IELTS CAM Inspired 15 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 15 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 5
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The importance of the huarango tree
• its roots are longer than those of any other tree, reaching as far as 75 metres underground
• the south coast of Peru is among the most easily harmed
1.
on Earth
• the region's only dependable water lies a long way beneath the
2.
• water is carried up by the roots into the upper
3.
, where other plants can reach it
• over time the huarangos were removed and
4.
were planted in their place
• after the trees are cleared, there is nothing left to keep the
5.
from washing away
Question 6 - 8
Complete the table below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Traditional uses of the huarango tree
Part of tree
Traditional use
branches
6
leaves and bark
7
trunk
8
Question 9 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
9
Sotomayor has had to challenge a local belief that keeping trees grown for food at one's home is a sign of poverty.
10
Roasting the tree's seeds produces a drink that tastes bitter.
11
Manrique has several local people working for him on his farm.
12
Planting the forest corridors could lower the amount of water that neighbouring farms use.
13
Where only a few huarango trees are left, the tree's population is slow to build back up.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
14
The whistling method is well suited to the island's challenging landscape.
15
Anything more elaborate than a simple message lies beyond what Silbo can express.
16
People trained in Silbo and those unfamiliar with it did not show the same brain responses during the scanning study.
17
Women are as likely as men to become skilled silbadores.
18
Scientists have made a detailed record of every whistled language that survives.
19
Silbo takes longer to master than ordinary speech.
Question 20 - 26
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Silbo Gomero
How Silbo is produced
• Silbo is a whistled version of
20.
, turning its vocabulary into high and low tones
• the sound is made higher by putting a
21.
in the mouth
• the
22.
in which the whistle travels is set by cupping the spare hand
How Silbo is used
• long used by shepherds and people living in remote places
• for everyday purposes, whistles carry short
23.
• can spread urgent news quickly, e.g. alerting people to
24.
The future of Silbo
• increasingly at risk from the growing use of mobile
25.
• the islanders are asking UNESCO to give Silbo a protected
26.
, keeping it for humanity
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below.
Big businesses
Many major firms are ready to harm people and the environment in the pursuit of profit, seemingly guided by no . Where from the authorities is weak and where the general public shows little , the outcome can be environmental harm — for example , or the loss of .
A
overfishing
B
oversight
C
subsidies
D
forests
E
scruples
F
wildlife
G
flooding
H
interest
I
employee backing
J
pollution
Question 32 - 34
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
32
In the third paragraph, the writer's central point is that damage to the environment
A
stems mainly from the public's lack of knowledge.
B
is something individual citizens have the power to stop.
C
cannot be tackled without new laws.
D
will continue until company bosses are better informed.
33
In the fourth paragraph, the writer sets out ways in which members of the public can
A
shape how both companies and governments act on the environment.
B
cut the environmental harm they themselves cause.
C
find out more about how firms affect nature.
D
draw attention to particular environmental accidents.
34
In the example concerning the meat-borne illness, the pressure applied by big business took the form of
A
processors refusing to supply the restaurant chain.
B
a restaurant chain persuading officials to relax the rules.
C
a restaurant chain lobbying the authority to bring in new rules.
D
a restaurant chain compelling its own suppliers to obey the regulations.
Question 35 - 39
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
35
In the writer's view, criticising companies is by itself an effective way to change how they behave.
36
Consumers should be willing to accept higher prices to pay for responsible environmental measures.
37
Bigger companies tend to damage the environment more than smaller ones do.
38
The writer's chief purpose is to establish which companies are admirable and which are not.
39
In the past, firms have altered their conduct once people came to expect it.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
40
Which of the following would make the best subtitle for the passage as a whole?
A
How can firms be persuaded to care less about profit?
B
Can the planet withstand the damage that industry does?
C
Who is really responsible for the environmental harm that big business causes?
D
What kinds of environmental harm result from corporate greed?
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The return of the huarango
The dry valleys of southern Peru are seeing the comeback of a native tree
Peru's southern coast is a slender strip of desert, perhaps 1,800 kilometres long, hemmed in where the Andes meet the Pacific. It is also among the planet's most fragile ecosystems, its web of life easily upset. Rainfall is almost unknown, and whatever water lasts the year round lies far underground, well beneath the surface. That is why the huarango thrives where little else can: its roots outreach those of any tree on the planet. Plunging as deep as 75 metres, they serve the tree but do more besides, drawing water upward into the higher subsoil, where the plants around them can live on it.
