Limiting Corporate Power and Cultivating Interdependence: A Strategic Plan for the Environment

In the current era, corporate power translates into abuses of the environment and violations of every human right, including basic human rights, worker rights, and the rights of women. As a result, limiting corporate power must be a central concern for those who seek a strategy to save the environment.

Environmentalists need to insist that businesses create or allow for mechanisms to hold them accountable to society. Corporate accountability is precisely the opposite of what is happening today in the political arena, where the allies of corporations in the government are trying to take these corporations one step beyond the reach of democratic accountability.

Overcoming Fragmentation

In addition to fighting for limits on corporate power, it’s important for environmentalists today to focus on overcoming the divisions within the environmental movement, as well as the separations between environmental, economic justice, and social justice movements. At present, even when some campaigns become successful, they don’t go all the way because they lack the integration with other struggles that’s required to effect sweeping changes.

In the earlier days of the environmental movement, back when new environmental agencies, laws, and regulations were being created and it was easier to enforce compliance with these regulations, it seemed fine for an environmental activist to specialize on an issue such as water, air, or endangered species. That kind of specialization of social change works in a period of stability and democratic accountability. But when the state has been hijacked, as it has been in the current moment, then the power needed to bring change has to be an amplified power. And that amplified power won’t come from a movement fragmented into separate silos of specialization—it will come from the integration of various environmentally sensitive projects into one movement or one big organization that helps people develop clarity about the interconnectedness of all the environmental and economic issues.

All deep change occurs when a movement is able to get a society as a whole engaged. How did we in India get our freedom? We succeeded once Gandhi was able to charge the imagination of the people of India, to help them hear the message that “you have a role in this, you can participate, and you can grow the change you want to see.” Gandhi’s leadership was more powerful than the leadership of past politicians because, instead of just giving big speeches, he shifted the frame to “you can make the difference.”

Spiritual Activism

I think spiritual organizations could play an important part in overcoming fragmentation and engaging society as a whole, though today environmental groups and spiritual organizations for the most part have very little connection. But the same is currently true of all groups working to transform our world: they are all operating in their own silos and we need to bring them together. That’s why I like the work that the Network of Spiritual Progressives (spiritualprogressives.org) is doing in bringing these communities together.

Global warming is one arena in which I can imagine spiritual progressive organizing making a difference by shifting mass consciousness. We know that 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions comes from industrial agriculture and globalized trade in food. Today much of the support for this comes through our own consumerism, so we’ve got to withdraw that support. That withdrawal can only happen if we see ourselves in a deeper way—as spiritual beings embedded in an increasingly just, compassionate, and environmentally sustainable world. The Network of Spiritual Progressives is working to help people imagine such a world through its proposal for a “New Bottom Line” that reorients our society toward generosity, peace, and social transformation. Coming to see ourselves as spiritual beings embedded in a compassionate world is the only way we are likely to gain the strength to give up our consumer addictions and habits and recognize that as deeper beings we need less things and more relationships. And once our relationships grow, whether with the earth or with our communities, our power grows too.

Interdependent Self-Sufficiency

The spinning wheel became a powerful symbol for...