Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: a political ecology of change

Tens of millions of people are engaged in activities which they hope contribute to improving people's lives. Whatever their specific venue, they experience the frustration of having to implement vertical solutions for problems that require horizontal strategies. Teachers, for example, have long complained that they are in an uphill struggle to teach children who come to school suffering from poor nutrition, inadequate health care, toxic exposure, unsafe housing, and violence at home or in the street and have few prospects for employment. Progress in any area of social concern is quickly undermined by the persistence of vast inequality in all other areas. The solution to any of these problems is out of reach absent the solution to all the others. Whenever a problem appears to resist efforts to solve it, the solution can be found by stepping back and asking a bigger question. The non-profits are prevented by their structures and funders from asking such questions because the inevitable answers would bring them into conflict with market imperatives. The role of the non-profits is to continually address but never solve the destructive social impacts of corporate power.

The Cats in Suits

As organisms we all live in our own worlds even when we share a common space. A bacterium in your mouth, for example, might as well be on another planet. It weighs so little that it can float in any direction, indifferent to the force of gravity that governs your every move. At the same time it is buffeted by miniscule bursts of energy, heat and chemicals which you have no awareness of whatsoever. You share one universe--if the sun goes cold you will both freeze--but the ways in which you behave are based on completely different sets of considerations.

A corporation is not an organism (however confused the US Supreme Court may be on this point). It is, however, a self-perpetuating entity that transforms its environment as a byproduct of its existence. It is functionally and legally structured around the goal of generating profit for its owners. It makes sense of the world by processing incoming information through twin organs known as the balance sheet and the profit/loss statement. Anything that does not appear in the window created by those two instruments is not part of the corporation's functional environment and therefore, as far as it is concerned, does not exist.

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