US Multinational ChemicalCorporations in Brazil and Mexico. In 1999 and 2000 WTO rounds, hundreds of protesters and activists walked the streets of Seattle and Prague, claiming that free trade would harm the environment. They may be wrong. As with any cultural good, exportation of environmental ideas is not simply a relocation.
Ideas change when they leave their original space, and they change again when they reach new soil.
Thus Garcia-Johnson focuses on these changes in corporate environmentalism and on the variables that could have conditioned these changes, mainly free trade and political liberalism. She organizes her three working hypotheses exploring how the combination of free trade and the protection of civil liberties encouraged the export of corporate environmentalism, as well as its transformation. She uses Brazil and Mexico as the two case studies to test these propositions, exactly because they have responded differently with respect to two variables. Whereas Mexico is more open to free trade, especially with the United States, while Brazil has a best record in protecting civil liberties. On one level, Exporting Environmentalism provides a well-written historical approach.