Evaluating Corporate Personhood
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Sustinere, Volume 1 (2021), No. 1, pp. 145-156 Empowering Nature: Evaluating Corporate Personhood HANNAH SALEH ALI AHAMEDI What makes us human? Is it the ability to speak, think, or have some sense of a moral code? Similarly, if we are unable to define personhood, how can we determine its antonym? For more than a century, corporations within America have been granted personhood. The quest for so-called freedom in America is often at the expense of the individuality and autonomy of the environment. Relating to the climate action sustainable development goal (SDG 13), within this paper I will argue that a corporation's right to personhood in the U.S should be null in the case of fracking projects, specifically because of a corporation’s ability to infringe on environmental personhood. Re-imagining limitations to corporate personhood would not only strengthen the climate movement, but also provide rationale towards the rights of nature. Ahamedi 146 INTRODUCTION What makes us human? Is it the ability to speak, think, or have some sense of a moral code? This is a question that cannot easily be answered. Yet, if we are unable to define personhood, how can we determine its antonym? This is an issue that arises in the discussion of corporations and their classification, despite the difficulty in defining and allocating personhood. A corporations is often identified as a mass of people working collectively under the title of an organization. This paper explores the ramifications of when corporations use this distinction toward financial gain.1 These stakeholders are seen as being independent of the individuals involved, providing a significant amount of power and leeway for them to act without repercussions or checks and balances. Corporations tend to be complex and large, usually consisting of both senior (CEO, COO, President) and junior roles (blue-collar job worker). Notably, this means that stakeholders, such as senior or junior members, are not liable in the legal system for the actions of their corporations.2 Within this essay, I will argue that a corporation's right to personhood in the United States should be null in the case of fracking projects, specifically because of a corporation’s ability to infringe on environmental personhood. Reimagining limitations to corporate personhood would not only strengthen the climate movement, but also provide rationale towards the rights of nature. Firstly, I will discuss how the fracking industry negatively impacts the environment and deprives it of its ability to exist. Secondly, I will argue that the act of denying corporations the ability to frack supports corporations’ own claim to personhood. Lastly, I will discuss how the global shift in perspectives regarding the climate crisis is represented in the United States through advocacy on the rights of nature. Before this, a brief context is needed regarding the fracking process. THE NATURE OF FRACKING As industries have attempted to move away from coal, oil and gas have provided tremendous revenue potential. The increased interest in utilizing fracking in the United 1 Corporation. In Cambridge Dictionary, n.d. 2 “Legal Person,” accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_person. Ahamedi 147 States is understood when economic growth and potential jobs are considered.3 Examples of corporations with fracking projects would include Chesapeake Energy, Apache, and Chevron Corporations. Fracking consists of drilling large pipes into the earth in the search for oil and gas. Once an area is deemed as having the potential oil reserves, a mixture of water/sand/chemicals is pressurized into the earth. This cracks rock layers and allows for a flow of oil and gas to occur.4 Although this may seem incredibly high-tech and advanced, it also has a flip side. It contributes to loss of habitat, pollution, and groundwater depletion.5 North America is one of the few places in the world which relies heavily on fracking for resource extraction.6 For the process to occur, copious amounts of water are mixed with various acids, plastics and friction reducers.7 Cement is often used as a barricade to stop the liquid from contaminating its surroundings, but this can fail due to leaks or over-pressurization.8 These failures contribute to the pollution of water that interacts with the ecosystem. Additionally, methane from fracking projects is a “potent greenhouse gas that heats the atmosphere quicker than carbon dioxide.”9 With the temperature of earth increasing by over two 3 Hilary Boudet et al., “‘Fracking’ Controversy and Communication: Using National Survey Data to Understand Public Perceptions of Hydraulic Fracturing,” Energy Policy 65 (February 2014): 57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.10.017. 4 Hilary Boudet et al., “‘Fracking’ Controversy and Communication: Using National Survey Data to Understand Public Perceptions of Hydraulic Fracturing,” 58. 5 Anthony E. Ladd, Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 1. 