DuPont, once explained to me, "In the old days, if we were going to put a chemical plant in a neighborhood, we thought that if we can just get the permission of the neighbors who live around that plant, we'll be fine. Not anymore. With the Internet and all, now it's like you have six billion neighbors that you have to satisfy. . . . You can get government approval for lots of things, but now it's a question of whether you can build wider [public] coalitions."

This helps explain why Ford Motor is now funding Conservation International's research on the Pantanal, its wildlife management program there and the conversion of Pantanal cattle ranches into private reserves-and even lobbying in Brazil to support the Pantanal preservation. To be sure, Ford is not saving the Pantanal because it's fallen in love with its endangered species, but rather because it believes that it can sell a lot more Jaguar cars if it is seen as saving the jaguars of the Pantanal.

291

And if that's what it takes to save this incredibly beautiful ecosystem and way of life then God bless Henry Ford and the Internet.

Article Citation:

Friedman, Thomas. 2000. The Lexus and The Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Anchor Books.