For every acre paved, another will be saved. Sounds
like a mantra for green business, a lullaby for the shopper with a troubled
conscience. For the first time, a mammoth corporation has pledged to
conserve wildlife habitat equivalent to the acreage it develops.
But the company launching the program isn’t
Patagonia or Timberland. It’s Wal-Mart.
On April 12, 2005 — a week before Earth Day
— Wal-Mart ads in at least 20 major American newspapers trumpeted the
dawn of a new conservation program called Acres for America. The idea is
that for every U.S. acre that Wal-Mart Inc. has developed or will develop
over the next 10 years, the company will conserve an acre of high-priority
wildlife habitat through its partnership with the nonprofit National Fish
and Wildlife Foundation. Wal-Mart has pledged $35 million for the program
and promised to conserve at least 138,000 acres, its estimated domestic
“footprint.” But the five signature projects announced on April
12 more than double that amount, allotting $8.8 million in Wal-Mart funds
to conserve 321,000 acres.
The campaign has the federal government gaga with
praise. NFWF chairman Max Chapman gushes that Wal-Mart is “raising
the bar on conservation,” and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton
calls Acres for America a model for other companies to emulate. Wal-Mart
CEO Lee Scott enthuses, “Protecting the environment is simply the
right thing to do.”
But some environmentalists are suspicious of the
company’s motives. An April 12 Sierra Club press release noted that
in recent years, Wal-Mart has agreed to pay $8.6 million in civil penalties
to settle lawsuits over the company’s alleged Clean Water Act
violations. In addition, Sierra Club notes, Wal-Mart often paves over large
open spaces and contributes to urban sprawl. “Wal-Mart thinks it can
paint over its record with a nice shade of green, but that won’t hide
its true colors,” says Sierra Club anti-sprawl-campaign manager Eric
Olson.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Tara Stewart says that Acres for
America is the company’s gift to future generations. Skeptics say
that the campaign is nothing more than a public-relations ploy to spruce up
the company’s tarnished image.
Wal-Mart is the world’s largest corporation,
with 2004 revenue of more than $288 billion, according to Fortune magazine. By
comparison, Target had 2004 revenue of about $50 billion, Costco $48
billion, and Safeway $36 billion. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be
the 29th richest, topping Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and Switzerland.
But the company’s profits are starting to wilt
just a little. In the past, Wal-Mart has actually benefited during economic
recessions by drawing cash-strapped Americans to its discount stores. Now,
the company seems to have fallen off the gravy train. Wal-Mart’s
first-quarter report for 2005 shows profits up 14 percent, but its sales
growth fell short of expectations by 2 cents per share, and the company
warned that profits might miss forecasts for the second quarter as well. In
late April, Wal-Mart stock hit a 4.5-year low.
That was enough to put financial analysts in a tizzy.
As John Dicker writes in his 2005 book The
United States of Wal-Mart, the company’s
monthly sales figures are now “an economic barometer unto
themselves.” A.G. Edwards retail analyst Robert Buchanan told
CNNMoney.com that Wal-Mart’s sag could be attributed, in part, to low
company morale. Other analysts blamed cluttered stores, uncool merchandise,
poor service, and a bad public image after years of negative publicity from
labor and community activists.
The company has gotten the most media flak for its
union-busting labor practices, sex discrimination, and sweatshop suppliers,
but it’s also under fire for its environmental impacts. Not helping
matters for the company are reports such as the Frontline investigative documentary
“Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,
to be released by muckraking filmmaker Robert Greenwald on Nov. 13.
Bob Bussel, director of the University of Oregon Labor
Education and Research Center, recently conducted a little test: He asked a
class of about 30 students whether any of them avoided Wal-Mart because of
its unethical practices. Six students raised their hands. If the class is
any indication of the population at large, Wal-Mart’s bad behavior
could be costing it 20 percent of its potential customers.
Cue Acres for America. The campaign uses images of
cute, fuzzy creatures to send a clear message to would-be Wal-Mart shoppers
with an environmental conscience: Wal-Mart is good for the environment. The
campaign puts environmentalists in a quandary. Yes, Wal-Mart is bad, they
say, but isn’t conservation by any means a good thing?
