"A local company has more accountability"
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“A local company has more accountability” is the kind of calm, almost homespun line that smuggles a radical critique of modern capitalism into a sentence you could print on a farmers market tote bag. Hawken isn’t praising smallness as an aesthetic; he’s pointing to a power relationship. “Local” isn’t just geography here. It’s visibility. It’s the difference between a business whose decision-makers can be confronted at the grocery store and one buffered by PR departments, shell subsidiaries, and distance so vast it turns harm into abstraction.
The intent is strategic: to reframe accountability as something engineered by proximity rather than granted by corporate virtue. In Hawken’s environmentalist worldview, ecological damage often happens where the perpetrators don’t have to look at it. Local firms, by contrast, operate under the social surveillance of community networks: employees are neighbors, customers know where the owner lives, and reputational consequences land fast. That immediacy functions as an informal regulatory system, sometimes more effective than formal rules that global firms can lawyer away.
The subtext also needles the mythology of frictionless efficiency. Global supply chains promise cheapness, but they outsource costs to places and people kept conveniently offstage. Hawken’s line suggests that sustainability isn’t only a technical problem (materials, emissions, metrics); it’s a democratic one. When production and decision-making move closer to the affected community, “externalities” stop being theoretical. They become personal, and therefore harder to ignore.
The intent is strategic: to reframe accountability as something engineered by proximity rather than granted by corporate virtue. In Hawken’s environmentalist worldview, ecological damage often happens where the perpetrators don’t have to look at it. Local firms, by contrast, operate under the social surveillance of community networks: employees are neighbors, customers know where the owner lives, and reputational consequences land fast. That immediacy functions as an informal regulatory system, sometimes more effective than formal rules that global firms can lawyer away.
The subtext also needles the mythology of frictionless efficiency. Global supply chains promise cheapness, but they outsource costs to places and people kept conveniently offstage. Hawken’s line suggests that sustainability isn’t only a technical problem (materials, emissions, metrics); it’s a democratic one. When production and decision-making move closer to the affected community, “externalities” stop being theoretical. They become personal, and therefore harder to ignore.
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| Topic | Customer Service |
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