The short answer: everything. They are the same creature…

Here’s the long answer:

A short while ago, I posted a link to an article on why people litter on Linked-In with this challenge:

“If we can’t stop ourselves from the simple act of littering, how can we expect large corporations like DuPont, Bayer, and Honeywell to stop their willful pollution of our waterways with forever chemicals?”

A Linked-In colleague responded with: “It’s the other way around, Nina. You can’t escape consumerism. And littering is not the same as pollution by multi-national conglomerates with a lot of history like DuPont and Bayer.”

This prompted me to think that the colleague had not even read my article. Because, in it I submitted that while the act of dropping a plastic bottle or toxic cigarette butt in a forest by a river seems small compared to a corporation’s wilful release of toxic chemicals in the environment, the mindset is the same.

“Littering,” I contended, “was an individual’s most personal form of disrespect and apathy for everything: the environment (one’s home), other people, and ultimately oneself.”

Three main factors drive one to litter and they are the same factors that drive a corporate CEO to wilfully sanction the continued dumping of dangerous chemicals into the environment: (1) lack of respect (for the environment; for all things, including self); (2) apathy (born of insecurity, lack of connection–particularly with the natural environment–and fear of vulnerability); and (3) a sense of no accountability.

By diminishing the act of littering, as my colleague had done, we become complicit in the notion that consumerism drives everything—even disrespect—and therefore somehow acceptable. As though the wilful act of throwing garbage into a forest or creek is just a natural function of a consumer attitude, not an individual’s disrespect of nature. Consumerism does not drive human behaviour and action; it simply exploits and directs traits that do drive us: insecurities, fears, longings—the very traits that the capitalist neoliberal model subvert to ensure continued consumerism and growth in capital. Consumers instead point an accusatory finger away from self as responsible to a concept or an amoeba-like corporate entity that is mostly untouchable and iconic: DuPont did this; DuPont did that… Not CEO so-and-so ratified this decision or that action:

How differently it would read if these individuals were made accountable instead of hiding under the shrouding carapace of a corporate entity!

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NOT: in 1984, DuPont secretly collects and tests tap water from its employees, which show forever chemical C8 (PFOA) at potentially dangerous levels in the public water supplies of both Ohio and West Virginia. In the years following, DuPont escalates production, keeping the chemical’s dangers a secret. Over the decades that follow, DuPont continues to pump hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA sludge and powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River and C8-laced vapours out its smokestacks. 

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NOT: in 1999, DuPont ‘collaborates’ with EPA in which it appoints half the scientists. DuPont doesn’t provide the other scientists with information on C8 or notify them that it is in the water and at levels that are unsafe.

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Corporations are certainly a legal entity; but they are made up of people. People run them. CEOs, shareholders, corporate managers. These are all individuals with their own history, moral obligation, and place in the community. They are accountable, no matter what the law.

They are morally accountable. Just as individuals who litter are.