Hearing its spin doctors at work, you’d think
that Wal-Mart was the best thing that’s happened for the environment
since trees.
Spokeswoman Stewart says that in 2004, Wal-Mart
recycled more than 2.8 million tons of waste. (She couldn’t say how
much waste Wal-Mart produces annually.) Since 2001, Wal-Mart has
participated in the National Parks America Tour, a volunteer-driven
initiative to put more than 10,000 work hours into park projects. (Wal-Mart
contributes by encouraging its employees to participate — unpaid.)
And Wal-Mart requires construction firms bidding on Wal-Mart contracts to
certify their project managers in stormwater management. (This is a smart
move, given that Wal-Mart has spent millions of dollars to settle alleged
Clean Water Act violations for polluted stormwater runoff from its parking
lots.) “We’re excited to be able to say, ‘Stormwater is
zero tolerance for us,’ ” she says.
Stewart paints a portrait of Wal-Mart in bright greens
and gold dust, denying that the Acres for America campaign is a PR
counterattack. “The Acres for America program is designed . . . to
let people know that we care,” she says. “We want folks to
understand that Wal-Mart is good for the environment.”
In The Case Against
Wal-Mart, Al Norman, founder of the national
Wal-Mart watchdog organization Sprawl Busters, unfurls a litany of
Wal-Mart’s environmental misdeeds. Among them: Pesticides and
fertilizers stored on Wal-Mart parking lots across Connecticut created
stormwater runoff that polluted the state’s streams and rivers,
leading state officials to call Wal-Mart “a serious statewide
polluter.” In 2001, Wal-Mart settled charges of violating the Clean
Air Act at construction sites in four Southwestern states, and, in 2004,
the company settled charges of illegally selling refrigerators with
chlorofluorocarbons at Sam’s Clubs.
Wal-Mart’s developers frequently choose to build
on sensitive sites such as wetlands, Native American burial grounds, and
wildlife preserves, Norman says. Making matters worse, much of the
environmentally destructive development is for nothing. Wal-Mart has a
habit of closing its discount stores to build larger Supercenters that turn
more profit, Norman says. Wal-Mart has abandoned about 356 U.S. buildings
and their parking lots, totaling 52 million square feet, or more than 1,000
football fields, of unused space.
In that context, Norman says, the Acres for America is
too little, too late. “This is like trying to cover up a smell with
perfume,” Norman says. “I don’t think it works too well
with Wal-Mart, because the odor of bad ethics keeps coming
through.”
Norman compares the Acres for America campaign to
Wal-Mart’s other goodwill gestures — gifts to the
Children’s Miracle Network, college scholarships for
African-Americans, the Teacher of the Year Award. He calls it
“cause-related marketing” or, more bluntly, “loud
giving.”
Still, Norman doesn’t knock the Acres for
America program itself. “If they’re going to give some land
anywhere, fine; we’ll take it,” he says. “It’s like
a war reparation. This is not a company that cares about the land or
natural resources. They have one of the worst track records in terms of the
environment of all the corporations in America.”
Norman admits that Wal-Mart isn’t the only bad
guy; he says that other big-box chains such as Target, Home Depot, and
Lowe’s are also guilty of environmental crimes. The big-box
prototype, a sprawling single-level store that lays waste to open space, is
an environmental disaster, he says: “The only thing that makes
Wal-Mart the No. 1 offender is that they’re putting up more buildings
than any other company in America. The other companies are not exonerated;
they’re just Wal-Mart Lite.”
American shoppers aren’t off the hook, either.
Consumption fuels the Wal-Mart beast. “There are two things Americans
do in excess: eat and shop,” Norman says. “I relate excess
consumption to empty lives. The more our communities are torn apart, the
less we talk to our neighbors [and] the more we fill our shelves up with
junk that ends up in the landfills. And Wal-Mart, with the support of the
White House, is encouraging people to go out and shop.”
Any way you look at it — as a model corporate
gesture or a shady corporate scheme — the Acres for America campaign
is smart. It’s as if a Wal-Mart PR executive wanted to amend the
opening line of Dicker’s book: “Unless you’ve been
residing in a national wildlife refuge, you probably hear a lot about
Wal-Mart.”
