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Re-Tooling Demand

This Financial Times article (subscription req’d) pulls back the curtain on rain forest destruction in Brazil to let us see what – and who – it’s all for:

At the recent UN climate summit in Glasgow, more than 100 national leaders committed to halt deforestation by 2030, and 30 financial institutions, including Storebrand, promised to eliminate the harmful practice from their portfolios by 2025. However, the signatories, including Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, did not indicate how it would be implemented or tracked, and environmental campaigners remain sceptical.

ADM and Bunge are among the world’s largest traders moving Brazilian soyabeans around the world. The increase in production of the commodity, largely used for livestock feed, has been a leading cause of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest as well as the destruction of Cerrado savannah.

The scale of soyabean production on deforested land and differing standards about what qualifies as acceptable activity makes tackling its presence in supply chains challenging for companies.

Both Bunge and ADM strengthened their deforestation policies last year in response to calls from shareholders. Storebrand, together with US fund manager Green Century, tabled a proposal at Bunge’s annual meeting asking it to tighten its policies, which was backed by 98 per cent of shareholders. Bunge has said it is committed to not having soyabeans from illegally deforested land.

As much as even the big fund managers and many governments get on board with divestment and ESG priorities in managing portfolios, this really points up the issue: the companies – and countries – who burn and mine for profit just aren’t going to give it up as long as it’s profitable. The whole ‘fiduciary responsibility to shareholders’ is baked into our ethos, as long as there is money to be made, dividends to be paid, stock to buy back, whatever.

For allies in COP26 and elsewhere, the approach has to include the goal to dismantle, and then re-assemble, the demand side. It’s worth being realistic about this – otherwise, we remain [eternally? That’s optimistic – ed.] captive to supply-side economic logic. As the ADM example highlights, the companies will never lead anywhere besides mining, digging, clearing, and burning.

Image via FT.com © Ricardo Beliel/Brazil Photos/LightRocket/Getty Images

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The Irascibles

It’s akin to a cliché folding in on itself and forming a kind of ironic paper airplane that gets tossed into the future.

the-irascibles

It landed on my table in the form of the Stevens and Swan biography of Willem de Kooning and it’s funny to set aside your naiveté or nostalgia – or invite them both in for a drink – and think about our mid-century art heroes. To set the scene, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to include no judges sympathetic to abstract art on the panel of its juried show “American Art Today, 1950”:

The snub was a godsend to the downtown artists: the museum performed to perfection the part of stuffy, blinkered fool, evoking the famous failure of the bourgeois Salon in Paris to include many of the great modernists. The artists around the Club could now, in turn, play the part of the slighted impressionists. They wrote an “open letter,” intended to be widely disseminated, to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dated May 20, 1950, and reported two days later on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan: Charge ‘Hostility to Advanced Art.” the letter began, “The undersigned painters reject the monster national exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next December, and will not submit work to its jury.” The artists patronized the Metropolitan – the presumable guardian of eternal values – by offering its leaders a history lesson: “We draw to the attention of those gentlemen the historical fact that, for roughly a hundred years, only advanced art has made any consequential contribution to civilization.” The group also picketed the museum, attracting further attention.

Emphasis mine. Part of that further attention was that Life magazine, “following the actions of the avant-garde with bemused interest since its feature on Pollock,” decided to publish a piece on the opening of the controversial exhibition – including the above picture of the excluded protesters.

Published under the headlines of “The Irascibles,” a name taken from an earlier editorial in the Herald Tribune criticizing the protesters, the photo by Nina Leen portrayed fifteen of the original eighteen painters who signed the letter to the Met. Highly theatrical, the artists were “arranged like a still life, staring into space, their expression serious, skeptical, demanding. Not one smiled.”

Pollock is at the center, very carefully positioned, with de Kooning on the upper left. The only woman is Hedda Sterne. A key to all the people in the photo is here. “Together, the artists seemed to embody their headline, “The Irascibles,” a name that was itself a dramatic piece of public relations that brought to mind every cliché about the struggle between the avant-garde and bourgeois society.”

And yet, can you imagine any subject getting a group of artists on the front pages of national publications today? Wait, don’t answer that.