Honestly, this one is used as a blame-shifting argument to allow people to still live in an industrial resource-extractive society and still feel good about themselves. "It's not my fault; it's the fault of the megacorporations. Nothing I do will affect this."

The general observation is this: there is a small number of corporations (since people like nice round numbers, the article or meme normally formulates it as "20 corporations" or "50" or "100"). Here is one such article.

The idea isn't technically incorrect. It is true that a small number of corporations account for the vast majority of fossil fuels pulled out of the crust. But here's what people who post this meme fail to consider: Chevron and ExxonMobil and BP and so on are NOT the ones using the petroleum. They aren't making the emissions. We--the citizens of the world--are. We do so directly (by driving cars, taking trains, flying in planes), and indirectly (by buying goods that are transported minimally from the factory to the store, and these days also from the distribution center to our home; by buying food that was farmed using machinery and also transported from form to store.) It isn't that Shell has a center somewhere that is just burning the gasoline they extract away: that isn't at all how their business model works.

There are plenty of issues to hold the petrochemical companies and their coal-mining equivalents accountable for with regards to climate change: suppressing early discoveries of the potential impact of their product; funding climate change denialism in the media; lobbying politicians all over the world to give them subsidies so that they compete with unfair advantages against other energy sources, etc. But they are NOT the ones who are creating the emissions. If there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't be as big business as they are.

So this idea is a blame-shift argument. In the end it is up to the citizens of the world to support other forms of energy generation, modes of transportation, and so forth, and to support the politicians, non-profits, and even corporations that will promote more sustainable and less detrimental technologies.

This idea is entwined with the next one, as well as the previous two. It is unquestionable that consumer capitalism (i.e., the one we are used to in the modern age, as opposed to the early days of the Industrial Revolution which saw little increase in the availability of goods or services to the working class) has been grossly detrimental to the environment. as practiced it focuses on extractive technologies; it is predicated on the idea of planned obsolesce even for expensive items like computers or cars; operates on the assumption that people will always want more/better versions of whatever they have; and (at least traditionally) assumes that once you have used up your products that you throw it "away". Furthermore, as we saw last semester, traditional economics fails to account for the externalities related to the extraction, use, and disposal of resources, so that they are not included in the pricing or taxing of these.

But to blame all of the environmental impact of humanity of capitalism, or to use the logical fallacy that if capitalism has a bad impact on the environment that other systems must be better, is short-sighted. Some look to indigenous ways of living: we will see about some of these issues in the next case study, but I think it is fairly clear that for the near term it would be unlikely for the majority of people in the industrialized world to suddenly adopt indigenous lifeways. The main alternative people look to is socialism, and here we find this case study is grossly flawed.

One the one hand some look to the generally good (or at least not horrible) environmental records of democratic socialist societies as in Scandinavia and elsewhere. However, this is a conflation of two different issues! While in terms of government responsibility for social institutions these nations are "socialist" compared to the US or Australia or the like, the market economies there are just as consumer capitalist as here. The shops have a wide variety of products from different companies (typically the same ones selling in the US, the UK, and so on); people are buying the latest Nokia phone; and so forth. So for the purposes of the factors which impact the environment these are still capitalist countries.

In contrast, the record of authentically socialist (in fact, communist) market countries with controlled economies upon their environments has been historically dismal, often as bad or worse than capitalistic countries of the same time. While the early days of socialist revolutions thought that a planned economy would avoid the excesses of the West (and in many ways it did), much of the rest of their environmental history was quite bad. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and their various client states had notoriously high rates of pollution (both near population centers and in the wilderness). Large scale operations dictated from their central committees (from the draining of the Aral Sea to China's ill-fated attempt to exterminate sparrows) were typically done without input from relevant scientists. And in general the assumption that the plans from central authority would be correct because they came from the central authority failed, as Nature doesn't care whether an idea follows proper Marxist doctrine or not.

Ultimately the horrible environmental record of the socialist/communist economies stemmed from the fact they occurred within dictatorships. Elsewhere private citizens, non-profit organizations, and opposition party politicians could speak up against environmental malpractice, and the possibility of goods or services with reduced environmental impact allowed consumers to "vote with their pocketbook". In one-party states with planned markets, these were very difficult for concerned citizens to do. Furthermore, with state control of the press it was difficult for many people to even be informed of the problem even if there was one.

(Castro's Cuba was an exception that proves the case. Although the Cuban Communist Party held similar control of the government, markets, and press in his nation, Fidel Castro personally was interested in environmental matters and wanted to preserve more of the wildlife of his nation against the degradations that was going on elsewhere in the Caribbean. An environmentalist dictator can certainly do more for the environment than an environmentally-oriented leader without as absolute authority... As a consequence, Cuba's wildlife is among the best protected in the region.)

