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This book examines how the global environment is regulated and, in particular, the diversity of actors involved in addressing the problem of climate change. It considers the role of private actors, such as nongovernmental organizations and transnational networks, in global environmental politics. It shows that private actors are increasingly assuming duties normally associated with governments. They are taking on the role of regulators, as they create, implement, and enforce rules to manage global environmental problems. The book asks when and why private actors perform these regulatory roles. It cites three examples to demonstrate the diversity of private authority and the ways in which nonstate actors are serving as rule makers: the first deals with Walmart, the second is about the ruffed lemur, and the third relates to the Kyoto Protocol. The book distinguishes between two different types of private authority: delegated authority and entrepreneurial authority.

Whereas the first five chapters talk primarily of companies’ reactions to disruptions, Chapter 6 begins the discussions of more proactive preparations. These preparations include the fundamental steps of creating redundancy and building flexibility. Yet the maturation of risk management has also led companies to prepare other kinds of specialized risk-management assets in the form of business continuity plans, emergency operations centers, and formalized processes for managing disruptions.

This chapter examines the continued importance of this form of labor relations in the years since the 1960s, as South Texas has continued to serve as a model for employers elsewhere eager to avail themselves of poorly-paid workers who lack the ability to claim the basic rights of citizenship. The lessons learned in the fields of South Texas, in other words, were not only borrowed by agricultural employers. Instead, employers have increasingly sought to use the model of farmworker treatment and apply it to workers far removed from the fields. Industrial and service employers continue to try and emulate the enforced powerlessness of agricultural workers, even if they no longer consciously point to South Texas as their explicit model. The Epilogue examines the continued resonance and importance of this model of labor relations as it has moved beyond the agricultural realm and into service and industrial employment.

Political, economic, and demographic changes have transformed the South in the period since 1950, especially over the past thirty years. Deindustrialization, the rise of the service sector, demographic changes, and southern-led innovations in the conduct of labor relations have combined to reinforce the South's traditional resistance to organized labor and to create widely emulated patterns of industrial relations.

This chapter discusses how U.S. transnational agribusiness corporations demonstrated U.S. farm and food power to the world from the 1960s into the 1980s. In earlier decades of the Farms Race, U.S. farmers were called upon to feed the hungry world as a counter-revolutionary project with a humanitarian veneer. By the late 1970s, politicians and businessmen were increasingly declaring their intent to rewrite the rules of global food production and trade on entirely profit-driven terms. Building on Cold War-inspired modernization and development projects initiated in the 1940s–1960s, U.S.-based transnational agribusinesses in the 1970s–1990s—including the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), the former linseed-oil manufacturer turned global commodities giant Archer Daniels Midland, and the Ozarks-based retail chain Walmart—constructed a world in which private corporations, including supermarkets, emerged as the primary institutional mechanisms for regulating and coordinating global food chains.

The epilogue centers on the question of how the contemporary world of global agribusiness differs, but also builds upon, the structures of the Cold War Farms Race. A brief discussion of Walmart’s entry into India opens the epilogue, offering an examination of how agricultural development as pursued by multinational corporations has been framed as an apolitical exercise. Yet as a brief discussion of Venezuela’s current food crisis demonstrates, the power exercised in food supply chains means that no such action can be apolitical. A discussion of supermarkets’ penetration into Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War furthermore highlights the ongoing contestation over what counts as “free enterprise” in the global supermarket-driven food economy. Finally the epilogue offers a few words on the paucity of contemporary food politics discourse and the problem of assuming consumer sovereignty.

This conclusion brings the narrative up to the present, tracing the continued enlargement of the foreign-trade zone system. And, relatedly, it takes stock of representations of the recent astronomical growth of multinational corporations that specialize in logistics. It probes the corporate mythology of “free shipping,” the fantasy that, thanks to containerization and other technological advances, behemoths like Amazon and Walmart have achieved frictionlessness. It also notes how warehouse workers have begun to counter such imaginaries, and, with their bodies blocking the streets, to assert the inescapable fact of the labors of circulation.

Faced with an endless stream of alarming news about the environment—rising temperatures and declining water supplies, population growth and species extinction, oil spills and cancer clusters—people increasingly want to know what can actually be done to address these problems. Concerned parents comb through websites late at night in search of safer products for their children. Students pack lecture halls in hundreds of environmental studies programs that have popped up on college campuses across the globe. Our grocery aisles and magazine stands are filled with advertisements promising that sustainability is just one more purchase around the corner. The major current of environmental thinking today emphasizes the small changes we can make as individuals, which (we are told) will add up to something big. Michael Maniates, a political scientist at Allegheny College, observes that the responsibility for confronting these issues too often “falls to individuals, acting alone, usually as consumers.” Yet solutions that promote green consumerism and changes in personal lifestyles strike many of us as strangely out of proportion with enormous problems like climate change, urban air pollution, and the disappearance of tropical forests. We learn that glaciers are melting and sea levels are expected to rise due to global warming—and in response we are advised to ride a bicycle to work. Scientists tell us that one out of every five mammal species in the world is threatened with extinction, and we react by switching coffee brands. Is it any wonder that people despair that real solutions are not within their grasp? You may suspect that tackling these gargantuan problems will require something more—but what? The answer, it turns out, can be found in a mountain of books and research articles published by thousands of social scientists over the past quarter century. But their discoveries have remained largely hidden from public view.

