For my money, there's nothing more delicious than a book that lays bare the rot of a corrupted industry from an insider's perspective. In the hands of a skilled observer, the subject can spring to life. Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis's hilariously disturbing account of Wall Street's investment-banking industry in the late 1980s, comes to mind.

Green, Inc., by Christine MacDonald.

Lewis's book traces its lineage to Mark Singer's Funny Money, a masterpiece of nonfiction that exposed the double-dealing and corruption that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry. Singer's impeccable reporting and lively writing carries the reader to the little Oklahoma bank at the epicenter of the financial catastrophe and plops him down right in the middle of the boardroom.

So, it was with a certain amount of anticipation that I picked up Christine MacDonald's book Green, Inc. (Lyons Press, $24.95) a self-described insider's tale of how the environmental movement has been hijacked by self-serving leaders and corporate stooges. The book's press release promised to reveal chapter and verse of mismanagement, malfeasance, and "double lives." An ambitious goal, no doubt, and I couldn't wait to tear into it.

The author immediately sets her sights on the Big Three of the conservation movement: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. arm of the World Wildlife Fund -- though she doesn't pass up the opportunity to slam the Environmental Defense Fund and its leader, Fred Krupp, along with countless, but unidentified, environmental websites (what she quaintly calls ejournals), and other various and sundry enablers. She carries a special grudge for Peter Seligmann, CI's chair, and his sidekick, CI President Russell Mittermeier, whom she paints as a couple of overcompensated, jet-setting playboys who devote more time to fawning over starlets and corporate chieftains than they do saving the planet.

MacDonald is convinced -- to paraphrase a Watergate standard -- there is a cancer within the environmental movement. The malignancy can be traced to the alliances between conservation groups and corporations that took root in the 1980s and exploded over the past two decades. CI, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund all have come to rely on corporations and their foundations. The conservation groups might refer to the corporations as blue-chip companies. Not so, MacDonald. She calls them, "the devils of deforestation."

MacDonald wasn't always so down on big-name environmental organizations. Indeed, it was only a few short years ago that she abandoned her journalism career to take a "dream job" at CI. Her formal title: Manager of the Media Capacity Building Program of CI's Global Communications Division. In short, public relations.

It wasn't long after joining CI in 2006, MacDonald writes, that she realized that something was "deeply wrong in today's clubby, well-upholstered world of conservations." It wasn't long, either, before she was out of a job. A year after joining CI, MacDonald's position was eliminated in a reorganization. Necessity collided with opportunity and Green, Inc. was born.

Christine MacDonald.

MacDonald's accusations are many and sweeping, but, for the most part, neither original nor revealing. She complains of widespread nepotism in the environmental industry, but fails to prove the hires are incompetent or unqualified (nor does she name names to back up her point). She condemns CI for taking millions from a foundation formed by former Intel founder Gordon Moore for a biodiversity center, but the only evidence she can muster of any wrongdoing is from unnamed "critics" who call the foundation a "glorified fishing club."

She devotes a great deal of space to troubles within The Nature Conservancy -- from incompetence and mismanagement to run-ins with the Internal Revenue Service. All interesting and true, but hardly new. The Washington Post broke the Conservancy story in 2003; MacDonald's retelling sheds no new light.

And that's true of most of the book. MacDonald wants the reader to accept her premise that the environmental movement has been irreparably corrupted merely because of corporate partnerships -- i.e., guilt by association. The author is unable to see any value in conservation groups embracing such alliances in a bid to steer environmental policies within the business community.

Nonetheless, there are glimmers of a real story in MacDonald's book. In particular, I wanted to know more about CI's relationship with the Bunge Ltd., a diversified conglomerate accused of violating Brazilian environmental laws and using lawsuits and threats to silence its critics. And MacDonald is right to insist that environmental groups should be more vocal in criticizing U.S. corporations when they run afoul of environmental policies, especially those companies that have alliances with various green organizations.

In the end, though, MacDonald can't forgive nonprofits for adopting "business operating practices and jargon," and turning their back on the days of "late-night work sessions [that] would end in sing-a-longs."

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African nations try to bring in eco-tourists

African nations are hoping to boost their economies by attracting the ecologically curious, following the example of nations like Costa Rica, which thrives on ecotourism. The island nation of Madagascar has boosted protection of forests and wetlands and boasts biodiversity rivaled only by the rainforests of Brazil. Other countries rebranding are Rwanda, famed for gorillas, and Equatorial Guinea, which would rather be known for biodiversity than oil, coups, and corruption. It signed a preliminary agreement in April with Conservation International to protect over a million acres of rainforest -- bringing the total protected area in the country to 37 percent of its territory, the highest of any African nation. Besides the obvious job-creating benefit of ecotourism, the head of Conservation International's Central Africa program says, "There is a sense that a country that takes care of its environment is a good country to invest in." Is the environment vs. economy myth dead yet?

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Macaws and effect in Central America.

A year ago, President Bush signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Since then, the controversial plan has inspired protests across the U.S. and in Central America. And while past trade agreements have been ratified by Congress in less than two months, the Bush administration has delayed the vote on CAFTA multiple times, unable to rally the support needed for it to pass.

