Sharon Beder
Global Spin: the corporate assault on environmentalism
Scribe Publications $24.95pb, 288pp, 0 908011 326

In 1991, following an explosion at the Coode Island chemical depot and the two day long fire which cast a pall of acrid smoke over much of Melbourne, police announced at a press conference that they were investigating possible sabotage by protesters. Eight months later, however, they admitted that there had never been adequate evidence for that allegation. Its source remains unknown. Several years later, Brian West, the CEO of the public relations company Hill and Knowlton Australia (which advised the company which ran the depot), used Coode Island to illustrate general themes about crisis management. On the matters of public perception and reporting, he said that companies should make sure that they 'are clearly seen to be in the victim box not in the culprit box'.

Late in 1994, Labor Environment Minister Faulkner excluded logging from significant areas of native forest, citing evidence of the high ecological value of the protected coupes. Early the following year, a cavalcade of logging trucks converged on Canberra, bearing timber workers and their families to a protest against the apparent threat to jobs and rural towns, where their case was presented to the media by articulate spokeswomen. Faulkner's decision was overruled by Keating and logging proceeded over much of the disputed area. That the loggers' protest had, in several ways, been subsidized by the timber industry, remained invisible.

In the run-up to the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change last year, the Australian Bureau of Resource and Agricultural Economics (ABARE) - the federal department of Agriculture's research agency - published several reports purporting to show the extent and severity of impacts on the Australian economy of mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse emissions. These reports gained wide publicity and shaped much of the debate which followed. Only later was it revealed by ABARE's critics, such as Clive Hamilton, that funding for its economic modelling is predominantly provided by private sector donors - including the Australian Coal Association, the Electricity Supply Association, EXXON, Mobil and Texaco.

Clearly, the structure and content of environmental protest and politics have changed since 1980. But the nature of these changes remains largely invisible. Since the mid-1980s, the corporate sector has learned a great deal about the tactics and mechanisms of environmental protest. Its members have mobilised considerable resources to defend themselves against adverse public opinion, to limit scrutiny by environmental organisations and, in particular, to thwart attempts by government to regulate their activities and open them to scrutiny.

Global Spin is an important antidote to the corporate sector's attempt to repaint itself in green and lull us into believing that we are moving rapidly towards ecologically sustainability. It reveals the changed terrain for environmentalism and documents the darker forces burrowing beneath that landscape.

Beder concentrates mainly on the United States, for it is here that the green backlash (the title of Andy Rowell's excellent book, published by Routledge) is strongest. She deluges the reader with a tidal wave of evidence, drawn from industry journals and critical commentary, about the ways in which the politics of environment has been subjected to increasingly sophisticated corporate manipulation.

She shows how, in the US and to a lesser extent in Australia, a range of tactics have been employed to counter environmental critics. For instance, industry-funded consultants have generated what some have labelled 'astroturf' - fake grassroots - groups, which can be incited to lobby politicians, clog the airwaves and protest in the streets about job losses (and on industry's behalf, lost profits) associated with environmental regulation. But it would be wrong to see these groups as purely artificial creations. As One Nation's recent prominence suggests for Australia, popular reaction to the distresses of globalisation has created a realm of anxiety and anguish ripe for manipulation and for scapegoating - including of environmentalists. Indeed, a nationwide counter-social movement, the Wise Use Movement, has burgeoned from these initiatives in the United States.