Corporations: Multinational Corporations & Wealth

As this map indicates, corporate wealth is concentrated and headquartered in Europe, the United States of America, and China. Corporate accountability is first and foremost to shareholders, but by extension corporations are accountable to society and increasingly aware, as is society, that environmental degradation as a consequence of profiteering is unacceptable.

Over the last 50 years as the conservation movement has flourished world-wide so too has neo-liberal capitalism and the two are increasingly caught in a complicated political dance. Some, such as Peter Kareiva, former Chief Scientist and Vice President of the Nature Conservancy and present Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, argue that the conservation landscape and the corporate landscape can work productively together. ¹ Critics such as Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler, and Bram Büscher question whether capitalism is structurally capable of taking genuine long term responsibility for ecosystem services. ²

On the list above, the world's wealthiest 20 corporations (2014) ³ are cross referenced to Newsweek's 2016 Green Rankings of 500 of the world's major companies. Among other things, Newsweek's methodology includes assessing the performance of these companies in regard to energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, water, waste, and the degree to which revenue is derived from sustainable sources. ⁴ Though Apple comes close at 26th, none of the world's richest companies make it into Newsweek's top 20. As if to illustrate the fundamental contradiction between capitalism and environmentalism, nearly all of the world's wealthiest corporations (except Apple) rank extremely low in Newsweek's Green Rankings.

Along with the greening of theology, the greening of capitalism and a new definition of economic growth that includes the earth system is surely one of this century's greatest intellectual and practical challenges.