(This is the third in a series of posts about topics that are considered off limits in the sustainability community.)

Some years ago, I attended a Bioneers conference, a sizable annual event that attracts green activists from around the country. For the first time in the conference's history, the organizers had invited a representative from a major mainstream company—DuPont—to speak. It was a pretty bold move. Bioneers attracts a hard-core "us versus them" crowd, with "us" being, in their view, the eco-warriors with God (but no money) on their side, and "them" the money-grubbing, environment-despoiling transnational enterprises and the contemptible lackeys who serve them. In opening the door to DuPont, the conference organizers were letting the villains into the tent.
   
To further spice up the gathering, a debate was held between Paul Gilding, a friend, colleague, and former Greenpeace head who had made the shift to being a prominent corporate sustainability consultant, and an anti-corporate hellraiser who shall remain nameless for reasons that will soon be apparent.

Gilding and the Nameless One had an energetic discussion about the pros and cons of working with Big Bad Corporations, and then the time for questions came. I plunged into the breach. Gilding's position seemed inclusive, I said: work for change by including corporations. Nameless's position struck me as A or B (activists or corporations), not A and B, and deficient for this reason. Would Nameless care to comment?

And comment he did. He loudly accused me of being a corporate spy—I'd spent some time as editor for a light-green magazine that gently covered corporate sustainability initiatives—and never did answer my question.

I was quite taken aback by this, as you might imagine. I had assumed I was among allies; suddenly I wasn't. When the session had ended, I went up to him and expressed my unhappiness in no uncertain terms. In response, Nameless brought his face to within inches of mine and hissed, and I quote: "F*** you, you f****** worm!"

I spent the night with images of jackbooted Nazis storming through my mind. Nameless's energy had been cut from that same cloth, so laden was it with righteous rage and blind hatred of the Other.

I recount this tale because it illustrates one of the great schisms in the sustainability community. The central issue concerns how to relate to power. In one camp are the rebels. For these individuals, there is only one way to deal with power—by confronting it. Ralph Nader is a rebel; so was Che Guevara. To compromise with power is to compromise oneself, ethically speaking. To collaborate with power is collaborationist, in the Second World War sense of treasonous.

Arrayed against the rebels are the pragmatists. Their logic goes as follows: we can't become sustainable without massive help from those in power. If that means putting our shoulder to the wheel alongside them, so be it. Ideological purity is a luxury we can 't afford.

This tension is one of the sustainability community's major stumbling blocks. Far too much time and energy is wasted in these internecine battles.

It is also a tension that many sustainability activists grapple with internally. This appears to have been the case for Seventh Generation CEO Jeff Hollender when, as discussed in a recent post, he grappled with a critical business issue—what (if any) relationship to have with Wal-Mart. Hollender decided to stop boycotting Wal-Mart; he abandoned the rebel stance. In a somewhat apologetic article to his stakeholders, he explained why he had adopted a newly pragmatist position: "We now believe that we can have a bigger impact by partnering with Wal-Mart than by shunning it."

The tale of the Nameless One is cautionary for a second reason, too. I experienced the full brunt of what psychologists call the shadow—his dark side. This is why I saw Nazi jackboots all night—the dark side can get mighty ugly.

People's shadows aren't only challenging for others. They're difficult for their owners, too. The shadow makes people irrational and ineffective, and it also makes the organizations they're associated with more dysfunctional.

The sustainability community attracts every manner of person, including, as with all political movements, people who put their energy into external activism because it keeps them from having to confront their shadow. This is another reason why, as a prominent environmentalist once noted off the record, the "sustainability movement is so good at eating its young."

In large measure, our crisis of unsustainability is due to realities we try to keep out of sight such as endemic poverty and massive environmental decline. These things are our global shadow. Writ large, the mission of the sustainability community is to drag this shadow into the light and thus make the world whole again.

It's a noble and necessary aspiration—accompanied, unfortunately, by a massive irony. Our own shadows get in the way.

It's a painful double whammy—the rebels versus the pragmatists, and the shadow. Sometimes it seems wondrous that we make any progress at all.