Andrew Crane, George R. Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics, Schulich School of Business

For one thing, its narrow focus on human rights and the rule of law distracts attention from the massive environmental damage  and energy consumption involved in extraction and processing of tar sands oil. For another, the claim that tar sands operations fully respect human rights is debatable, with numerous First Nations claiming that these operations impair their rights to clean water and a healthful environment.

It is also hard to miss the xenophobic undertones of the Ethical Oil message–it is no coincidence that most of the countries targeted by the campaign are ethnically, culturally or religiously distinct from the white Canadian majority, and the dangerous “otherness” of the foreigner is a central trope of Levant’s book.

Most importantly, as Andy argued forcefully, Canada cannot credibly portray itself as an energy policy leader simply by claiming that the status quo in the Alberta oil patch is preferable to the status quo in certain other oil-producing nations.

Rather, to be a real leader Canada would have to show that it is genuinely committed to progress toward a post-carbon economy and improvement of the human rights records of Canadian companies overseas. This would include holding Canadian oil companies to the same high standards wherever they do business in the world. It is disingenuous to say that oil companies in Canada are ethical leaders if those very same companies are busily pumping oil and propping up those same repressive foreign regimes that the Ethical Oil campaign vilifies.

Way to go Andy! Thanks for bringing some much needed clarity to the “Ethical Oil” campaign’s effort to obfuscate the ethical issues surrounding the tar sands.

(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.

The Québec Superior Court had ruled that the lawsuit was an abuse of process designed to intimidate Barrick Gold’s critics, and that Barrick should pay the defendants’ legal fees. Despite this important victory, and facing the prospect of a lengthy knock-down, drag-out legal battle, the defendant authors and publisher decided to settle the case out of court. As part of the settlement (according to the Barrick press release), they agreed to cease publication and reprinting of the book, and to make a “significant payment” to Barrick.

Barrick explicitly agrees, in its press release, that the authors and the publisher, Écosociété, wrote and published Noir Canada in good faith, in the belief that it was legitimate. It also acknowledges that

“Noir Canada was written to provoke a public debate about controversies surrounding the presence of Canadian interests in Africa and to call for the creation of a public inquiry about this Canadian presence in Africa. [The authors] still maintain this position and continue to inquire about the role of private corporations active as commercial partners with African political representatives engaged in armed conflicts.”

But how much room does this settlement leave for such investigation into and public debate about the connection between Canadian companies and environmental damage, armed conflict, and human rights violations around the world?  A group of Québec intellectuals thinks that it will have a chilling effect, and I believe their concerns are well founded. Their commentary was published in Le Devoir yesterday, in French. An English translation was posted today on the blog Free Speech at Risk. It is important reading.

Here is a bit of what they said:

“Still the reader may wonder why the authors have nevertheless “accepted” another SLAPP from Barrick Gold. Why did they “choose” to comply with these conditions? Those who ask these questions have no idea of the kind of psychological pressures that can take place in thèse circumstances. The consequences of this lawsuit are enormous for the authors. Lives have been turned upside down forever. One must be aware of the fact that the out of court deliberative process does not in general take the form of a conversation over a cup of tea. In the case of a continuing SLAPP, a poisonous atmosphere often prevails, even if one is looking for an out of court settlement. The lawyers try to demoralize the opposition. Thus, the authors and the publisher did not choose anything. They were desperately trying to extricate themselves from a legal unbearable straitjacket.

“Despite the ferocity with which Barrick’s lawyers have practiced censorship, it is remarkable to note at the end of this process the strength of character of the authors and the publisher. They strongly reaffirmed the rationale for the publication of their book.

“Moreover, the admissions required by Barrick in fact reveal a certain weakness on the part of the company itself. It can only win its case by exerting an enormous pressure on its opponents. But in so doing, it shows that the lawsuit was from the very beginning not a procedure meant to refute but rather to silence the authors and their legitimate questions.”

This episode underlines the need for anti-SLAPP legislation in Canada.  In the United States, around half of the states have anti-SLAPP laws protecting the right to public participation, allowing courts to dismiss abusive lawsuits, award legal fees to SLAPP defendants, and allow them to launch “SLAPPBack” lawsuits against those who launch SLAPPs. British Columbia had such a law briefly in 2001, enacted by the departing New Democrats and repealed quickly by the incoming Liberal government. Québec introduced draft anti-SLAPP legislation in 2008, which was enacted in 2009—too late to stop Barrick from bringing its lawsuit. Ontario is mulling the prospect (see a thoughtful paper on this by Osgoode Hall Law School student Christine Kellowan, posted days before the Noir Canada settlement in an effort to renew the debate that had appeared to die down in the last year).

