Interestingly what is starting to happen in the business community is the opposite trend. More and more of them are realising that they might have to start rethinking their attitudes to morality. It is getting harder and harder for a business to remain successful if it simply ignores the moral choices of its customers or its workforce.
This week McDonalds announced that it is going to get rid of plastic straws and replace them with paper ones. It has already succeeded in taking almost all plastic out of its packaging. Back in the day this was the corporation that decided that it would take a couple of anarchists to court for distributing leaflets outside one of its stores criticising its products. Some company executive thought that the best way to protect McDonalds reputation was to bully a couple of hard up protesters in the hope that this would end criticism of the way the company was operating.
The result was spectacular. A spectacular failure. The reputation of the company plummeted and whole generations of young parents simply boycotted the stores and wouldn’t take their children near one. The anarchists won hands down regardless of the court case. Since then the company have slowly realised that they badly need to try and detoxify their product. They still sell mass produced meat. Many of their products are still unhealthy. Yet as fast food stores go they now have one of the best reputations for training their staff, they have made serious efforts to offer a few healthier meal choices and they are now well ahead of their rivals on getting rid of plastic packaging. Given the sheer volume of their sales this is no small achievement. Having started out as one of the most cynical of capitalist companies McDonalds have put considerable effort into repackaging themselves as a company with some morality.
There are, of course, large numbers of companies functioning on the basis of the short term bottom line who are using zero hours contracts, packing their products in the cheapest plastic materials, and competing solely on price and advertising. Yet increasing numbers of companies are realising that morality is an important part of their business and that both workers and customers need to feel there is something worthwhile about the organisation if they are going to give it any loyalty. There are, for example, many businesses in the States who have increased not reduced their efforts to get free of fossil fuels since the election of Donald Trump. Instead of jumping for joy that they have a President who is ignoring science and going for quick profit at the expense of future generations they are choosing to invest in the changes that they think are necessary to adapt to the next generation of fossil fuel free business.
As we get progressively closer to incurable environmental disaster it is not entirely surprising that intelligent business people are beginning to question the morality of past business practices. After all no one can escape the consequences of global environmental damage and even the most profit obsessed individual ought to be aware that sooner or later they are not going to be able to enjoy their wealth in the middle of environmental breakdown. This week, for example, researchers revealed that the Antarctic ice cap is melting at trend rates that will finish off the existence of all our coastal cities by the end of this century. The loss of New York, London, Shanghai and Bombay is not something that anyone who thinks about the future with any degree of seriousness can morally justify being aware of and doing nothing to stop.
When it comes to protecting nature it has been tempting for some environmentalists to try and win the argument by making an economic estimate of the financial value of land on which there are high concentrations of biodiversity or where particularly important ecosystems can be found. That can be an interesting intellectual exercise. It is rarely convincing. Few people are persuaded to protect polar bears against drilling for oil in the arctic because of a calculation of a clever economists about the value to the public of maintaining a nature reserve. It is a lot easier to persuade people that it is simply morally wrong to put at risk the existence of a magnificent species simply in order to lurch on a little longer with an outmoded fossil fuel technology.
I don’t want to save bumble bees because of the huge economic contribution they make to agriculture by pollinating our crops. I want to save them because they are beautiful and interesting and have been on this planet for around 60 million years and it is morally wrong to wipe them out by carelessly using pesticides to support monoculture. I don’t believe that we should keep fishing trawlers away from significant parts of our coastline solely in order to protect breeding grounds and increase fish catches. I believe that there is something morally wrong with scaping all life off the floor of the ocean by dragging heavy chain nets for miles across vibrant environments that may never recover.
So I am going to try and move away from my old prejudices. I still think it is true that it is economically wise for countries and companies to get themselves at the forefront of the change to a fossil fuel free economy. I still think that change is coming fast and there is money to be made by making that change and money to be lost by betting on the survival of fossilised technology. But rather more importantly I think there is a moral imperative on us to act.
We are staring at the consequences of a society that has allowed itself to become dominated by the pursuit of money. That has resulted in the destruction of huge swathes of life on this planet along with all its glorious complexity and taken us to the brink of catastrophic environmental breakdown. It has also left many people with an aching emptiness in their lives which has at its core the simple problem that there has to be more to life than just buying the next product.
It we are to start to repair some of the damage then we need to assert the importance of some very different values. There is such a thing as society. Community and family and friendship matter. Most good things aren’t done because someone wants to make a profit. Morality matters and we need to get back to making moral choices about how we wish to live our lives before it is too late for our own species – and many others – to survive.