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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Reverse Greenwash, December 12, 2008
This review is from: Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad (Hardcover)
This book usefully (at first) raises many important issues that might make passionate environmentalists uncomfortable and inspire them to look at their activism in a new light. Conservation organizations have become dependent on large donations from corporate polluters who then mislead the public about their "green" contributions. MacDonald also sheds light on some other unintended consequences like the gamesmanship of carbon credits and the displacement of indigenous peoples from third-world preservation zones sponsored by first-world NGOs.
With that being said, MacDonald claims to be an environmental insider and investigative journalist. But she only succeeds in finger-pointing and scape-goating, and offers absolutely no viable solutions to the problems raised (loudly) throughout the book. One is reminded of a pampered college freshman who learns for the first time that there are problems in the world, and then believes she's making a real difference by simply raving about how poorly-defined villains should be stopped. This type of thinking carries no understanding of the longstanding systematic trends of politics and economics that are at the root of current problems and which would need serious long-term reforms before huge global challenges are resolved.
Like MacDonald, many nature lovers would like to see conservation organizations end their relationships with polluting industries and stop allowing those corporate oligarchs to misuse the spirit of conservation for their own marketing purposes. But unlike MacDonald, many are also aware that we live in a globalized economy with an unfair distribution of wealth and political power, and passionate citizens have to resort to fighting fire with fire. MacDonald equally loathes money-hungry conservationists who have sold out their principles, and power-hungry corporations that abuse the public trust and pretend to be green for the PR benefits. So she blames both, inconsistently, as if they were equally culpable.
MacDonald's unsupported polemics are exemplified in one key passage in Chapter 11, noting that a few scientists have recently found reason to doubt whether all types of trees effectively sequester carbon and thus reduce global warming. MacDonald uses this slight uncertainty to accuse Ducks Unlimited of "misleading" its partners in a years-old voluntary tree-planting program. Earlier, in Chapter 5 MacDonald generally condemns the entire worldwide environmental community for ineffectiveness because environmental problems still exist. In all cases, MacDonald's culprit is money, but she's got no solutions other than finger-pointing at interested conservationists, blaming them for failing to miraculously solve deeply entrenched problems caused by systematic structures in international economics and politics.
So with this disappointing book, the "environmental insider" has merely given ammunition to anti-environmentalists who pounce upon the occasional errors in judgment by conservationists who are forced to work in a political and economic world they never made. Also note that MacDonald's opinions have been made available to the public by an organization she criticizes, FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), which endorsed the recycled paper in this book. [~doomsdayer520~]
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Overwrought and underresearched, January 31, 2009
This review is from: Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad (Hardcover)
If it's true, this book is a damning critique of the big green groups. The problem is, it does not appear to be carefully researched or balanced in its approach. It's hard to know what's fact, distortion, or fiction. That's a shame, because global conservation is terribly important and these groups are at the center of it.
Here's one glaring example of MacDonald's disregard for accuracy. In Chapter 10, she writes about a paper that was published in Science in 2007, "Globalization of Conservation: a View from the South." When I read MacDonald's description, I thought, "That's not how I remember that article." So I went back and re-read the original.
The paper is in fact a thoughtful critique of global conservation, the gist of which is that more support needs to go to the small NGOs, rooted in local communities, that are often doing the most effective work.
Here is how MacDonald begins her summary of this paper: "The authors characterized conservation agendas such as CI's Biodiversity Hot Spots and WWF's Global 200 Ecoregions as mere 'branding' strategies, casting doubt on claims that the work is 'science-driven.'"
If that were true, that would be a pretty strong condemnation. Here's what the authors actually wrote:
"These INGOs [large, international NGOs] have developed a range of tools, e.g., Biodiversity Hot Spots (1), Global 200 Ecoregions (2), and others (3) to set priorities and to compete with each other. They often use a corporate "branding" strategy to help raise funds and to define and communicate their niches in a crowded and competitive market. ... Although these brands are derived from conservation science, they are vulnerable to scientific criticism (7). For example, priority-setting plans that target fixed areas for conservation (e.g., Hot Spots and Ecoregions) are insufficient to deal with fast-moving threats such as pathogens or invasive species (8), the alteration of species' ranges due to climate change (9), or spatially dynamic marine ecosystems (10)."
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What is the environmental movement doing wrong, August 13, 2009
This review is from: Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad (Hardcover)
I had heard about some of the controversies surrounding The Nature Conservancy and other big environmental groups, but did not know the details. Christine MacDonald gets down to the brass tacks. I think she is convincing on the need for a review of salaries for top environmentalists. She's also good on reminding environmental groups to be very, very careful when it comes to accepting donations from big polluters. I will definitely be reconsidering some of the groups I donate to.
That said, it seems to me that the real question is whether environmental groups can accomplish more by working with business or not. Is there any point to trying to reform from within? MacDonald apparently thinks that any compromise with polluters is doing a deal with the devil. I'm not so sure. If environmentalists choose not to engage at all with business, will that only marginalize the environmental movement?
On the other hand, MacDonald points out the environmental movement so far has failed, in that deforestation, pollution, climate change, and species extinction have not been halted or reversed. OK, I agree that the environmental movement somehow has to do better. But MacDonald has no suggestions on how to accomplish this, beyond a few vague platitudes.
I do wish the environmental movement would be more honest about what it is going to take to make the economy sustainable. This will not be easy. The fact is that sustainability is going to require an end to most, if not all, mining. Economic growth will be a thing of the past. Ditto globalization. Having more than one child, or a personal automobile, will be the sort of luxury only wealthy people can afford. We're all going to have to learn to do more with less. This is not to say that it will be all bad--many of us might find that better personal relationships and less obsession with buying stuff will make us happier. However, daily life in a sustainable economy is likely to be very different from now. Maybe Christine MacDonald is right that trying to compromise with today's multi-national corporations is pointless. However, you'll have to look to some other book to find solid discussion of these points. (As a start, I would suggest Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.)
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