Barrick Gold’s lawsuit against the authors and publisher of the book Noir Canada: pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique, a French language exposé of the practices of Canadian mining companies in Africa, has been settled out of court.

(See Barrick Gold’s press release, a Le Devoir news story (in French), and a story in the Winnipeg Free Press)

The defamation lawsuit was a classic example of a “SLAPP” – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, employed by powerful individuals and corporations to intimidate critics and stifle scrutiny of their actions, typically by claiming that the criticism amounts to libel or slander. Such lawsuits have been employed in efforts to silence indigenous people, environmentalists, labour groups, human rights activists and others who try to oppose logging, mining, resource extraction, pollution, dam-building, and other activities that they believe are harming or may harm health, safety, welfare, or ecological integrity in affected communities.

Could you imagine having to grow your own food?

Industrial agriculture has, in the recent past, brought us wine and milk lakes and butter mountains. This industrial approach to agriculture is the main reason why the per capita food production continued to increase during the 1990s and early 2000s. Though there is concern that this upwards trend may now be declining.

The downside of industrial agriculture seems to be most often expressed in arguments for organic foods. What is very rarely mentioned, however, is that our ability to engage in industrial agriculture is primarily due to fossil fuels.The energy value of the apple that we buy in the store is about 60 kcals. The total energetic cost of producing that apple, is far higher. Energy was burned in the form of gasoline that drove the tractor, and in the production of the fertilizers.

What should we make of Mattel‘s October 5, 2011 announcement of new “sustainable sourcing” principles for its paper toy packaging? The move came after a highly-publicized Greenpeace campaign featuring Ken and Barbie “breakup” videos on the internet and huge banners draped from Mattel’s Los Angeles headquarters declaring, “Barbie: It’s Over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.”

Greenpeace banner on Mattel HQ, June 2011 (Greenpeace)

The principles commit Mattel to some significant concrete steps.

Under Mattel’s new policy, 70% of its paper packaging will be harvested sustainably or recycled by the end of 2011, rising to 85% in 2015, with preference for paper certified under the Forest Stewardship Council program for sustainable forestry certification.  The company has also directed all its suppliers to exit known controversial sources of paper fibre. It has committed to avoid such sources in the future by ensuring that fibre sources are known and traced throughout the supply chain, fibre is harvested in compliance with local laws, and is not harvested from old-growth forests, from forests recently converted to timber plantations, or in ways that violate internationally recognized indigenous rights.

This blog was originally published in Professor Mark Winfield’s bog.

Ontario environmentalists have generally been breathing a sigh of relief over the re-election of the McGuinty government, with its implication of the continuation of the Feed-in Tariff system under the Green Energy Act, and more general avoidance of the major retreat by the province on environmental matters that would almost certainly have accompanied a PC victory. However, as I noted in my previous blog, even with the re-election of the Liberals, the possibility of some sort of retrenchment on the environment, particularly in light of the province’s fiscal situation cannot be ruled out. In fact, I am increasingly of the view that a major restructuring in the province’s approach to environment and natural resources management is likely, most probably through the 2012 budget. Such a development would not be unprecedented – recall the 1996 federal Liberal Program Review budget that followed the relatively progressive 1993 “Red Book” platform.

Three years ago I was involved as an observer in the drafting of the ISO 26000 guide on Social Responsibility. The guide was prepared by an international working group of 450 representatives of business, labour, government, NGOs and other interests from 99 countries and 42 international organizations.  The early drafts of the guide contained language suggesting that an organization’s responsibility to do something about human rights varies with (among other things) its ability to influence the perpetrators of human rights violations. One passage, for example, stated that

“there will be situations where an organization’s ability to influence others will be accompanied by a responsibility to exercise that influence…. Generally, the responsibility for exercising influence increases with the ability to influence.”

This struck me as intuitively right. Companies (and other organizations) often have special relationships either with third parties who are in a position to violate human rights (governments, suppliers, security contractors, etc.), or those whose rights are violated (employees, local community members, etc.).