The Multinational Monitor

OCTOBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 5

T H E    L A W R E N C E    S U M M E R S    M E M O R I A L    A W A R D


THE DECEMBER 1997 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to The Conservation Fund.

The Conservation Fund regularly works with big corporations, accepting large monetary donations and properties which it manages. Among those corporations is the giant chemical polluter DuPont.

In September, Dupont donated land in the state of Maryland to the Conservation Fund and the American Farmland Trust.

A reporter asked whether the Fund was "greenwashing" DuPont's dirty deeds elsewhere by celebrating the company at a news conference and party at the National Press Club.

"You are so naive," snapped Conservation Fund spokesperson Jack Lynn. "I can't believe how naive you are," he repeated. "That is the kind of question we used to get back in the 1970s." (Corporate Crime Reporter, September 22, 1997, p. 7)

* In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Deputy Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.

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