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as a private company diminishes the ability to affect policy through public opposition and shareholder activism. Protests at the front door will have little impact on executives unconcerned with share prices. The very fact that Hunt stepped in when Shella publicly-owned companybowed out under stiff external pressure seems to indicate an unstoppable race to the bottom.

But this is not true.

Though disparate in the face of large, coordinated actors such as Hunt and the IADB, consumers hold the ultimate power to determine the success or failure of commercial operations. If we do not accept the operating parameters of a multinational corporation operating on the other side of the globe we need not accept their operations at home. Multinational corporations exist to make money, and losing customer support is as significant a setback as losing the development that supplies those consumers. By acting as conscientious consumers we can exert more pressure on companies we don not like than by calling them dirty names or damning the condition of our world.

Conscientious consumption may not be easy or cheap, but it can be successful. Organic, fair trade and locally-produced foods have grown increasingly popular as alternatives to traditional agriculture and its perceived ills, and anti-sweatshop movements attempt to make clothing manufacturers accountable for labor conditions in their factories.

The extension of conscientious consumption to natural resources may seem a radical and impossibly utopian proposition, but the success of established ethical' consumption movements disarms the critics. Let us examine the three primary bases for arguing that this movement would not work: economics, complexity and producer opposition. None holds up. First, conscientious consumption of natural resources is not doomed by economics. The organic food movement grew from humble origins in 1960's counter-culture to become the fastest growing sector of the food economy, worth $11 billion today. Conscientious consumers are a self-selecting group who indicate that price is not their primary concern, and increased production costs can be used to justify prices that make alternative food a very profitable industry. On a pound of fair trade coffee middle men make 90 cents for every 10 cents passed onto the farmer. If natural resource producers such as oil companies could build on this model and capture just a small part of the enormous natural resource market, economic viability would not

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