What is problematic about being seduced by the economic and scientific appeals of efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity?
CW: Even environmentalists see the reigning economic order as a good thing. It needs correction, they say, or “greening”. We need to reason with corporations. I think only groups like Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network have always understood that the only way to deal with the corporate world is as a finally irrational antagonist. (I’ll leave the Earth Firsters out of this for the moment.) We imagine that we all prosper from the rule of technocrats. We don’t. The environmental movement would sound very different if it were articulated from the perspective of poverty. But I read the magazines of the major environmental groups, like Audubon, and I see the same propaganda from carmakers and big oil, and the same advertisements for luxury goods, presented on the same glossy paper stock as I see in the pages of The Economist. It’s hard to see a difference in their audiences. DJ: How has the Barbaric Heart of corporations made us strangers in our own land? CW: Well, not strangers so muc
