Book Notes

Global Spin: The Corporate
Assault on Environmentalism
By Sharon Beder
White River Junction, VT
Chelsea Green, 1998
288 pp.; $19.95

"Surveys show that the majority of people in most countries are not only concerned about the environment; they think environmental protection should be regulated by governments and given priority over economic growth," writes Sharon Beder in Global Spin. Her purpose is to explain why this is.

The short answer: "Widespread public concern is not translating into government action because of the activities of large corporations that are seeking to subvert or manipulate the popular will."

Global Spin is a compendium of the various political and public relations strategies utilized by Big Business to stave off environmental reform. The book focuses primarily on the United States, but also includes examples from Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Beder's story starts, appropriately, not in 1990 with Earth Day and the corporate responses to it, but with corporate alarm over a burgeoning environmental movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Confronted with frightening citizen mobilization, corporations themselves organized politically, reinvigorating old trade associations, establishing public affairs departments, building new business coalitions and funding thinktanks to provide the intellectual rationale for business-friendly policies.

From the mid-1970s on, and particularly since 1990's Earth Day, business has evolved a whole new set of political tools to obstruct passage, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws.

Beder devotes chapters to corporate front groups, the wise use movement, lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), corporate-funded thinktanks, the public relations industry, advertising, commercialism in education and media bias.

With the partial exception of a chapter on dioxin, Beder's approach is to categorize, describe and illustrate with examples the corporate tactics she discusses. This makes Global Spin a valuable encyclopedia of the corporate capture of the political process. But it also means there is no single narrative to carry the story forward, which makes the book a bit less engaging than it might otherwise be.

Beder recognizes that corporate spin is not the whole story of how business has managed to hold off fundamental economic and social changes to protect the environment. Both the threat of capital flight and a corporate-dominated campaign finance system have arguably been more important in preventing an economic restructuring commensurate with the ecological problems facing the world. But the mechanisms of corporate spin are certainly a critical part of the story.

And unmasking and confronting corporate public relations strategies will be an important part of any successful campaign to achieve far-reaching environmental protections. Beder is right to warn that environmentalists "ignore the ideological sphere where corporations set the agenda" at their own peril.

Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the
Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat
By Howard F. Lyman with Glen Merzer
New York: Scribner, 1998
223 pp.; $23.00

It is easy to see why the beef industry wanted to silence Howard Lyman, the former cattle rancher and vegetarian activist who, with Oprah Winfrey, was sued by a group of Texas cattlemen in the first "food disparagement" case brought to trial in the United States [see "Veggie Libel," this issue].

Lyman's Mad Cowboy hits you right between in the eyes. In the first three pages, the book explains in gruesome detail how cows are fed "protein concentrates" made from rendered (ground-up) dead horses, dogs, cats, chickens and turkeys, as well as blood and fecal matter of their own species.

It is no wonder that Lyman's presentation on Winfrey's show inspired her to suggest she would give up eating hamburgers.

Lyman writes with the fervor of a convert. A former Montana rancher, he left college a firm proponent of chemicalized agriculture, and proceeded to transform his inherited family farm into a regimented factory farm replete with hormones, pesticides and cows in confinement. He reports his old daily diet as a half-dozen eggs and six slices of bacon for breakfast; a half-pounder for lunch, with pork and beans on the side; a 16-ounce steak for dinner with mash potatoes in gravy; and a pint of ice cream with chocolate syrup for desert.

He describes his realization that chemicals were destroying the land, and that chemicalized factory farming was transferring wealth from farmers to chemical companies. He transitioned to organic farming and later, after moving to Washington, D.C. to work for the National Farmers Union, to vegetarianism. He eventually became a vegan, eating no meat or dairy products.

But while Mad Cowboy's criticism of carnivorous diets and the factory farm system is infused with a convert's passion, it is well argued and documented. Lyman explains the health hazards of high-fat, meat-heavy diets, the bacterial perils of chicken and fish, the looming threat of Mad Cow disease and the dangers of hormones and pesticides in meat products, as well as the environmental costs of raising cattle. 

Mad Cowboy is a compelling call to substitute plants for meat.