Wal-Mart hired Pres of Sierra Club in 2005 to go green

[True Earthling]

From Adam Werbach's wiki...

Adam Werbach is an environmental activist who was elected as the youngest-ever national president of the Sierra Club in 1996 when he was 23 years old.<1> He is the author of Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto, published by Harvard Business Press, and named one of the top business books of the year by Fast Company Magazine.<2> The book appeared on the Inc. Magazine bestseller list.<3> Werbach is a web correspondent for The Atlantic, serving as the magazine's online "sustainability expert."

In 1997, while president of the Sierra Club, Werbach wrote "Act Now, Apologize Later," a series of essays and autobiographical anecdotes published by HarperCollins. In it, he recounted the stories of the many average citizens he'd met while visiting nearly every local chapter of the Sierra Club: "From rural priests to animal trackers, from a 12-year-old girl in California to three elderly women in Georgia, from senators to surfers and from Woody Harrelson to llama riders, an incredible array of people give us a thousand reasons to be hopeful."<5>

In late 2004, Werbach wrote and presented a speech referred to as "Is Environmentalism Dead?" (the official title was "The Death of Environmentalism and the Birth of the Commons Movement") at the Commonwealth Club of California. This widely-circulated, controversial speech suggested that advances in environmentalism had stalled, due to outdated thinking and approaches. He challenged the environmental establishment to tackle the issues differently, by linking environmental goals with other broad social and economic goals.<10><11>
Werbach, a San Francisco resident, was appointed in 2003 by San Francisco city supervisor Chris Daly to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission while then Mayor Willie Brown was out of town.<12> Additionally in April 2006, Werbach was elected to the six-member international board of Greenpeace He was subsequently re-elected and later resigned to focus on writing his next book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto.<13> In 2010, Werbach wrote Extinction/Adaptation, a one-hundred copy limited edition ABC book illustrated by the artists Andrew Schoultz and Kyle Knobel. The book catologed extinctions and adaptations in human behavior.<14>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Werbach

In this excerpt from Force of Nature, Edward Humes describes how Wal-Mart changed the way environmentalists looked at the company...

How Wal-Mart won over a Sierra Club president

The presence of the outspoken Werbach at Wal-Mart (WMT) (Werbach took the company on as a consulting client), and his repeated statements that he believed the retail giant was sincere in its green ambitions, perplexed and roiled the close-knit landscape of major U.S. environmental groups. Most of them tended to view the retailer as Werbach had done up until 2005: as a company that would tear down nature just so it could sell a cheaper pair of underpants. "I thought they were the devil," he recalls simply. Many of his progressive friends and colleagues, already taken aback by his "environmentalism-is-dead" speech, were horrified that he would even meet with Wal-Mart representatives, much less go to work for the company, and Werbach tended to agree with them -- at first. Then he took his first trip to Bentonville, an exploratory visit before he and Wal-Mart agreed to work together.

To his surprise, he found a line of managers and career-Wal-Mart people waiting to meet with him, asking him why he thought their company was perceived so negatively when, internally, they said they prided themselves on always trying do the right thing. They kept asking: Why is there this disconnect? What can we do better? Werbach, who until that moment felt he probably would not work for Wal-Mart, began to wonder if coming to Bentonville might be one of the greatest opportunities to bring about environmental progress he had ever encountered. Ruben, Jackson, and even Lee Scott all told him that the company needed to hear outside views on these questions -- even when the answers were not what Wal-Mart supporters liked to hear.

And here was Wal-Mart, putting him in charge of the largest sustainability education program in history. "I was training a million people on what green is, on what a carbon footprint is, on energy conservation. It was unheard of, and they loved it. These weren't people in grad schools, these were people making eleven bucks an hour, and there was a thirst for this information. I've done tons of organizing on college campuses, elite universities, urban areas, but I've never seen uptake like this." As the training went from store to store, employees would talk up their sustainability projects in their communities, Werbach said, and soon teachers would be calling to see how they could build a similar program into their curriculums.
The main reason the word "sustainability" is a widely understood term today, concludes Werbach, is that Wal-Mart made it part of the national conversation. "Wrap you head around that if you're a hemp-wearing environmentalist."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/

[Lucinda]

1. I had no idea...thank you for posting this!

knr

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. Fuck Werbach!

Mr. Werbach has done NOTHING except provide the borg-like Wal-Mart a temporary fig leaf while they continue to ravage the American manufacturing sector and make the American taxpayer pay for their employees. In addition, I doubt seriously that Werbach would be allowed to effect any change in the Wal-Mart strategy of driving American manufacturing to countries that have zero environmental controls or labor standards. That is the way Wal-Mart likes it and it is what they demand of their suppliers. This is clearly a case of rationalization by Werbach to justify the sale of his soul for the large salary he gets to act as a benevolent gesture by the Great Wal-Mart of China.

In short, you are not fooling anyone Mr. Werbach! Piss off and I hope you choke on your blood money!