As Dr. Merck discussed last semester, new forms of economics (even within a capitalist structure) could be revised to be more responsive to climate change issues. Pricing, taxation, and other revised economics that included the value of ecosystem services have the potential to reduce our environmental impact. And already at least some companies and industries have seen the benefit of recycling/repurposing materials to be less extractive.

So this meme has a lot of truth in it, in that extractive consumer capitalism is environmentally destructive. But it is incomplete. A market in which environmental impact has a feedback role onto production and consumption, and a society where the leaders (political, social, and economic) can be held responsible by its citizens is more likely to be restructured into sustainability and resilience than one which is not.

A memetic idea current on social media is responding to someone who claims "humans are responsible for climate change/environmental decline" by pointing out that indigenous controlled lands are where 80% of biodiversity remains. So it isn't humans that is responsible; it is consumerism/industrialism.

In broad strokes there is nothing incorrect about this. After all, we've seen that was the industrialized use of fossil fuels that led to anthropogenic global warming, and extractive use of natural resources in general that is responsible for overall environmental impact. These are byproducts of the industrialized world.

Furthermore, it is true (as we saw in Drawdown that various indigenous forms of land management are far more sustainable than standard commercial systems. This makes sense: any system that has existed for millennia is by definition relatively sustainable on human time scales.

We saw in the first semester that human arrival into places not previously occupied by people often resulted in the local extinctions of animals and plants, especially large-bodied animals. This pattern was seen from Pleistocene Australia and the New World to the Pacific, Madagascar, and New Zealand during the last 2000 years. But typically as these arriving humans move from invasive species to what would later be called "indigenous" populations they developed lifeways that could persist for very long periods of times. That isn't to say that such peoples are "at one with Nature" (as some well-intentioned but essentially racist folk from industrial societies would think), but rather that through trial and experiment traditional practices were developed that were successful over the long term.

There are two main misleading aspect to this meme. The first is a pragmatic one: how useful is this observation? Would it be at all possible for American or British or Japanese or Kenyan citizens to abandon cities and suburbs and start life in an indigenous style? And what would that lifestyle be? There is no one "indigenous" way of life: it is adapted to local climate, resources, environment, and so forth. Furthermore indigenous forms of food production provide too little nutrients per unit area to feed the global population; such an abandonment of urban life would require the death of a sizable fraction of our species.

Another misleading aspect of this meme is the issue of biodiversity. It is true that a huge amount of biodiversity is found in indigenous-held land, but this isn't precisely due to better land management. Instead this is a byproduct of the fact that biodiversity in the form of number of species per unit area is not uniform or randomly distributed over the surface of the Earth. A long-known feature of ecology is the latitudinal gradient of biodiversity, with there being vastly more species living in the tropics than higher latitudes, and vastly more species in rainforests than elsewhere. In the map below the hotter color reflects higher species diversity:

This pattern is not new: it extends back in geologic time long before the rise of humans. Ecologists still debate the exact cause of it (more favorable conditions for originations?; smaller species ranges in tropical organisms?; etc.), but this pattern is real and external to humans.

Indigenous peoples make up only about 6% of human populations. And while they can claim customary ownership for a larger fraction of the surface of the planet, in practice they have direct "tenure secure" ownership of about 10% of this. As one might image, the regions that are given over to indigenous tenure have historically been those lands that settler powers find less profitable. One such environment has historically been tropical rain forests. So due to this lands being (until recently) perceived as non-profitable, the environment that has large numbers of rare species are mostly in the hands of indigenous population: hence the "80% of biodiversity" figure.

(Related to this is the issue of biodiversity being measured in "number of species" rather than in "biomass". That 80% of species mostly consists of species with very small population sizes and habitat areas.)

All that said, protecting biodiversity (even, or maybe even especially, of rare species!) is most definitely a goal to be achieved, and indigenous tenure of the lands with these species is the means by which this can be achieved. Furthermore, even if specific practices of indigenous land management might not be exportable to different climes, the knowledge and experience can inform new thinking about practices elsewhere. And finally allowing cultures to maintain their traditions--and especially to protect their land ownership from industries that are now exploiting rainforests at an ever-increasing rate, as in the Amazon and in Indonesia--is a just and worthy effort.

So this meme is a little misleading and not particularly actionable, but at least it has the potential to alert a larger public to a series of important issues.

It can often be difficult to convey your thoughts and ideas effectively, particularly when they require a fair amount of background material. Thus, we often rely on memetic shorthands to spread concepts we feel are important, valid, and significant. But please do so with care, and try not to spread misinformation when you are trying to get helpful ideas to your fellow citizens.