Our Jaw: Still Dropped

Wal-Mart's eco-initiatives turning Arkansas into sustainability hotspot

Posted at 9:14 AM on 07 Sep 2007

Attention shoppers: we bring you news of the latest sustainability hotspot, none other than Fayetteville, Ark. Green start-ups are flocking to town, the University of Arkansas has established an Applied Sustainability Center, and the mayor rides an electric bike to work. Why? Because of a certain retail giant whose headquarters lies half an hour away. Say it with us now: Wal-Mart. The mega-store's recent efforts to be green are apparently luring like-minded (and hungry) companies to the area, including ventures that are experimenting with non-petroleum plastic and fuel-efficient shipping. As a result, Fayetteville has begun to market itself as an eco-haven, even adopting the hopeful nickname Green Valley. "We are driving a stake in the ground to become the center of the sustainability movement," says Mayor Dan Coody. Adds Jonathan Johnson, head of the university's sustainability center, "The environmental community is really focused on Northwest Arkansas. There's a huge experiment going on here."

source: The Washington Post
see also, in Grist: An interview with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott

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Comments: (9 comments)

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Give me a freaking break

This company drives consumer culture, locates on the periphery of cities ensuring people must drive rather than use transit to drive, destroys local economies while contributing to environmental degradation on a grand scale in developing nations and especially Three Gorges Dam, two coal plants a week, China, and you guys are falling over yourselves fawning over some cheap greenwash that might even be lowering their operating costs to help fuel their enviro-destruction elsewhere. Shame on you.

And meanwhile, according to Source Watch, the Walton Family Foundation is a funder to the Heartland Institute, a foundation that promotes smoking and denies climate change.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Inst ...

Quit helping this despicable corporation greenwash themselves. It is disgusting.

by cyberfarer at 11:24 AM on 07 Sep 2007

Making the goat the gardener

Don't rely on the industrie to create the change we need! This is just another example.

People will believe anything if they want it bad enough. It is good that they want to - it is bad that they trust so blindly. Green sells well even if it is not green. Is it a problem in the USA that so many people believe so easily what they are told without any skepticism.

Tobacco companies supporting health initiatives - Oil companies funding alternative energies - Walmart supporting the environment.

Yeah right.

Karsten PolluteLessDotCom

by PolluteLessDotCom at 12:30 PM on 07 Sep 2007

But E.D. Loves Wal-Mart, on the other hand . . .

this dropped into my email box re Wal-Mart

23 Organizations (including ILRF) Release Joint Wal-Mart Critique:

Wal-Mart's Sustainability Initiative: A Civil Society Critique

full PDF of report at http://www.bbc.wikispaces.net/space/showimage/CounterSust ...

Nearly two years ago, Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott announced a bold initiative to turn the world's largest company green. A long-anticipated first progress report on these sustainability goals is expected to be released soon. In advance of the company's report, 23 environmental, farm, labor, and other civil society groups have offered their own critiques of Wal-Mart's approach to sustainability.

Some of these critiques focus on specific Wal-Mart commitments and offer recommendations for change. Others argue that even if Wal-Mart achieved all of its stated goals, the company's business model makes it inherently unsustainable. All of them remind us of what's at stake by demonstrating Wal-Mart's huge and often devastating impacts on real people and places in the United States and around the world.

This report was coordinated by the Big Box Collaborative, and includes contributions from ActionAid International USA, Agribusiness Accountability Initiative, American Independent Business Alliance, American Rights at Work, Center for Health, Environment and Justice, Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoria Sindical (CILAS), Cornucopia Institute, Corporate Ethics International, Dogwood Alliance, Environmental Investigation Agency, Food and Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, Good Jobs First, Global Exchange, Gulf Restoration Network, Institute for Policy Studies, International Labor Rights Forum, Mangrove Action Project, STITCH, WakeUpWalMart.com, Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now (WARN), and Washington State Jobs with Justice.