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.

Like most voluntary corporate codes of conduct, the principles are couched in qualifiers like “where possible” and “to the extent feasible”, and do not provide for independent third-party verification. But they are not mere window-dressing. They commit Mattel to some significant concrete steps, including to establish specific goals, report publicly on progress, and adopt procedures to ensure that its procurement practices actually reflect the principles.  They also require Mattel to support “multi-stakeholder” efforts to protect global forest resources and give preference to fibre certified under schemes that “exhibit the highest standards and robust audit processes.”

While the principles do not spell out which programs this language is intended to mean, most people familiar with forestry certification would read it as referring implicitly to the FSC, with its innovative tri-cameral structure (environmental, social and economic chambers, each split further into global North and South sub-chambers), as opposed to its mainly industry-driven counterparts such as the big forestry companies’ favoured American Forest & Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the Canadian Standards Association’s Sustainable Forest Management program, and the small woodlot owners’ favoured Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).

Sumatran tigers (WWF)

Greenpeace claims that the new policy will help the endangered Sumatran tiger by preventing Mattel from sourcing paper from companies like Jakarta-based Asia Pulp and Paper, which Greenpeace alleges is a major contributor to deforestation in the tiger’s rapidly shrinking Indonesian rain forest habitat—and which, incidentally, has been buying up Canadian forest industry operations at a rapid pace.

At one level, this is a victory for environmentally responsible business. Mattel is the largest toy maker in the world, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in play.” Its procurement practices have a significant impact on the behaviour of suppliers around the world and send a strong signal to other global toy brands like Disney and Hasbro. If Mattel goes “sustainable,” others will likely follow. Its new procurement practices will make business more difficult for some of its more ecologically destructive suppliers, and reward those that are less destructive. In the long run, if extended throughout the industry, they might help ease the seemingly relentless pressure on tropical rainforests and Sumatran tiger habitat.

Let’s face it: The Sumatran tiger will not be saved by buying Barbies packaged in sustainably harvested paper.

But will Mattel’s new principles reduce the number of Barbie, Hot Wheels and Fisher Price toys purchased by and for the children of the world? Far from it. You can bet Mattel hopes they have the opposite effect, boosting sales by easing the consciences of consumers who fancy themselves environmentally responsible.

Let’s face it: The Sumatran tiger will not be saved by buying Barbies packaged in sustainably harvested paper. If Mattel and the other big toy brands stop sourcing paper products from tropical rainforests, less scrupulous players—companies not as susceptible to public shaming—will take up the slack. Tropical deforestation, like other ecological crises, will not be reversed unless we confront humanity’s insatiable and constantly growing appetite for material consumption, especially in the already affluent industrialized countries like Canada.

I have two school-age children. After reading the Mattel announcement, I thought I would count the toys in their rooms. I lost track around two hundred. Then I tried to imagine all the old toys we have discarded or given away, a pile that would dwarf those we currently have. A pile made largely of plastics that take millennia to break down in the environment. And how many of these toys do our children play with more than once, twice, a dozen times?

Instead of saying “I want a toy in sustainable packaging,” consider saying “I don’t need another toy just now.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love toys, and they can be crucial for children’s intellectual, emotional and other development. But how many does one child need? I’m not suggesting that all a child needs for a full play life is a stick and a mud puddle, although those ingredients can fill entire childhood afternoons. What I am suggesting is that the next time you think about buying yet another toy, instead of saying “I want a toy in sustainable packaging,” consider saying “I don’t need another toy just now.” If hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people choose not to buy that next toy, encouraging children instead to create and explore interior and exterior worlds of play with their own minds and bodies using the materials around them, not only will we help reduce the pressure on species and ecosystems, we will help raise generations of stewards eager to protect them.

I don’t mean to be unduly harsh on Greenpeace or Mattel. Initiatives like Mattel’s sustainable sourcing policy are victories of a sort. With Greenpeace turning forty this year, it is worth reflecting what kind of victories its often dramatic direct action campaigns achieve. Their greatest significance, as Greenpeace asserts in a fortieth birthday pamphlet that just arrived in the mail, is to create “the possibility of another future” by shining a spotlight on environmentally and socially unsustainable business practices. “Sustainable sourcing” is one small step toward such a future. Buying less, and creating more with our own imaginations and hands, would be a larger and more rewarding one.

“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.). In such circumstances it seemed intuitive that, if companies had leverage over third parties through their webs of relationships, they ought to exercise such leverage to improve the human rights situation even if they, themselves, were not contributing directly to any human rights violations.