Bussel sees the Acres for America campaign as an
attempt to divide the political left, which has been largely united against
Wal-Mart for its poor labor and environmental practices. He says that by
appealing to environmentalists, the company is attempting to shake up the
sense of “green” solidarity with the “blue”
pro-labor movement. “Wal-Mart has a real sense of
divide-and-conquer,” he says. “From a strategic point of view,
[Acres for America] is a clever move on Wal-Mart’s part. But people
have to recognize that they’re dealing with a very sophisticated
company that is under fire because of its policies.”
Norman agrees, relating the Acres for America campaign
to the company’s strategies of featuring African-Americans in their
marketing and underwriting programs for National Public Radio.
“They’re clearly going into areas of the American culture that
are not naturally allies of corporate greed to do some disorganization and
put out disinformation,” Norman says.
“They’re trying to buy goodwill.
It’s part of an elaborate bribe.”
Case study
Why some Oregon residents question Wal-Mart’s support for nearby conservation project
One of Acres for America’s signature projects is
the conservation of 1,120 acres of wildlife habitat along Squaw Creek, a
tributary of the Deschutes River in central Oregon.
The Deschutes Basin Land Trust will use funds from the
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Wal-Mart to purchase a
conservation easement on a private ranch, which will conserve fish and
wildlife habitat while allowing ranch operations to continue. The easement
is a part of the land trust’s ongoing effort to reintroduce salmon
and steelhead runs to streams they’ve been absent from since the
construction of dams on the Deschutes 40 years ago. Wal-Mart’s share
of the $1.35 million easement is $400,000.
Bend, Ore., resident Michael Funke says that the Squaw
Creek conservation project sounds great but the timing is suspect. Hundreds
of Bend-area locals have been organizing for months against a proposed
Wal-Mart Supercenter in north Bend that would sit smack between two
existing Wal-Marts in south Bend and Redmond. Funke leads a citizen-powered
movement called Our Community First, founded in February to oppose the
proposed Supercenter.
Funke points to a 2004 study released by U.S. Rep.
George Miller, D-Calif., that finds that the average Wal-Mart store
employing 200 people costs taxpayers more than $420,000 a year in the form
of state and federal assistance for low-wage workers — welfare,
housing assistance, Medicaid, and food stamps. By Funke’s
calculations, Wal-Mart’s $400,000 share in the Squaw Creek easement
comes up short of the estimated $840,000 tax burden of the existing and
proposed Bend stores. “They still owe us more money!” he says.
Money is not all he thinks Wal-Mart owes the people of
central Oregon, where the unofficial slogan is “Poverty with a
View.”
“If you really want to help our
community,” Funke says, hypothetically addressing the Wal-Mart upper
management, “raise wages. Channel your money back to our community
rather than to [company headquarters in] Arkansas or suppliers in
China.”
In Funke’s opinion, the Acres for America
program is a welcome gesture, but it’s not indicative of an
environmentally conscious corporation. “I don’t think we should
get caught up in the idea that Wal-Mart is all of a sudden interested in
the environment,’ he says. “What it’s interested in is
its reputation.”
For the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s
description of this project, as well as four others announced in April, go
to www.nfwf.org/programs/walmart/rfp.htm
Wal-Mart, by the numbers
The average Wal-Mart discount
store uses 98,000 square feet.
The average Wal-Mart
Supercenter uses 186,000 square feet per store and 20 acres for the parking
lot (1,000 parking spaces), generating an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 car
trips per day.
Wal-Mart’s revenue in
2004 was $288 billion — or $33 million every hour.
At the end of 2004, Wal-Mart
had 3,551 U.S. stores. On average, one new Wal-Mart store opens every day.
Wal-Mart stores receive government
subsidies of almost $4 billion in tax breaks, cheap land, and so on.
Wal-Mart costs the federal
government hundreds of millions annually in welfare benefits for underpaid
workers.
There are currently more than
350 empty Wal-Mart stores nationwide, comprising about 52 million square
feet of unused space.
On average, for every Wal-Mart
Supercenter that opens, two local grocery stores go out of business.
Sources: The United
States of Wal-Mart, by John Dicker; Sprawl
Busters, www.sprawl-busters.com; Good Jobs First, www.goodjobsfirst.org.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2005.