The latest vote is scheduled for this month, but CAFTA's passage is by no means inevitable. Many Democrats and some Republicans, having learned from the fallout of NAFTA -- for example, the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs -- are expected to vote against it. They're taking this stand because the agreement is weak on both labor and environmental standards, and because they are beginning to realize such treaties promote not free trade, but corporate trade.

The environmental movement has also learned from NAFTA. An impressive coalition of professional and grassroots organizations is fighting CAFTA on the basis that it "would allow foreign investors to challenge hard-won environmental laws and regulations, and fails to include adequate measures to ensure environmental improvement throughout Central America and the United States." Members include Friends of the Earth, Earthjustice, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, among others.

Missing from this fight is an elite subset of the movement: the international biodiversity conservation organizations. Not one of the four major groups in this field -- Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and the Wildlife Conservation Society -- has demonstrated the courage to oppose CAFTA, despite ample opportunity over the past year.

When asked about his organization's position on CAFTA at a recent talk at the University of California-Berkeley, Kent Redford of WCS replied that his organization "does not engage in policy work." (The speech, offering an indication of priorities, was titled, "Has Poverty Alleviation Abducted Conservation?") Conservation International's vice president for conservation and government said, "We don't have a position." A World Wildlife Fund representative wrote, "WWF has not been tracing CAFTA either in Central America or in our U.S. office. As a result, we don't have a position on CAFTA ..." Nor has The Nature Conservancy stated a position.

Their silence is inexcusable. Consider the immediate threats CAFTA poses in a region that, while accounting for less than 1 percent of the world's land mass, is estimated to hold 8 to 10 percent of the planet's species:

In the face of these outrageous threats, how to explain the silence of these four groups, which are so well-endowed in budgets and policy staff?

We might look to an important paradigm shift. In the heady days after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, all of the major biodiversity groups embraced the concept of sustainable development. But over the past few years, the conservation pendulum has been swinging back to a stricter preservationist ideology. Little by little, the international conservation organizations have shifted to market-based approaches to conservation.

A decade after Rio, at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, these groups championed public-private partnerships. They also lauded the new reign of "ecosystem services," whereby any aspect of the environment can be had, for a price. It's not that the big organizations don't "do" policy; rather, they do only a certain kind of free-market policy work.

To facilitate the uptake of this free-market approach, international conservation groups have opened their doors to transnational corporate leaders. Today, three-quarters of Conservation International's board and half of the slots on The Nature Conservancy's board are given to representatives of major corporations -- including Wal-Mart and Gap, Inc., two companies actively lobbying in support of CAFTA. Are these corporate dollars a Faustian bargain for the international environmental movement? Are they subtly distracting these large conservation organizations from seeing the links between political economy and environmental degradation?

In these final critical weeks of debate, we need the lobbying support of the international conservationists working in Central America. Together, the four major groups control well over half of conservation dollars available worldwide, and wield enormous influence. Their partnerships with in-country organizations make them perfectly suited to lobby both on the ground and in Washington, D.C. They could give detailed testimony about CAFTA's impact on the regional environment. They could also lend support to the courageous Central Americans who have already spoken out vociferously against CAFTA.

Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Wildlife Conservation Society: it's time. We challenge you, with all your resources and your clout, to see beyond corporate interests. Join the many others in the environmental community who oppose this dangerous trade agreement.

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In the interest of living up to our reputation for providing the occasional sliver of cheery environmental news, Grist is pleased to report that notwithstanding rampant ecological degradation, nearly half of the land on Earth remains undeveloped and unpopulated, according to an international study released earlier this week. The study -- the most comprehensive such analysis to date -- was greeted with surprise by many scientists, but it was also viewed as a wake-up call, because only 7 percent of the 46 percent of the Earth that is still wild is protected. For a given area to qualify as wilderness under the terms of the study, it had to be at least 3,800 square miles in size, accommodate fewer than two people per square mile, and have at least 70 percent of its original vegetation. In total, some 26 million square miles made the grade, about a third of them in the Antarctic and the Arctic tundra. "A lot of the planet is still in pretty decent shape," said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, which organized the study involving 200 scientists.

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In the largest gift ever to a single environmental group, the foundation created by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore announced yesterday that it would give Conservation International $261 million over 10 years. The money will help the Washington, D.C.-based group identify and protect biodiversity hotspots, areas that CI says cover 1.4 percent of the Earth's land mass but contain 60 percent of the planet's terrestrial species. The group's president, Russell Mittermeier, said he hoped to use Moore's gift to leverage as much as $6 billion from private and public sources. In 1998, Moore gave $35 million to CI to help establish the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science.

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Starbucks announced this week that it will pay an extra 10 cents per pound for coffee beans that are grown on environmentally and socially responsible farms. The announcement, which was made at a growers conference in Costa Rica, comes at a time when a world coffee surplus has depressed wholesale prices to 40 cents per pound, with devastating effects on many growers. Starbucks, which pays at least $1.20 per pound and buys about 1 percent of the world's coffee and 15 percent of specialty coffee, said it would reward suppliers who conserve water and energy, reduce pesticide use, recycle, provide safe working conditions, and comply with local wage and benefit laws. The group Conservation International will help to oversee third-party verification of the suppliers. However, critics say that until the company publicly discloses information about its suppliers, the announcement amounts to little more than a P.R. stunt.

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