UN Special Representative John Ruggie

I was surprised, therefore, when the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative on business and human rights, Professor John Ruggie, objected strenuously to this aspect of the draft ISO 26000 guide.  He argued that a company’s size, resources and power do not determine its human rights responsibilities, otherwise big corporations could be called upon to protect and promote human rights simply because they had the ability to do so despite having no connection to or involvement in the human rights abuses in question. This, he argued, would require assuming, in moral philosophy terms, that “can implies ought.” He also argued that this approach was conceptually vague, difficult to operationalize, and susceptible to strategic gaming by companies and governments alike.

In response to Professor Ruggie’s concerns, the leadership of the ISO 26000 working group rewrote the portions of the guide dealing with influence and leverage. Many references to responsibility arising from and increasing with the ability to influence other actors’ decisions and activities were removed.  The changes were endorsed by the working group at its final meeting in Copenhagen in the Spring of 2010, and later that year the final version of ISO 26000 was published with the approved of a large majority of ISO member bodies.

This was not the end of the story as far as I was concerned. I still found appealing the proposition that corporate leverage—a company’s ability to influence the actions of third parties through its relationships—gives rise to corporate responsibility in certain circumstances. I turned to the business ethics and moral philosophy literature for confirmation of my intuition. To my surprise, no one seemed to have tackled this question head on. Plenty of scholars had touched on aspects of the problem—the general relationship between power and moral responsibility, the concept of “silent complicity,” the idea of corporate “spheres of influence,” and so on—but no one had presented a systematic moral argument for the proposition that leverage, in certain circumstances, gives rise to responsibility.

Corporate “leverage” gives rise to responsibility where there is a morally significant connection between the company and a rights-holder or rights-violator, the company is able to make a difference, it can do so at modest cost, and the threat to human rights is substantial.

So I set out to supply the argument myself. Drawing on venerable moral debates about a bystander’s duty to come to the rescue of someone in distress and on excellent work by contemporary business ethicist Florian Wettstein about positive moral responsibilities to speak out against human rights abuses, I developed a theory of leverage-based corporate human rights responsibility. I argue that leverage gives rise to responsibility where four conditions are satisfied: (1) there is a morally significant connection between the company and a rights-holder or rights-violator, (2) the company is able to make a contribution to ameliorating the situation, (3) it can do so at modest cost, and (4) the threat to human rights is substantial.

While the proposition that leverage equals responsibility remains highly controversial in the global business community and was rejected by Professor Ruggie in his work as UN Special Representative, I believe it is both morally sound and consistent with leading global frameworks for corporate social responsibility, including the UN Global Compact, ISO 26000 and Professor Ruggie’s own Guiding Principles on business and human rights, endorsed this past summer by the UN Human Rights Council.

If you are interested in reading more about my argument, the paper is available from SSRN (click on “One Click Download”) and is forthcoming soon in the Business Ethics Quarterly. I welcome your comments.

Assisted migration is the intentional translocation of species outside their historic ranges to mitigate biodiversity losses caused by climate change. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently become the subject of fierce controversy in the academic literature.

The article was written by IRIS Senior Fellow and York geography instructor Dr. Nina Hewitt and an interdisciplinary team of IRIS-affiliated researchers from biology, environmental science, business, law and social science. It takes stock of the burgeoning academic literature on this topic and identifies possible avenues toward consensus on how to address what might otherwise become an intractable ethical and policy problem.

Joern Fischer of Leuphana Universität Lüneburg in Germany, a leading scientist in the field, wrote about the article yesterday in his “Ideas for Sustainability” blog. He congratulated the article for its thorough analysis of a very complex and polarized debate. It is polarized because many scientists see assisted migration as pitting two conservation goals against each other: the preservation of a single species from extinction, versus the protection of entire ecological communities against the risks posed by introduced species, which can have impacts similar to invasive alien species.

Fischer lauded the article for focusing on the nuances and complexities of the debate rather than accepting a polarized, black-and-white view. He especially liked a figure in the article that presents the arguments for and against assisted migration and their key inter-relationships in a one-page schematic.

Professor Fischer praised the article’s effort to provide a conceptual framework within which scientists and policy makers can find common ground:

“The authors state that the debate is complex, and rather than proposing a simple solution, they try to provide a framework which can help to reach case-specific solutions. Hooray …! I wish more scientists did this. … Hewitt et al. have done a great job of giving an authoritative overview of many relevant arguments. I highly recommend their paper!”

