Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 88

those strategies that ostensibly are aimed at benefiting ecological spaces
by introducing measures designed to lessen environmental harm of
specific types.
For their part, transnational corporations vary in how and under
what circumstances they take over, monopolise and utilise the natural
resources of the planet. In some places, the appropriation of formerly
communal or traditional lands is at the point of a gun, as companies
hire thugs to remove and bulldoze people's homes and villages (Robin,
2010; Boekhout van Solinge and Kuijpers, 2013). Governments are
also implicated in the systematic abuse of human rights involving the
redesignation of traditional lands for the purposes of the 'national
interest' (Clark, 2009; see also Chapter Two). Common property is
thus being transformed into private or state-owned property, and land
use is linked to capital accumulation and profit rather than subsistence
and ecological balance.
In addition to straight out coercive measures such as these, reforms in
environmental management and regulation are perceived to be closely
linked to efforts made by transnational corporations to further their
hegemonic control over the planet's natural resources (Goldman, 1998ab;
Pearce and Tombs, 1998). The ideological shift toward self-regulation
under neo-liberal policies has been manifest in new forms of market
relations as well as environmentally destructive activities. Different
factions of capital have divergent orientations to the environment
depending on their market focus - for example, public relations firms,
newly emerging environmental protection industries and/or forestry
companies. International competition among capitalist sectors and
among communities for access to healthy resources, including clean
water, has also intensified because the natural resource base has shrunk.
In this competition, the dominance of western capital has been
sustained partly through 'environmental regulation' itself: ironically,
this has sometimes been used as an entry card to new international
markets. For example, markets may be protected through universalising
environmental regulation (developed in and by the private sector,
sometimes with NGO collusion, and later enforced by governments
in the form of preferred contracts, and business legal requirements)
that themselves advantage the high-technology companies of advanced
industrialised countries (Goldman, 1998a, b). The largest companies are
most likely to be capable of being environmentally 'virtuous'; they also
have disproportionate influence when it comes to redesigning the rules
of international standarisation through environmental management.
In addition, it has been argued that the cleaning up of old dirty
industries and the rewriting of property laws in accordance with