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atization and self-regulation, is another culprit in the devastation of the world’s natural resources. While efficiency in the market may have been intended to prevent the misuse and overuse of resources, modern corporations have seriously modified it. They have come to use this tenet to protect their interests and to allow them to continue, unchecked, behaviors which are detrimental to all living beings. They claim that their more complete knowledge of the situations at hand empower them to be the best planners and in the name of efficiency, governments have been allowing businesses to self-regulate. Even when a problem is so serious as to demand regulation, corporations have been the authors of the very regulations they are subject to. In The Globalization of Corporate Culture, Karliner sites how “U.S. corporations also helped write laws that use a risk assessment formula to make economic consideration the determining factor over health protection when setting environmental standards…” He also mentions that even the Business Council for Sustainable Development argues self-regulation as the most efficient mechanism for change, and promotes the spread of capitalist free-market systems as the ticket to sustainability in the world. The idea that efficiency can be achieved through the capitalist economy is so pervasive that even those who claim to be environmental advocates “…have made the worldwide expansion of resources extraction, production, marketing and consumption synonymous with sustainable development.”

Profit maximization, one of the most basic concepts of the capitalist structure, is the tenet that I see as most harmful. Profit is the reason businesses exist, and I certainly would not argue a return to a non-industrial society, but the goal of profit-maximization certainly needs to be rethought. Since the market has little or no capacity to reflect the true cost of environmental degradation, the maxim of profit maximization inherently leads to serious environmental damage and loss of human and animal life. Some of the most recent problems with this maxim involve the activities of the P.R industry as related in Silencing Spring. As the truth has started to come out about the role corporations play in the destruction of our environment and calls have been made by the public for repair and prevention, the focus on profit maximization has led businesses to manipulate the consumer. Instead of cleaning up their act, businesses have engaged in deceitful P.R programs which air to change the consumers’ image of them, rather than change the problem. Silencing Spring sites a few examples; “…corporate sponsors form partnerships…” which lead to the downplaying of potential hazards and the building of a righteous company image, companies are also co-opting a green image through affiliations with environmental movements because “such companies are finding that cold cash will buy them good will from the environmental movement.” In addition, “some of the industrial polluters with the worst records have devised “public education” campaigns that enable them to placate the public while they continue polluting,” through the distribution of free literature and so called education materials to schools and other community forums, all which distort the truth in order to create a more positive image for the company. While all these activities require a multi-billion dollar input of cash annually on the part of the companies, the cost