This endorsement from one of the protagonists in the assisted migration debate is a great vindication for the hard work that went into the study, and it suggests that the article will have a constructive impact both on the scientific debate and on conservation policies and practices on the ground. Achievements like this article really help to advance IRIS’s mission as a national and international leader in practical, collaborative and interdisciplinary research that influences policy and decision makers on a variety of sustainability issues.

There is one irony in this story. The research was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, one of the victims of the Canadian federal government’s recent massive cuts to scientific and environmental programs. These cuts are one of many sad indications of this government’s unfortunate head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change and other ecological challenges.  CFCAS pleaded with the government, to no avail, to reconsider the cuts and devote adequate funding to weather and climate research.

I am very excited about two things for this sabbatical:

1. Getting up and working a nice 10-15 hour day in which I work on my own top priority projects, rather than having to prioritize the administrative tasks required to support other people.

2. Getting to be a student again, and learning a lot of new stuff.

During my last sabbatical in 2004-05, I wrote an article for University Affairs about being a harassed, overworked working parent of young children and trying to have a successful sabbatical. On rereading it, I found that my advice to readers, was actually helpful to me six years on!

I started planning for my current sabbatical two years ago. I will be spending 6 months at Harvard Forest on a Charles Bullard Fellowship finishing a book that I started writing 10 years ago. After that, I will be going back to the Zoology Department in Oxford University, where I did my doctorate. I will be a Visiting Scholar in the group of Prof. Kathy Willis, at the Long-Term Ecology Lab., where I will write another book. But before this blog reader goes all misty-eyed, yes, that IS Oxford’s picturesque Radcliffe Camera, with my daughters standing infront, a few weeks ago, but to right, is a shot of the very 70′s concrete Zoology building. Squeezed in between my time at Harvard and Oxford, I will be attending conferences and workshops, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2012 AGM, where the symposium that I proposed and am organizing with former York U student, Dr. Andrew Tanentzap, “Making Progress on Wicked Problems Through Interdisciplinary Collaborations” was successful in the peer-reviewed adjudication competition!

This sabbatical will be quite different from my previous one, when I did three separate one month trips to Sweden, and hung out in the basement at the Massey College Library at the University of Toronto, for the rest of the time. Together, with the Librarian, P J MacDougall, I wrote a cool article for Trellis, the Toronto Botanical Garden newsletter, about the Victorian gardening writer, James Shirley Hibberd, “A Victorian Google”.

During the next year, IRIS will be very ably led by Prof. Stepan Wood of Osgoode Hall Law School, whom I am delighted to welcome back from a very successful Sabbatical Year in Italy. I hope that he will find time to blog, but he will probably find himself in the same mega-time-crunch boat that I did. On the other hand, I hope to be blogging more in the next year about my travels, and posting in the regular blog part of IRIS. The work that I will be doing, relates to sustainability, and specifically, habitat conservation and restoration, as well as to oil and gas and energy security.

I wish Stepan and the IRIS community, the very best for a productive  year, and I hope to see some of you in Harvard and Oxford.

Dawn Bazely

BUT, I think I finally came up with a way to sustain a year of regular blogging.Tracy Tanentzap, our IRIS Research at York Undergraduate Student gave me one of my favourite Christmas gifts: a 2011 365-day calendar with advice on how to Go Green. My only issue with the calendar, is that the tips are very much at the Introductory Level. I am doing nearly all of them already (I looked ahead).

So, what better inducement to blog regularly, than to provide the GOING GREEN 101 tip for you, plus a suggestion for how to upgrade it to a GOING GREEN level 201, 301 or 401 tip. The good folk at www.pappintl.com are very welcome to incorporate my ideas into their future calendars:

Jan 1: Make a New Year’s resolution to ‘go green’. If this is the Introductory course on Going Green, then the higher level course would be: GOING GREEN – UP YOUR GAME.

Jan 2: Get fit by jogging, running, biking, walking or skating outdoors. Time spent outdoors builds an appreciation for nature and the environment. Upgrade: Take the stairs at the office, not the elevator. OR, in my case – if you are working 60-70 hour weeks and your failed intentions to exercise  are paving the way to overweight hell, then call a personal trainer and support the local economy.

Jan 3: Wash your clothes in cold water. Upgrade: Wash fuller loads – combine clothes and reduce the total number of weekly loads.

Jan 4: Darn your socks, repair your clothes. Upgrade: Start a knitting or sewing club – for any age – as a social activity.

Jan 5: Drink tapwater, not bottled water. Lot’s of good reasons to do this. Upgrade: We all have our own water  bottle, but if you are like me and forget to take it, then make sure that you have 3-4 bottles stashed in different strategic locations.

