Many environmental organisations in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s were sponsored by companies, including oil companies. New oral histories – conducted by National Life Stories and the RENEW Programme – draw our attention to this fact. Viewed from a present in which the ‘slow violence’ of capitalism is increasingly apparent and problems of lobbying and greenwashing clearly stated, these sponsorships might seem strange. And yet, the oral histories do not tell a simplistic story of past naivety giving way to present day awareness. Instead, they shed light on an enduring tendency to overlook the obvious commercial drivers of environmental deterioration – something called out recently by Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro.
By the 1980s in Britain there were a huge number of environmental organisations, large and small. Those I include in this piece give a sense of the range: the government’s Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) looked after nature reserves and conducted ecological research; the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) advised farmers on nature conservation; the Black Environment Network (BEN) worked to widen participation in environmental activity; the National Council for Voluntary Organisations’ Environment Team (NEST) linked environmental organisations with the wider voluntary sector; the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV) promoted practical conservation; and the Wildlife Trusts’ WATCH group got children out and about recording environmental change.
Recording oral history interviews with me recently, individuals who worked for these organisations in the 1980s and 1990s recall projects sponsored by oil and other companies.
BEN was supported in some of its early work by ESSO. BP funded NEST. Young members of the WATCH group took part in weekend and holiday projects with project-packs paid for by companies including ESSO, Volvo Cars and the newly privatised National Power. Shell UK funded hundreds of local environmental projects through the Shell Better Britain Campaign in association with BTCV, NCC and others.
Interviewees do not claim to have been – at the time – in any way naïve or unaware of the part played by some of these companies (and the widespread use of their products) in causing environmental degradation. Diane Warburton, for example, reflects on her work with the Shell Better Britain Campaign, until the mid-1990s, as follows:
It was a lot of projects doing a lot of good. […] But it was Shell. […] We all knew the criticisms. […] You’re working for an oil company trying to do environmental work; we all knew what that meant.
C2053 Diane Warburton, Track 3. © Diane Warburton
In other words, individuals and organisations took part with no naivety about the sources of funding. Benefits seemed to outweigh risks of involvement:
These conservation organisations […] were all quite happy to be part of this Campaign […] there was no sense from any of them that they were concerned or tainted by the connection because they thought that what Better Britain was doing was worth doing. And it was funnelling money to groups […] that would not have got that money.
C2053 Diane Warburton, Track 4. © Diane Warburton
Being happy to take part was a matter of focusing on immediate positive outcomes of the Campaign: hundreds of thousands of pounds in grants supporting projects in which people of all ages acted on their local area: planting trees, flowers and vegetables, digging ponds, turning derelict land green. As sociologists Nina Eliasoph and Kari Norgaard have found in other times and places, a focus on the local and doable in the Campaign was chosen instead of attention to structural or global issues:
It felt a very important thing to do; it wasn’t changing the world, it wasn’t […] transforming society, but it was making their lives a lot better. […] Shell Better Britain tended to focus on the quality of life and […] local wildlife and local greening rather than planetary issues.
C2053 Diane Warburton, Track 3. © Diane Warburton
It helped too that Shell UK’s Corporate Affairs Department (from which the Campaign was run and which had a history of associating Shell with Britain’s nature) was itself aware of the advantages of being low key – perhaps keen to perpetuate what Geert Buelens calls a ‘banal’ presence in the background of everyday life:
Publicity material […] would say ‘funded by Shell Better Britain Campaign’ but it might be in very small print at the bottom. […] They weren’t stupid. You know, they knew that if they […] were heavy handed about it, they’d get backlash. So they weren’t heavy handed about it.
C2053 Diane Warburton, Track 4. © Diane Warburton
Other companies were similarly discreet when it came to their funding of environmental work. Small logos appear at page bottoms and back covers of leaflets. George Greenshields tells us that the car he was given to visit farmers in Dorset in the 1980s to talk about nature conservation,
had this magnetic sign […] it said ‘Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group Conservation Adviser’ and in small type it was ‘car sponsored by Tricentrol’ [an oil company] or something underneath.
C2053 George Greenshields, Track 2. © University of Exeter/British Library Board
While the Shell Better Britain Campaign was greening cities and FWAG regreening farms, young members of the Wildlife Trusts’ WATCH group were recording their environment with branded project packs. The Ozone Project, sponsored by Volvo Cars, provided children with seeds to grow plants that could be used as indicators of low-level ozone pollution.
Courtesy of Mary Hollingsworth.
National Power paid for River Watch Packs with cardboard river quality recording devices.
Mary Hollingsworth.
Here again, the involvement of oil and chemical companies did not become a focus of attention. As the Wildlife Trusts Director of Education in the 1990s, Mary Hollingsworth oversaw WATCH and says in her interview that:
I just think that the conversation was different then. […] ESSO sponsored Tree Watch and we didn’t really have any murmurings about ESSO particularly. […] Everybody got a bit soppy; because its kids they weren’t so bothered. […] We had Water Vole Watch […] sponsored by Norsk Hydro who were a fertiliser firm. That could have been contentious, but nobody raised it.
C2053 Mary Hollingsworth, Track 2 © University of Exeter/British Library Board
I read this testimony as suggesting that a form of what Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‘socially organised denial’ operated within the WATCH group. That is to say, no one involved was unaware of the problem of company sponsorship but nevertheless ‘nobody raised it’ because to do so would have been disruptive. Phrases such as ‘could have been contentious’ suggest that the issue was constantly present but never actually brought into focus. The reference to ‘kids’ suggests that – again echoing Kari Norgaard’s work – a concern to smooth over difficult matters for children was a feature of this communal avoidance.
Mary suggests that ‘it’s really if people outside of the network got hold of it’ that there could have been ‘disquiet’. From these interviews alone it’s not possible to say whether external criticisms were voiced. Within WATCH, harmony would seem to have been maintained:
Interviewer: Do you remember […] ever any discussion within the national office about the choice of funders?
MH: No not really – I mean I think [pause] no, not in my hearing anyway.C2053 Mary Hollingsworth, Track 2 © University of Exeter/British Library Board
The interviewees quoted here – Diane, George, and Mary – were among a minority of people in the period who were exceptionally attentive to the environment. They and others were unusually active in seeking to create and restore nature, identify pollution and improve environments. They were also at work at a time – as Mary puts it – when ‘the conversation was different’ to today. It was not until the 2000s that climate change became a dominant feature of concern for ‘the environment’ (sharpening focus on fossil fuel interests) and environmental activism experienced what Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz call a ‘return of the radicalisation of ecological warnings’.
Nevertheless, the environmental work discussed in this article depended on forms of inattention that continue to hold back fundamental change. Mary observes that companies ‘liked the work of WATCH’ in part because ‘it wasn’t political’. I would go further and suggest that, for all involved in company sponsored environmentalism, it was helpful to separate environment and politics. This separation allowed companies to have a low-key presence in environmental projects while staying silent on their role in making those projects necessary in the first place. Environmental organisations could accept vital funding for doable work even while nothing much else changed around it. Individuals could pond dip or measure ozone or plant trees rather than attending to matters that were more difficult.
Difficult in the sense of complicated and ingrained – an often taken for granted capitalism is everywhere in ‘the web of life’ and oil is central to whole ways of life and even masculinities. And difficult in the sense of inconvenient – easier left unraised.
Interviews were recorded by National Life Stories in a partnership with the NERC funded Changing the Environment programme’s project ‘Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach (RENEW)’ (NE/W004941/1).