No Deforestation: For a Beautiful, Gruelling Moment, We Cooperated
June 2012, a large meeting room in the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Geneva. On one side of distantly spaced tables, a team from Greenpeace moved quietly but deliberately into the room, assembling their laptops and notepads, preparing it seemed, for a game of Battleships. On the other, folk from Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) nervously took their seats, adjusting their clothes, preparing themselves. I sat in the middle, quietly watching the unfolding dynamic, rotating the handle of my yellow, plastic cricket bat.
This was the first “official” meeting between the two warring parties. There’d been one or two informal meetings, but this one was different, it was about opening a dialogue. The path to this moment had been fraught. Wave after wave of Greenpeace campaigning had seen APP’s customers desert the Indonesian paper giant en mass. APP was hurting. Greenpeace had the upper hand but knew that APP was resilient. The company’s natural forest clearance operations hadn’t stopped, and this was the prize the campaigners so desperately wanted.
I’d been working with APP on and off since March 2011 after their sister company, Golden Agri Resources (GAR), Indonesia’s largest palm oil company, had announced a No Deforestation commitment, ending the Greenpeace campaign against them. I’d helped GAR navigate that path and APP wanted to know how I’d done it, to explore whether I could help them too. It had proven to be less straightforward. After some false-starts, we’d gotten going properly in February 2012 and APP had taken its first steps in the right direction. I’d shared with Greenpeace that I felt that APP’s leaders were opening to broader possibilities. The Geneva meeting had been arranged to explore those, though there were no commitments beyond talking and, fingers crossed, some listening, from either party.
It was more than a little tense. Bad words had been spoken between the people sitting around the table via waves of thunderous press releases for years. There was no love. I wondered if we might bring a little humour.
I opened the meeting by introducing participants to my cricket bat. “If any of you folk behave in a bad way toward the other, if you’re rude, disrespectful or otherwise unpleasant, the cricket bat will be used.” Cue nervous laughter. They all knew I wasn’t violent, that I joked a bit, but there was enough edge in my voice to create doubt. The ground-rules were thus established. A hugely productive meeting unfolded, laying the foundation for APP’s journey to its own No Deforestation announcement, with natural forest clearance operations halted across its entire supply chain, on February 5th, 2013.
For that beautiful, intense moment in the second half of 2012, for it truly was just a blink, we cooperated. It wasn’t sweet, handholding, skip through the daisy-field cooperation. No. It was gruelling, brutal, hard on the body and spirit cooperation, draining every last drop of energy and life from everyone involved, but we got there.
“There was no love. I wondered if we might bring a little humour”
It had all started on May 17th, 2010 when Nestlé’s then Director of Operations, José Lopez[1], announced the world’s first ever “No Deforestation” commitment at a palm oil industry conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Framed as their Responsible Sourcing Guidelines, Nestlé’s announcement turned the world on its ear. Here was the world’s largest food company committing to exclude deforestation from its global supply chains, starting with palm oil and pulp and paper.
That announcement hadn’t come from nowhere either. At precisely 12:00pm on March 17th, two short months to the day earlier, Greenpeace had launched its “Kit Kat” video accusing Nestlé of using palm oil from cleared orang-utan habitat in its iconic chocolate bar. A whole other cooperation story later during which I supported Nestlé’s team to respond with their No De commitment and Greenpeace to understand where Nestlé was at, and the foundation was laid for a new level of company commitment, way beyond the narrow and ineffective scope of certification.
GAR had been in Greenpeace’s sights as the company that had apparently done the clearing that led to the Nestlé campaign. As Indonesia’s largest palm oil company, and the world’s second largest planter after Malaysia’s Sime Darby, they’d been a great campaign target – get them and the rest of the industry would follow was the campaign logic. From September 2010, I’d supported GAR as we opened a negotiation with Greenpeace. Having established the No De framework with Nestlé, I helped GAR frame its policy. GAR’s February 2011 announcement was the fruit of a rich, tough and likewise gruelling cooperation with Greenpeace.
Then came APP, and after APP, Wilmar.