6 Robert W. Howarth, Anthony Ingraffea, and Terry Engelder, “Should Fracking Stop?” Nature 477, no. 7364 (2011): 272. 7 Robert W. Howarth et al., “Should Fracking Stop?” 272. 8 Robert B. Jackson et al., “The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 39, no. 1 (2014): p. 337. 9 Michael Gerrard, Chloe Williams, and Bill McKibben, “U.S. Fracking Boom Likely Culprit in Rapid Rise of Global Methane Emissions,” August 16, 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us- fracking-boom-likely-culprit-in-rapid-rise-of-global-methane-emissions. Ahamedi 148 degrees in the past two centuries, additional heating of the atmosphere should be discouraged — we are in the midst of a climate crisis.10 Oil companies, which are the prime investors in fracking projects, are “consistently ranked among the least trusted corporations and most in need of more regulations.”11 This is likely due to the lack of checks and balances within the status quo towards managing these groups. Knowing that corporations have a fragmented relationship with environmental standards is what generates anxiety among activists about fracking. Fracking projects increase the carbon monoxide distributed into the atmosphere while also creating methane emissions that contribute to a warmer climate.12 Moreover, the contamination of water, industrialization of land, potential chemical spills and disrupted habitats both inside and around sites, are just a few of the trade-offs of fracking.13 This does not even take into account the impact it has on global climate, rising sea levels and the depletion of the ozone. For example, fracking releases smog, ground level ozone, formaldehyde, to name a few.14 On top of that, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise because oil reserves are never left untouched. These emissions are a direct result of the fracking. Yet, the potential to extract and make profit is too irresistible.15 Although corporations are cognizant of their actions and their repercussions on the livelihood of flora and fauna, they often overlook it because of the immense capital that fracking creates. Everyday in 2018 saw the production of eleven million barrels of 10“Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?” NASA. NASA, May 10 2021, climate.nasa.gov/ evidence. 11 Francisca Farache et al., Responsible People the Role of the Individual in CSR, Entrepreneurship and Management Education (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 176. 12 Francisca Farache et al., Responsible People the Role of the Individual in CSR, Entrepreneurship and Management Education, 177. 13 Francisca Farache et al., 177. 14 Joe Hoffman, “Potential Health and Environmental Effects of Hydrofracking in the Williston Basin, Montana,” Geology and Human Health: Case Studies (Carleton University , February 15, 2019), https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/health/case_studies/hydrofracking_w.html. 15 Philip L. Staddon and Michael H. Depledge, “Fracking Cannot Be Reconciled with Climate Change Mitigation Policies,” Environmental Science & Technology 49, no. 14 (February 2015): 8270, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b02441. Ahamedi 149 oil.16 Importantly, this adds up to a large amount of money. Attention to the potential financial profit of fracking projects can be seen in Pennsylvania, where in 2010 the state received upwards of 3000 companies requesting drilling permits.17 Although management, investors, and even the average company desk clerk understand the dangers fracking poses to the environment, the lack of hesitation is symbolic of agnotology, a discipline focusing on the “production of zones of ignorance.”18 Corporations are indifferent to the long term ramifications of their actions and are blinded by greed, because they have been raised in a society where the effects of the capitalization of natural resources are “minimized and nature [becomes] a mere externality, ” — that is, it becomes ours to ruin.19 We “disconnect [nature] from any material substratum” and view it as being worth destruction.20 We uproot the land, displace it; all without a second glance. However, fracking projects cannot necessarily be stopped. The corporation has a right to property, and thus possesses the ability to do as it pleases regardless of the negative environmental implications. This means that there is no process to evaluate the credibility of these projects, or whether they should be occurring to begin with. The environment, especially during a climate crisis, deserves the ability to thrive and exist without threat. Thus, the best solution to coping with this crisis is by ridding corporations of their ability to do further harm, especially since giving them the moral decision to help the environment is futile. COMPETING CLAIMS FOR PERSONHOOD To contest a corporation’s right to property would support an identical cause in terms of the environment, as fracking denies the environment its own right to 16 Bethany McLean, Saudi America: the Truth about Fracking and How It's Changing the World (New York, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), 8.