It won’t come as a big surprise that I’m not the biggest fan of corporate America. Like a lot of folks who work in conservation, I’m a big angry liberal who things corporations should be regulated before they’re to be trusted. A lot of that is rooted in the long and contentious history of the environmental movement in the United States. Some of the earliest examples of conservation fights were nature vs. industry (John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Dam, Rachel Carson fighting chemical companies over DDT, the ‘timber wars’ in the Pacific Northwest of the 1990’s, etc.).

Recently, more companies are trying to “do the right thing,” and corporate conservation has been taking off. My instinct is to look on these efforts with suspicion, but my friend Joyce sees it differently. Joyce is one of my few friends who used to work in the private sector (she’s now a poor nonprofit employee like me!). She still engages corporations though, helping to direct their charitable giving and sustainability projects.

So Joyce and I had a drink to talk about this growing trend in corporate conservation. Is it all a big PR scheme, or is it possibly the key to saving the world?