Wilmar hadn’t suffered a massive APP-type campaign but as the world’s largest palm oil company, was always garnering campaign attention from all NGOs working on palm oil. Climate Adviser’s Glenn Hurowitz led the charge with Greenpeace firing its own shots across the company’s bows. After an intense period where Hurowitz targeted Wilmar for causing the forest fires that burned across Indonesia in May-June 2013, choking Singapore in a terrible haze, I’d drafted Wilmar’s wide-ranging No Deforestation, No Exploitation, No Peatland (NDPE) commitment from discussion and cooperation with the company and Glenn. After more gruelling process, our three-way cooperation yielded Wilmar’s policy announcement on December 5th, 2013.
In a short, 46 month period, that kicked off with the Nestlé Greenpeace campaign on March 17th, 2010 and concluded with that December 5th, 2013 Wilmar announcement, we’d seen this gruelling, brutal, beautiful cooperation help the world’s largest food, palm oil and integrated pulp and paper companies and second largest palm oil planter commit to ending deforestation in their supply chains.
Quite something.
There was much rejoicing. There was great hope this would signal a new era where forests would be protected, kindness restored and where these commitments could signal a new way of doing business. As 2014 unfolded, wave after wave of company NDPE commitments were announced as the pendulum swung in what seemed to be the forests’ favour. At the September 2014 Climate Summit in New York, an extraordinary short video was made highlighting GAR, APP and Wilmar, so recently regarded as villains, as forest heroes. The video featured government, business and NGO leaders, none of which had been at the cooperation table that yielded the commitments, but who nonetheless wanted to support (and be seen to support) the movement.
It all felt pretty groovy.
Yet here we are today.
Earlier this year, Mongabay Founder Rhett Butler published a post looking back on the past decade and concluded that our collective efforts at stopping deforestation had failed. Though it hit me hard, I had to agree with him.
“Epitaph for the 2010s
All told, the 2010s were a tumultuous time for tropical forests. The decade opened with hope and optimism built on solid momentum around recognizing the value of forests and their inhabitants, technological advances that increased transparency, empowered activists and communities, a new breed of corporate conservation commitment, and unprecedented progress in reducing deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest. But the decade closed with the outlook for tropical forests looking as bleak as ever, but with less margin for error and less time to spare to correct course.”
We’ll probably never nail exactly where we went wrong, it’s so complex and multi-faceted, but my sense is that one of the contributing factors was that we all, collectively, got exhausted by the brutal, gruelling cooperation. I can only speak from my own perspective, but that 46-month period almost killed me. In 2016, burnt out and exhausted, I had two heart operations. I couldn’t go on.
I’d laughed to myself during 2014 when I’d heard that a large US Foundation, concerned with deforestation, had put the word around its network that it wanted to understand how TFT, the organisation I’d founded back in 1999, had achieved so much success with all these transformations. They wanted to fund other organisations to do the same, to help take the work to scale. That they never thought to ask me or to send support to us still confuses me today.
The essence of the success that the Foundation was so intrigued about was not the technical assistance they imagined. No, it was this commitment to cooperation, no matter how challenging, how difficult, how gruelling or brutal the whole experience. I knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere if we didn’t get the protagonists speaking and understanding each other so I used all the effort and strength I had to breathe life into the tiniest hint of cooperation wherever I could find it. I believed that if we could keep the channels open, a new way of working could emerge beyond the immediate crisis generated by the campaigns.
No one was able to do that. Greenpeace had a post-commitment dialogue with Nestlé that went well for quite some time. The post-commitment dialogue with GAR and APP was similarly positive for a while but with the pressure of the campaign relaxed, people changed and those that had sat around those tables in hotel rooms and offices, those who had imbibed the heady “what if” possibilities generated by the brutal cooperation moved on. Organisational memories lapsed and business targets on both the NGO and company sides pulled the cooperation apart. Mistrust re-entered the room. A whole dialogue could unfold there around why these cooperation partnerships eventually sundered but sunder they did and the world’s forests and people are worse off for it.
That’s not to say that APP, Wilmar, GAR, Nestlé and the many others who made NDPE commitments have walked back. They continue to implement their commitments, sometimes with lapses and challenges, sometimes with inspiring achievements.
