Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Although formal education is important - citizenship is now, after all, part of the
UK's National Curriculum - it is the reflection of one's lived experience that probably
has most bearing on changing human conduct.
Globalization and cosmopolitanism have affected the life experience of the
individual as well as the conduct of transnational companies (TNCs), not least because
of growing public awareness of global inequality and the serious problems associated
with free trade and unsustainable modes of economic production. Zadek (2001)
argues that TNCs should become good corporate citizens, taking due account of
their employment practices and ecological footprints in local and national environ-
ments. Although others suggest that TNCs will only do this if their financial bottom
line is threatened, their commitment being purely instrumental, corporate social
and environmental responsibility is a practice that many large companies now engage
with seriously. The expectation of gaining new consumer markets or the fear of bad
media publicity, as recently experienced by organizations such as McDonald's, Shell,
Nike, Nestlé and Monsanto, are strong motivators. Consequently, there have
developed a number of strategic corporate/NGO alliances in recent years - Starbucks
and CARE, Reebok and Amnesty International - suggesting that the responsible
corporation may be something more than a PR exercise (Palacios, 2004).
Equally, it may be asked whether it is easy for citizens to be green. How can
individuals, groups and businesses fashion and act on their ecological obligations
when so much of our social and economic lives are structured unsustainably, or
offer so many contradictory and incompatible forms of satisfaction and reward. As
Paterson (2000) shows, car culture is intimately bound up with the global political
economy. Cars themselves symbolize modernity, growth, success and development,
as the massive expansion of car use and ownership in China testifies. Seyfang (2005),
writing on ecological citizenship and shopping, notes that a major criticism of the
mainstream model of sustainable consumption through market transformation argues
that only purchases, not votes, really count in today's world. However, not everyone
is able to influence the market. Sustainable goods may be beyond a person's price
range or may be simply unavailable in local stores. People may become disempowered,
disillusioned with the ideology of green consumerism, and overly suspicious of
corporate greening and green marketing. They may see themselves as being part of
a corporately imagined or stimulated community, identifying themselves readily with
particular brands and logos. Seyfang also recognizes that people buy things for a
variety of purposes that may have little to do with being a good ecological citizen.
People shop for therapeutic reasons to raise their self-esteem, to buy themselves a
treat, to identify with a particular cultural group, to foster a sense of belonging or
to display a certain social status in the community. In developing countries, ecological
citizenship may take similar forms, but frequently, when combined with direct political
action, the focus is strongly on engagement, action, participation, environmental
learning, gender equality, human rights, subsistence, leadership and empowerment,
rather than material consumption. However, this is not to deny that issues of
consumption may not also be genuine issues of survival, cultural or personal identity.
Civic environmentalism, combined with practices of ecological citizenship, including
grass-roots action, may therefore be firmly and literally rooted in the local ecology,
generating both a sense of and a commitment to place, the land, the locality and
the home (Maathai, 2004).