November 17 Day of Action Against Big Box Retailers and Supermarkets
http://intldayofaction.bbc.wikispaces.net/

bernardo issel - http://www.NonprofitWatch.org - bernardo (at) NonprofitWatch.org

by NonprofitWatch at 12:51 PM on 07 Sep 2007

They'll shop until WE drop

I agree with the above comments. The idea that any mega-corporation, most especially Wal-Mart, is even "green" (to say nothing of actually sustainable), should be immediately scoffed at.

Furthermore, it is really popular to believe right now that we can buy our way out of global warming. Companies want us to believe that just by consuming differently, and not less, that we are still being environmental.

Baloney.

An essential part of being an evironmentally conscious person is LIVING SIMPLY and consuming conscientiously.

That isn't a very profitable idea for most corporations, though.

By the way does Wal-Mart still use sweat-shop labor or would ending that practice, hurt profit as well?

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields. -Leo Tolstoy

by iprefertherain at 12:54 PM on 07 Sep 2007

Avoiding that "guilty" feeling

This may not be news to others, but this realization was eye-opening to me:

North Americans feel guilty about what they do to the environment. We know what is going on and we feel bad that we do not stop.

So, the popular solution to the problem is not to change but instead to believe that your behavior is changed and you do not have to feel guilty anymore. Initiatives by Walmart (and other companies to follow I am certain) help with removing that guilty feeling while allowing us to continue shopping, consuming, buying the latest gadgets, etc. The solution to the inconvenient truth is not so inconvenient after all.

What a beautiful self-initiated twist of one's own mind!

I have said it before but will say it again: If we believe what we want to believe nothing will change. I fear that is what many of us do not want to hear because it includes ANY spiritual or moral believes. Those may be pleasant to the individual, but have a detrimental effect on the sustainability movement. The changes that need to occur are rather inconvenient and hard to accept as necessary. It is hard to convince anyone to commit to those changes if you yourself believe in comforting supernatural concepts without reason or evidence. You believe in a "spirit" - they believe in Walmart.

Educating our children and those they admire, good science, observable evidence, and reason are the only way out.

by PolluteLessDotCom at 5:42 AM on 08 Sep 2007

yeah

Who cares if the mayor rides an electric bike (like BioD!), if he does it near WalMart it's evil.

by odograph at 6:21 AM on 08 Sep 2007

A pittance of a penance...

...for a company that is responsible for how much carbon emissions over the years?

Herein lies the ethical rub: when a company takes 100 steps back and 20 steps forward, should we applaud them like they're 20 steps ahead, or critique them like they're still 80 steps back?

by Brudaimonia at 11:22 AM on 08 Sep 2007

wal mart poses a great opportunity

i think that we are missing a great opportunity to actually make a difference in sustainability with WalMart. WM has millions of shoppers each day who for the most part could care less about environmental causes. Rather than rail about the evilness of WM and condemn their shoppers as ignorant hicks (they are not), why don't we support them and work with them to reach a gigantic segment of the population that we could never work with otherwise? This is a huge opportunity and a great way to make a real difference rather than just talk and talk and whine and whine. No matter what we do, WM is here to stay and they are going to grow and grow. Who cares why they go sustainable, let us just get on board with them and help them to get there and make a real difference.

by jwilliamp at 9:25 AM on 17 Oct 2007

What???

I think your writer needs to visit Fayetteville - my hometown - before attributing our "greenness" to Wal-Mart.
First, Wal-Mart is headquartered in Bentonville, about 30 mins. north of here. And while I do applaud the steps Wal-Mart has taken to get their eco-stuff together, they still have a long way to go. And if you go to Bentonville and Rogers, where most Wal-Mart corporate staff and vendors live, you'll see the most disgusting examples of sprawl - with miles and miles of McMansions chewing up what used to be farmlands and forests.
Second, Fayetteville has been a lot greener than most other cities in our state and region for a long time - not that we're perfect. But if you're going to attribute that to anything, it would be the presence of the University of Arkansas and the intellectual & cultural diversity it hosts.
And as for Dan Coody - he's no environmentalist. He allowed Kohl's (and later, lots of other developers) to totally ignore our limited tree ordinance, and has basically been a lapdog to all developers. The progressives in Fayetteville are working hard to get rid of him.

by scryberwitch at 6:39 PM on 19 Feb 2008

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