Jan 6: Use baking soda instead of chemical cleaners for the tub and toilet. Upgrade: Buy the book, Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing by Michael de Jong. In fact, buy 10 and give them as gifts along with a Zen Cleaning Kit – lemon, white vinegar, baking soda, borax and salt.

Jan 7: Compost your kitchen and yard waste. Upgrade: Make your composter RAT-PROOF. Yes – your composter is an ideal home for Rattus norvegicus. Food rains down on their heads and they are very happy. We now have a rolling compost bin (available at Lee Valley Tools)  plus a raised metal bin on bricks with holes punched in the side and a huge, heavy lid. As much as I respect rats, I really do not want them living in my compost bin.

Jan 8: Buy local food produce, and buy organic (check out my blog on buying organic). Upgrade: Learn how to preserve and put up food. It has gotten easier to learn how to do.

Jan 9: When printing documents, use recycled, non-bleached paper. Upgrade: Set your printer to 2-sided printing. You will need to change the printer settings in your computer printer driver.

Jan 10: Use biodegradable detergents for your dishes and laundry. Upgrade: Learn about the Phosphorus run-off situation and the phosphorus by-laws in your region. It’s actually more of an issue than you may think it is. I was surprised by what I found out.

Ok – so that’s it for now. Let’s see if I can keep the tips and the upgrades coming.

Happy New Year,

Dawn R. Bazely

From January to April 2010, I taught BIOLOGY 2010, Plants.

I have long been annoyed that of the 6 Kingdoms of Life (Bacteria, Archaea, Plants, Protista, Fungi and Animals), introductory zoology courses cover only 1 kingdom. On the other hand, introductory botany courses cover  5 kingdoms. The animal kingdom has hardly any species compared to other 5. In introductory Botany or Plants courses, if we follow the text book’s organizational structure, starting at chapter 1, we work our way through fungi, seaweed, bacteria and viruses before getting to trees and flowers. This is NOT fair!

The last time I taught this Biology course was in 1997. And everyone was bored by how long it took us to get to plants – chapter 15 after chapters 1-14 on every other kind of organism except animals. But, thanks to the wonders of e-learning, now I can start my course with chapter 21 – The Human Prospect, or People and Plants and not lose the thread.

My goal was to hook the students into the course through excitement about plants as food:

Without photosynthesis, there would be no life on earth as we know it. Plants are the foundation of our life. Yet, although there are over 250,000 species of plants, humans use only 14 species as our main food crops! WHEAT, RICE, MAIZE, POTATOES, SWEET POTATOES and MANIOC (provide more than 80% of the total calories consumed by humans), while SUGARCANE, SUGARBEET, COMMON BEANS, SOYBEANS, BARLEY, SORGHUM, COCONUTS and BANANAS add to the list, that constitutes the majority of crops that are widely grown for food around the globe.

In the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian (crop-based) societies, the area needed to support a family dropped from 5 sq km to a fraction of this. The efforts of a few people were able to produce enough food for everyone.

Since then, the industrial revolution and the green revolution have provided huge subsidies to the amount of time and energy that it takes to produce food to feed ourselves.

All food for thought!

I think that we should give Jerusalem Artichoke or Sunchoke (Helianthis tuberosus) more attention. It’s one of only two truly native plant crops in our Great Lakes Basin (the other is wild rice – Zizania aquatica). You can see photos of me and my husband with our back yard crop of Sunchokes – we have dug up about 30lbs so far!

Dawn R. Bazely

Now, I have had various interactions, on and off with CFIA for a decade, about the development and implementation of the Invasive Alien Species Strategy for Canada. CFIA and Environment Canada were two of the lead agencies on this issue. From a global perspective, Canada has been a laggard when it comes to the development of strong laws, policies and programmes for managing potentially invasive, non-indigenous, introduced species, and their potential threats to both agriculture and the natural environment. I have witnessed this laggardliness from when I was researching my book with Judy Myers at UBC, and in the decade since, as Canada has tried to move forward on this issue (see Myers and Bazely 2003). I have come to the conclusion, that one of the main reasons for Canada being at the rear of the pack when it comes to action, is the woeful under-resourcing of the various agencies, including CFIA, who are tasked with the issue. Who’s at the front of the pack? New Zealand and Australia.

Therefore, Prof. Rick Holley’s (University of Manitoba) observation about the lack of resources for CFIA in the context of screening imported food for quality and contamination, certainly resonates with my experience. For example, I referred to a US Department of Agriculture report on “Imports from China and Food Safety Issues” in an earlier Food Blog (no. 2) because I couldn’t find a Canadian information source.

Dawn R. Bazely