You’re presented with an opportunity to engage in a profitable activity that lines up nicely with whatever it is that your business does, but there’s a catch.  What you know, but most of your potential customers don’t,  is that the thing which will provide you this benefit will come at a hidden cost to someone else.  The risk to you is minimal, but some type of harm will in all probability be inflicted on others – perhaps even to a great many others.  If the harm is detected and becomes widely known, you’ll likely be forced to stop, thus cutting you off from a revenue stream.  But let’s say that for you and your business, the consequences aren’t likely to go much beyond that.  

This is in fact an entirely common scenario, and it puts your business in a position of having to decide whether or not to forge ahead.  If you do, someone will be hurt.  That’s a given.  And in that ubiquitous circumstance where that someone is the planet, it means effectively everyone.  So what do you do?  What do most businesses do?  And for those cases where the choice is made to stay the course, what do we as a society do about it?

Any business may face such a choice at some point.  The fact that our society functions at all suggests that many or most will come down on the right side of the question.  I don’t believe that most of us are prepared to knowingly do harm – though we are a species well able to wilfully blind ourselves, and to rationalize a situation to make it justifiable.  Or at least palatable.

Ultimately, it is and perhaps always will be the case that the business entity in question will decide to proceed.  To take the profits for as long as they can, and to continue the activity until someone forces them to stop.  This may be a hard truth to swallow, but we can all think of plenty of examples.  It also implies that we need a couple of things in place.  

The first is that we need effective enforcement mechanisms to prevent the behavior once detected (assuming it actually becomes illegal at that point).  The second implication is that we need agencies which will act effectively as watchdogs for activities that go on under the covers – to bring them to the attention of an up-to-then-unaware public.   That public will then be in a much better position to exercise the enormous power it holds to drive good behaviour by the collective purchasing choices it makes.

I urge you to support organizations that work hard every day to expose deleterious business practices.  One of these is Greenpeace, whose main function is to expose environmentally harmful activities.  It’s often necessary for their investigators to do extensive field work in order to discover what’s going on, and then to shine the harsh light of negative publicity on it.  Corporate offenders are often well-resourced and highly motivated to keep secrets.

Consider some of what Greenpeace investigations have uncovered.  A pesticide so toxic that it’s been banned from use in the United Kingdom where it’s made, but nevertheless is still exported to be sprayed on fields in other countries.  (Once this story broke and was featured in major news outlets, we were quickly on our way to a comprehensive export-ban.)  Or consider the situation in the Amazon Rainforest, which loses an area roughly equal to three football fields every minute.  What most of us don’t know, but what organizations like Greenpeace bring to light, is that agribusiness giants we’re very familiar with are complicit in this destruction.  They do this in part by sourcing huge quantities of soy they know comes from land recently cleared of native vegetation to make way for industrial soy farming. 

And these companies are quite prepared to go on the attack to disrupt peaceful movements against them.  They recognize that when strong evidence of unethical business practices emerge, people can be mobilized to demand change from lawmakers.  So there is a powerful incentive to dig into their deep pockets to use whatever means may be available to silence critics.  

We’ve written on this blog about the morally abhorrent phenomena of SLAPP suits (which stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation).  These are often disguised as libel suits, and are designed not to necessarily win, but mainly to drain the target’s resources.  Greenpeace has been embroiled in one such suit with Resolute Forest Products for over eight years now.  It takes a great deal of courage (not to mention the support of large numbers of individual donors) to fight on in the face of these well-funded attempts by large corporations to intimidate and to silence. 

The same is true of Ag-gag laws, about which we’ve also written here.  The powerful agricultural lobby has lately bumped up against First Amendment Rights in the United States,  which has begun to curtail their use somewhat in that country.  Unfortunately, so far these affronts to both compassion and free speech have been on an upward trajectory in Canada.  This makes it essential that we continue to support groups like Animal Justice, a national animal law non-profit whose lawyers do excellent work on behalf of animals in this country.    

Supporting these organizations is important to the defense of a healthy and resilient democracy in which we are all free to speak out.

Of course, when it comes to companies who desperately need to keep us from seeing the harm done by their activities, be aware that SeaWorld is just such a company.  A well-informed consumer is highly unlikely be filling a seat at one of their shows.  Very few persons who are knowledgeable of what captivity is really like for a dolphin are potential patrons.   For this reason, SeaWorld’s stock price depends entirely on keeping us ignorant.    

We will put an end to this terrible injustice eventually, because companies like SeaWorld can’t maintain a lack of awareness among the public indefinitely.  Eventually, the people who buy tickets will know not to do so.  But for the time being we are fighting Goliath.  SeaWorld is much “bigger and badder” than we are.   They’re better funded than we are, and can dramatically outspend us in putting together a PR campaign or a legal team.  But every person we reach is one more potential backer for us, and one who’ll never go back to them.  Over the long run, that’s why we’ll beat them.

So in the meantime try to be a well-informed consumer.  Transact with the many businesses who, as a matter of policy, have elected to do what’s right – for people, for other animals, for the environment.  You have the power to let your purchases speak on behalf of your values.  You can avoid buying products with palm oil that isn’t certified sustainable.  You can buy only cosmetics that haven’t been unnecessarily and cruelly tested on animals.  And unless you live in a part of the world where food security means reliance on seafood, you can make the choice to not buy anything at all that comes out of the ocean.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Jason, Canadian Cetacean Alliance