Host:  This week, Pepper Trail continues our series on taking responsibility for the Earth by the discussing the final one of his Earth Precepts, which states:

 ☼       Do not exempt corporations or governments from the environmental precepts that individuals                               must follow 
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This final precept may seem out of place with the others.  It appears to extend moral responsibility for the Earth beyond the individual, to include vast, impersonal, world-spanning conglomerates.  Unfortunately, this precept is essential if the biosphere is to survive.  We cannot simply tend to our own personal behavior, live up to our own personal responsibilities. While corporations and governments ostensibly exist to serve us, their true ideology is ever-increasing power and ever-expanding growth.  Pursue an ideology of unlimited growth in a closed and finite system, and the inevitable result is disaster.  Our planet Earth is a closed and finite system.

It would be difficult to design an entity more alienated from life and more antithetical to life than the modern multinational corporation.  Corporations insist on the legal rights of persons, but accept no personal responsibilities.  In fact, corporations act like persons with no moral compass – no set of guiding precepts, like the Ten Commandments.  As law professor and author Joel Bakan has pointed out, corporations exhibit all the symptoms of deep psychological pathology.

Under current law, corporations exist to serve their shareholders, and that service is provided by one thing: maximizing profit.  All other considerations, including the health and safety of their workers, the utility and quality of their products, and the effects of their operations on the environment, are secondary.  In fact, corporate leaders often argue that it would be irresponsible for them to be responsible – because responsible behavior like controlling toxic pollution would reduce profits. 

Thanks to their skillful public relations campaigns, it is easy to forget that almost all the ways in which corporations act as “good citizens” are due to legal compulsion.  Remove the compulsions, whether they are minimum-wage laws or pollution regulations, and corporate “responsibility” ends.  Indeed, the phenomenon of globalization is simply the relentless attempt by corporations to escape social and environmental responsibilities which are, however feebly, enforced by national governments.

All this is not to say that corporations cannot be forces for good.  Even under current law, there are corporations that treat their workers fairly and pursue environmental policies – sometimes from conviction, sometimes seeking a positive image with consumers.  What this precept calls for are universal standards to make all corporations responsible members of human society, and responsible citizens of the biosphere. 

This can be done.  Corporations are human creations, and we can control them.  One promising strategy is advocated by a group called Corporation 2020.  This is to change the legal definition of corporations, giving them a new kind of charter that would balance profits with social and environmental responsibility. The strengths of corporations – the speed with which they can respond to changing needs, their ability to deliver goods and services efficiently, their capacity to foster innovation – can be rewarded, and their anti-social behavior prevented.

One thing seems clear:  if humanity does not reassert control over the actions of corporations, all our efforts to return to a life-centered culture are doomed to failure.  The present corporate ideology of profit maximization and limitless growth is incompatible with the long-term integrity of the biosphere.

Next week, we’ll look back at the Earth Precepts, and forward to a hopeful future.  Until then, this is Pepper Trail.

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