JENNA OUTCALT
Staff writer
Stand.earth began when other forms of activism didn’t work. During the 1990s, Canadians put their bodies on the line and created a media storm to stop the logging of Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia. However, nothing seemed to deter the potential clear-cutting.
That’s when a new strategy emerged: going straight to the corporation that would be buying the paper products from those trees. When confronted with the potential harm and public pushback of buying those products, companies backed away, and the trees still stand today.
“We already had the news coverage, we already had outrage and we had even policymakers (who) were getting worried about what was happening there,” Todd Paglia said. “But the missing element to make all those things come together was power.”
Paglia is the executive director of Stand.earth, an environmental advocacy group that now works around the world to protect the Earth and promote sustainable business practices. He will deliver a lecture for the Bird, Tree & Garden Club and Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative at 12:30 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall.
Paglia said he plans to delve into Stand.earth’s out-of-the-box environmentalism tactics they have developed over the course of decades to Chautauquans today.
“I feel like so much more progress is possible if my organization weren’t such an outlier,” Paglia said.
He said he will discuss how to make large-scale environmental change, which he explained involves going straight to the entity with the power. Paglia used the example of influencing fashion companies to reduce their carbon footprint in their factories rather than just their headquarters. When Stand.earth’s research team calculated how much more significant factory emissions were, they launched a pressure campaign to appeal directly to the corporations.
“… Since that point, (we have) gotten, literally, the majority of the fashion sector to adopt policies to reduce their carbon footprint, adopted long-term goals to get to emissions reductions by 2030, 2035,” Paglia said.
He explained that the companies with major power over legislation and industry were often the target of Stand.earth’s campaigns.
“Much of our focus is on big companies that wield incredible influence over policy, over land, over everything that we care about,” he said.
Even though Paglia noted, in his perspective, it is “the worst corporate moment maybe in the last 100 years,” he said he thinks people will see corporations wanting to make environmental progress as public opinion pushes them into it.
“Companies are increasingly worried that the pendulum’s going to swing the other way, that they have been neglectful and arrogant and that their consumers and their stakeholders are going to push back big time,” he said.
Stand.earth has its own research team that looks for places companies could improve their sustainability.
“We, first of all, approach them with that information quietly, educate them and then get them to change,” Paglia said. “And if they don’t, we don’t take no for an answer.”
Paglia said Stand.earth is like an excuse for companies to do what they know they should do, even when change seems difficult.
“We have run countless campaigns over the last 25 years,” he said. “There’s not a single company that we have campaigned against that is not in a good relationship with us today. And the reason for that is that we motivated them to do something they wanted to do.”
Paglia said these sustainability improvements help companies become stronger in the long run. That’s why companies turn to Stand.earth when they are under pressure to become more environmentally friendly.
“That’s the magic moment where you’re like, ‘All right, let’s do this together,’” he said. “That’s my favorite part.”
