The story of a man who made a fortune on dynamite, then cleansed his name by creating a Peace Prize, is well known.
Recently I've learned of an analogous story, of a man who made a fortune running one of Europe's largest asbestos firms, then cleansed his name by turning himself into a philanthropic environmentalist.
This later story is that of Stephan Schmidheiny, founder of the Business Council for Sustainable Government, one of the organizers of the Rio de Janeiro earth summit, and founder of Avina.
a Latin-American oriented endowment for the study of ecological sustainability.
But cleansed though he might have thought he was, Schmeidheiny found that his asbestos-,marketing past was hard to shake, and late in the spring of this year he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his part in the deaths of thousands.
This came to my attention as a page one story in the Hartford Courant last week. It was a front page story only because the Courant cares about our state's primary educational institution, Yale University, and Schmidheiny is an honoree of Yale. In connection with his philanthropic work, Yale gave him a doctorate in Humane Letters in 1996, and made him the keynote speaker at an event hosted by the Yale school of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2000.
I ought to mull this over and find some Deep Significance, eh?
How about this, then: Guilt is good. The accumulation of massive wealth can be good, too, because it gives the guilty, and those feeling their guilt, the leverage to do something to make amends. This instinct to clear one's name? how can we encourage it?
How do we know that Schmidheiny's philanthropy was motivated by guilt? People have been known to do both good and evil. In any case, why rely upon the guilt of wrongdoers? The government could have taken is ill-gotten gain and used it to benefit past or potential future victims of asbestos.
ReplyDeleteBloggers don't need evidence. At any rate, you can now say that the guilt-as-motivation thing is a fact, because you read it on the internet.
ReplyDeleteAs to govt role, I know a little about govt's role in the world of asbestos and asbestosis, and I believe that guilt-ridden philanthropy is probably the better bet for making some lemonade out of these lemons.
ReplyDeleteI was advocating what government's role should be. I doubt that, even if a statute imposes a criminal fine on asbestos violators, it contains a mechanism to use the money for victims; and I don't know the extent to which victims would be able to recover from Schmidheiny in a civil suit.
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