Call me a slow thinker, but there was something about Wal-Mart's "green space trade" plan, announced a couple months back, that bothered me from the start but which has only now crystallized. The company's plan is to buy and preserve an amount of land equal to that which it develops for its stores over the next ten years, to in effect compensate for its development with non-development elsewhere.

What bothers me most about it is the logic that underlies such a deal. I think of it as a sort of "kindly thief" offering: a thief who tells you that he's going to rob as many houses as he likes for as long as he likes, but he promises to avoid robbing one house for every house he robs. Doesn't sound like much of a deal, does it? But the logic is essentially the same. This "gift" we're getting from Wal-Mart is something we already have: undeveloped land. What's implied in this deal is that the un-bought, un-developed land out there now is theirs, not ours. It's theirs for the taking, and the fact that they're going to buy it for us makes us little more than hapless bystanders watching the company wield its power. This supposed altruism is little more than a chilling demonstration of how much power this company has.

Some might take my attitude as sour grapes--does this liberal have to badmouth everything? But Wal-Mart is profoundly exasperating to me. What they do is permeated by awful, avaricious policies: anti-union, anti-women, environmentally unsound (through vast clear-cutting developments, runoff pollution, noise/light/traffic pollution, etc.), contributing to massive trade deficits, placing huge tax burdens on local communities...it goes on and on. What's exasperating, though, is that they don't have to do any of this.

Wal-Mart is an enormously profitable company--some would say obscenely profitable. They could allow employee organizing, develop their store sites in community-friendly ways, sell more domestically-made goods, pay decent wages and benefits to their employees, and still make a healthy profit. But like Enron, they seem more concerned with maximizing profit at any cost and expanding scale at an unsustainable rate. Wal-Mart could settle down and become a model of ecological and pro-labor practices--they have the money and clout to do it. But instead they continue to barrel ahead ravenously, and the scale to which they're building their operation will, also like Enron, force them into more and more hurtful business models just to keep them afloat.

Consider one green Wal-Mart development on the drawing board in Vancouver. Take a look at that, and then think about how the Wal-Mart(s) look in your town. Wouldn't this design be vastly better for you and your town? Why isn't this the norm? Why do we let them get away with the mediocrity they offer us? Are cheap (and cheaply made) goods really worth what they do to our local businesses, our streams, our souls?

At the end of the day, there's only one kind of green that Wal-Mart cares about, and that's the green of filthy lucre.

Labels: Environment