ACTIVISTS say companies should be honest and accountable, and put people ahead of profits. But unless these common-sense guidelines also apply to nonprofit advocacy groups, corporate social responsibility will remain just another tactic for raising money and advancing political agendas.
Take the group Environmental Defense (ED), launched 40 years ago to secure a ban on DDT and, in the words of co-founder Charles Wurster, “achieve a level of authority” that environmentalists never had before. Its high-pressure campaign persuaded EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus to ignore his own scientific panel and ban DDT in 1972.
The panel had concluded that DDT is not harmful to people, birds or the environment. That’s especially true when small quantities are sprayed on walls to repel mosquitoes and prevent malaria. But ED and allied groups continued their misinformation campaign until the chemical was banished even from global health-care programs.
The activists ignored DDT’s lifesaving role, and focused instead on exaggerations and outright fabrications about how massive overuse of DDT affected birds and ecosystems, as alleged in “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (whose 100th birthday was commemorated on Sunday).
DDT helped eradicate malaria in the United States and Europe. But the disease still kills 2 million people a year, mostly in Africa. Since 1972, tens of millions have died who might well have lived if their countries had been able to keep DDT in their disease-control arsenals. Who will commemorate their deaths?
A year ago, the U.S. Agency for International Development and World Health Organization finally redeployed DDT for malaria control. But ED, Pesticide Action Network and other agitators still claim DDT is “associated with” low birth weights in babies and shortened lactation in nursing mothers.
Even if this wild speculation were true, says Uganda anti-malaria activist Fiona Kobusingye, these risks “are nothing compared to the constant danger of losing more babies and mothers to malaria.” Kobusingye has had malaria many times and lost her son, two sisters and four nephews to the disease.
None of these pressure groups has ever apologized for their disingenuous campaigns or been held accountable for the misery and death they helped perpetuate. Instead, they now blame malaria on global warming, and use this false claim to swell their coffers.
Malaria was once common even in Ohio, New Jersey, California and Siberia – but these groups allege that it’s spreading because global temperatures have risen a few tenths of a degree.
With authority must go accountability. In other words global social responsibility: for all corporations, including multinational activist corporations; for all concerns, health and economic as well as environmental; and for all people, especially Third World families in constant danger from diseases eradicated long ago in the United States.
Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Congress of Racial Equality and Atlas Economic Research Foundation and author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death” (Eco-Imperialism.com).