In a 2009 episode of The Simpsons, Marge Simpson baked what she considered the ultimate healthy, socially conscious, safe snack food: “home­made, organic, nongluten, fairtrade zucchini cupcakes.” Proudly presenting the cupcakes to her daughter’s playgroup, Marge was asked what kind of butter she’d used. “None!” she exclaimed; she had baked the cupcakes in a nonstick pan. But Marge’s beaming pride quickly dissolved into embarrassment when she learned of her apparent eco-stupidity. Marge didn’t know that nonstick pans were made with PFOA (perflurooctanoic acid). “There is only one thing more dangerous than PFOAs, Marge,” one mother declared. “Plastics made with BPAs. Never, ever let your child near any product with the number 7.” At that moment, a child tips a cup up to his mouth revealing the number 7 on the bottom of the cup. The mothers scream in unison and run hysterically out of the house. Bisphenol A (or BPA) had become a three-letter household word. The chemical, used for over a half-century in plastics, was now at the center of a contentious scientific and political debate as well as fodder for prime-time cultural satire. Was BPA safe? On the one hand, a growing number of researchers, championed by environmental and health advocates, point to a growing body of research suggestive of serious health risks of BPA. This includes animal research on low-level effects of BPA exposure on prostate and mammary gland development and neurobehavioral function and development; a small but growing body of epidemiological research on BPA exposures and cardio­vascular disease, diabetes, and social behavioral problems; and evidence of widespread, low-level human exposure including in pregnant women (vom Saal et al. 2007; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2008). On the other hand, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its counterpart in Europe, the European Food Safety Authority, maintain that the levels in food are low enough to be considered safe for all humans.

Contemporary ritual practices have become of an existential nature—undefined, unchallenged, and unappraised—and the objectivity of those initiated reflects little of their confirmed status. The only remnants, and sadly so, are the memories of the ritual. This chapter delves into the ways in which rituals are steadily losing their intrinsic value and becoming an instrument of namesake induction into a hallowed circle of martyrs. While it does not tread the usual route of advocating a surge in the qualifying age for each induction rituals, it infers that the milieu of a child's development and the overarching influences on his/her personality should lead by example, a life that reflects the validity of the commitments rendered at the time of initiation. The Walmart-ization of the church refers to the nihilism that has crept into ritual practices, rendering it as a mere pause rather than a landmark along the journey.

Chapter 6 argues that Walmart is in fact organizable and that the Chilean case study gives us some insights as to how to organize the transnational giant. Despite neoliberal policies, and weak labor law, Chilean workers have been able to beat the odds to successfully win ‘bread and roses.’ The Chapter also addresses the global implications of the Chilean case, in particular, thinking through the challenges and opportunities for global solidarity. Walmart must be organized transnationally, but much care must be taken in how to approach workers and unions across the world.

Consumers have access to substantial information on the products they buy, but much information is missing. “Sustainability information” – about traits like greenhouse gases, child labor, toxic chemicals – is not part of the flow of information. In its absence, the market cannot reflect consumer values about sustainability. New sources of information could integrate our collective values into day-to-day consumer transactions, and make ordinary shopping a path to a more sustainable future.

Introducing sustainability information for consumer products can be accomplished through regulation, international agreements or by the marketplace itself. Large-scale purchasers, like Walmart or the federal government, have enough market leverage to bring forward sustainability information. Once it is available, the information will help make the global market more efficient and more responsive to important human values.

Despite being among the country's lowest paid workers, employees in the food system have remained largely invisible to the average consumer. But now, food system workers are garnering the support of consumers through campaigns for good jobs, wages, and food. This chapter highlights three organizing campaigns that are emblematic of this struggle: 1) the Brandworkers campaign at Amy’s Bread, an artisanal bakery in New York City; 2) the Teamsters campaign at Taylor Farms in Tracy, California, the largest salad processor in the U.S.; and 3) the OUR Walmart campaign at Walmart stores around the country. These cases illustrate how consumers can actively support workers who are organizing against everyday exploitation and oppression.

A vital but often neglected part of the urban restructuring of Los Angeles has been a resurgent activism that has created some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. The Justice Riots of 1992, as they are now called, stimulated vigorous grassroots and place-based coalitions of labor unions and community-based organizations seeking to deal with the enormous inequalities and injustices brought about by globalization and the formation of the New Economy. Affected to some degree by the critical spatial perspective espoused by the Los Angeles research cluster, these new coalitions were among the earliest in the United States to adopt specifically spatial strategies, and in these cases, thinking spatially about justice made a difference. This spatial turn in the justice movement is traced through three organizations: the Bus Riders Union and its initiating sponsor, the Labor/Community Strategy Center; the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE); and, most recently, the Right to the City Alliance.

The introduction chapter presents the lens of the book, providing the author’s unique vantage point as documentary producer, strategist, and scholar. It opens with a first-person narrative reflection from 2005, launching the book from her experience co-producing the advocacy documentary film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, with Brave New Films, which premiered alongside a national grassroots mobilization campaign. This chapter provides foundational definitions of documentary and an original articulation of shared characteristics of social-issue documentary storytelling in the networked era: editorial independence, commitment to truth, civic motivation, and entertainment value. This introductory chapter locates documentary within the contemporary networked media era, the backdrop of community-based activism and public engagement that happens in concert with many nonfiction stories. It culminates with a roadmap overview of the book, chapter by chapter.

This chapter examines how the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt moments of hostility between Latino and non-Latino residents of Lafayette emerged in the immigration debate of 2006. It considers the lived moments of conflict and confrontation as well as the social borders and boundaries set up throughout Lafayette. It analyzes the responses of Latinas and Latinos regarding gendered differences that manifested in multiple microaggressions, as well as Walmart's role as a space of interaction in the perceptions of Latinos and non-Latinos regarding their daily routines. It also discusses the experiences of second-generation Latinos who were targeted with slurs, negative interactions, and traumatic moments of denied belonging.