This Changes Everything

“The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green” (Pages 191-201)

Klein begins this chapter with the story of the endangered Attwater prairie chickens on the coast of Texas. Oil and gas developments put their habitat at risk. Concerns were raised, and an area of land owned by Mobil back in 1965 was donated to the Texas National Conservancy to protect these birds from extinction. Perversely, the nature conservancy itself began extracting fossil fuels on the preserve in 1999. The story provoked controversy, but extraction continued. In 2012, the last of the chickens disappeared from the reserve: “Under the stewardship of one of the biggest environmental nongovernmental organizations in the world […] an endangered species has been completely wiped out from one of its last remaining breeding grounds” (195).

For Klein, this is an illustration of the environmental movement's failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind soaring emission levels: “Large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting [fossil fuel] interests—they have merged with them” (195). Klein points to other large green groups with strong ties to the fossil fuel sector: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP. The WWF has a long relationship with Shell.