My sense is that the problem was just way bigger than we collectively imagined and that while these companies definitely had a role, the forces driving deforestation go way beyond their responsibilities.
We did cooperate in that beautiful, awful 46-month period and produced outcomes that were good. That the world continues to lose so much forest doesn’t mean that the 46-month beautiful moment was a failure. For me it signals that we weren’t able to stay with it, with that specific type of hard cooperation where truths were told and real solutions were sought and found by everyone at the table.
There’s still cooperation. Companies participate in meetings, there are Alliances and Forums. Governments make grand announcements at UN meetings so there’s no shortage of effort. Yet none of these approaches to cooperation led to those breakthrough NDPE commitments in that 46-month period of great pain; they had zero involvement in any of the processes. Why then, do we think they’re the right vehicles for saving the world’s forests now?
NGOs continue to campaign and create the conditions for cooperation to emerge if anyone is open to it, themselves included, it seems that so many aren’t. My sense now though is that those campaigns are in some ways blunted by the Alliances and Forums that exist today. Companies have a place to hide. At the same time, as we’re seeing in Brazil, despite climate change and all the knowledge we have that continuing to deforest is so bad for the planet, the pendulum has swung in favour of populist politicians who win elections appealing to those few who directly profit from cutting down the planet’s lungs.
It’s a messy situation but it was messy before. I am perhaps deluded and holding onto something that has proven, in some people’s eyes, a failure. The thing is, I was there. I was around those tables, on those planes, in those forests and dark Board rooms as people, stressed and exhausted, grappled with a way ahead. I know what was achieved, I know the delta between what was and what changed once that gruelling, beautiful cooperation had worked its magic.
Understanding how that cooperation led to those breakthrough commitments might help us find a way forward again today. I don’t see all the fighting and accusing and rocket launching getting us far. I’ve long said that wars create wastelands and my belief in that mantra is only reinforced as I watch the world’s forests fall and burn, oceans and other habitats disappear under a mountain of plastic waste etc.
So many people retort with, “That’s what the UN’s for!” arguing that the global cooperation to solve those issues can only be resolved with things like the Paris Agreement. I just yawn. Tough though no doubt the negotiations were, and full-credit to those who sat through endless days and evenings of long action to get there, the thing for me is that those sitting around those tables are too often focused on just being seen to be doing something. There isn’t a blood-curdling commitment to the hard work of negotiating something so ambitious and then giving it your all to implement it by enough parties. There are of course some, but too many are pretenders at those tables. And that’s a big problem.
“Perhaps we all need to take up cricket?”
The key lesson from that short, beautiful, horrible 46-months of gruelling cooperation was that great things are possible if we turn up, committed to change and focused on delivery. The second lesson is that there are no silver bullets and that I think was one mistake made in concluding that the job was done. Many assumed that the companies were the principal deforestation drivers so get them on board, job done. As I said then and as we’re seeing now, companies clearly are important and many continue to deforest – at great scale in places like Brazil, less than before in Indonesia – but that governments and small-holders are in the mix too. It is truly a very complex, hugely wicked problem and one big mistake we make is failing to understand that these problems don’t have any solutions; there are just approaches that make things better, perhaps less bad. In that sense, we’ll never have zero global deforestation, but we might, if we’re courageous, strong and emotionally intelligent enough, make things better than they are today.
A commitment to stay the course and remain in that brutal space, getting supported for health and well-being along the way, seems like it could be part of a second attempt, if anyone has the bandwidth to dive in there. People will continue to point to the Alliances and Forums as the way to go but so far I can’t say I’ve seen them produce the sorts of step-change breakthroughs we managed in that moment of cooperation.
We can continue to blame and judge and point fingers, we can continue our war with each other, ultimately our war with ourselves and it will continue to have the same outcome. Remember those words from Einstein about not expecting a different result by doing the same thing that caused the problem in the first place. For 46 months, a very small group of people took a different path. There are lessons there that might be applied more broadly as climate change begins to ravage us, if only the world would care to explore what happened.
Perhaps we all need to take up cricket?
[1] I dedicate this post to José’s memory. José was the driving force behind the formation and implementation of Nestlé’s No Deforestation commitment. I was deeply saddened to learn of José’s passing in March this year.