Likely in a schadenfreude-esque attempt to make myself feel better for not being an environmental leader, the following questions entered my mind: Who is paying for this fellowship, and where did the funds come from?
Criticizing the funding source of one of the few pro-environmental institutions in Utah seems counterproductive. Shouldn’t those of us who are concerned about the environment look away?
No. The most progressive approach is to take a true-cost accounting of bad money being used for good things, and then make an informed decision. Otherwise, it’s possible that the impact generated by the grant recipient doesn’t offset the societal cost of the grant, in which case it would have been better not to have taken the money.
Accepting grant money indiscriminately incentivizes extractors and exploiters to carry on until our planet turns into Venus, as long as their foundations occasionally write checks to good causes. In what follows, I’ll attempt a high-level accounting of the true costs of the environmental humanities grant to demonstrate the type of analysis necessary to prevent incentivizing the Venus scenario above.
The first societal cost of the environmental humanities grant is the environmental and labor exploitation endured to create the actual grant funds. Mellon created his fortune — the money used for the foundation’s principal donation — by using his bank’s customers’ deposits to finance the coal, oil and chemical industries, among others.
The second societal cost of the environmental humanities grant is the trade-off created every time a private foundation allocates funds rather than a public institution. Grant funds that would have been deployed by democratically elected power are redirected at the arbitrary judgment of the foundation’s wealthy patrons and staff.
Grant recipients should account for the societal cost of a grant in their decision to accept and allocate grant money. Only the environmental humanities program would know whether it fully accounted for the societal cost of this grant, but it includes a thoughtful crowd, so I’m hopeful.
If and when grant-seeking institutions pass this hurdle, my thought is, take as much as you can get. Just spend it wisely.
Russell Fischer