How the huarango reshaped the land of the Lower Saran Valley, in southern Peru, is a question Dr Aurel Marchetti, an archaeobotanist at the University of Northmoor, has pursued for years. As he sees it, the tree lay at the heart of what the valley's earliest inhabitants ate, and because its roots could tap water lying far below, it saw those communities through the parched years when everything else they grew withered. Bit by bit, all the same, the huarangos came down and crops took their place. Clear the native woodland and the soil, with nothing left to bind it, simply washes away; let the huarangos vanish and desert is what remains. Today not a thing will grow in the Lower Saran Valley.
The neighbouring Middle Saran Valley leaned on the huarango just as heavily, and for just as long. In its shade people grew their vegetables, and from its seed pods they made food to eat. Herbal remedies were brewed from the leaves and bark; the branches, burned down, gave charcoal for cooking and warmth; and the trunk yielded the timber that raised their houses. That tree is now slipping away at speed. Fuel and farming have already claimed most of the valley's huarango forest, at first only smallholdings but these days sprawling estates that grow produce for buyers overseas.
'Of the forest that covered this ground eight centuries back, no more than four per cent is still standing,' says Emil Sotomayor, a botanist with the Aldergrove Botanic Institute, who, with the ethnobotanist Dr Petra Lindqvist, runs a pioneering scheme to save and rebuild the vanishing habitat. None of it can work unless local people are brought along, and that has meant chipping away at deep-set attitudes. 'These days, the higher a community sets its sights, the more it reads a food tree in your yard or street as a badge of poverty, proof you still grow your own,' he says. Determined not to let the Middle Saran Valley follow the Lower, Sotomayor is coaxing residents into valuing the huarango again, 'reviving a piece of the culture,' as he puts it. He has founded a huarango festival to reawaken local pride and set schoolchildren to planting trees by the thousand.
Sotomayor is convinced that usefulness is the key. 'People will only invest in bringing a habitat back if the tree you offer them earns its keep,' he says. Working alongside local families, he has set about building them a dependable income, converting what the huarango produces into things they can eat. Simmer the beans, he explains, and they reduce to a dark, treacle-thick syrup that can be stirred into a drink or added to a soup or stew. Ground-up pods make a flour for baking, and once the seeds are roasted they turn into a sweet drink, faintly of chocolate, that stands in for coffee. All of it, he notes, is rich in vitamins and minerals.
A few farmers have taken the plunge already. The certified organic farm run by Rodrigo Manrique, the only one of its kind in the Saran Valley and another that owes its start to Sotomayor, has carried huarangos for eleven years. From them he makes syrup and flour, sold at an organic market up in the regional capital. The plot is small and still falls short of supporting him, yet he is sure that will not last. 'Here in Peru the appetite for organic food is growing fast,' he says. 'The future is where I'm putting my money.'
Yet even if Sotomayor manages to rekindle local affection for the huarango, the larger farms remain a danger. Some of them slice straight through the forest, severing the corridors along which mammals, birds and pollen must travel up and down the slender belt of woodland. To counter this, he is persuading landowners to let him plant forest corridors across their property. The added trees, he argues, will help the farms as well, cutting their water consumption by reducing evaporation and offering shelter to the insects that keep pests in check.
'Once we can map the biodiversity and grasp how the pieces connect, we have a foundation to build on. In the desert, a habitat can contract until almost nothing is left,' Sotomayor observes. A rainforest depends on a huge, continuous stretch of land; this place never has. Here life has survived in nothing more than narrow corridors and scattered pockets, and where a handful of trees hang on, numbers climb again rapidly, the species having learned to grab water the instant it comes. He sees the project as a blueprint that might be carried to arid country elsewhere. 'If it works here, in the most fragile system on Earth, that's a real message of hope for many regions, Africa among them, where drought bites hard and waiting for rain is not an option.'
Silbo Gomero – the whistle 'language' of the Canary Islands
Off the north-western shoulder of Africa, in the waters of the Atlantic, lies La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. Volcanic in origin and thickly ridged, it climbs through steep stony inclines and deep wooded gorges to a summit of 1,502 metres. What has made the island famous, though, is not its scenery but its whistle 'language' — a way of carrying information across great distances that could hardly be better matched to such rugged, broken country.
Scientists now argue that this 'language', called 'Silbo' or 'Silbo Gomero' after the Spanish verb 'to whistle', has a good deal to teach us about how the human brain deals with language. When people listen to Silbo, the researchers report, regions of the brain that ordinarily handle speech spring into action — a sign, they suggest, of just how adaptable the brain is when it comes to reading meaning into sound.
'For a long time we have pictured certain patches of the brain as reserved for language, and only now are we grasping how wide a range of signals can count as one,' says Petra Vaskin, who co-wrote a recent study and teaches psycholinguistics at Askeby University.
In effect, Silbo re-encodes Spanish, each word turning into a whistle pitched high or low. To push the pitch upward, a silbador slips a finger between the lips, while the free hand, held in a cup shape, steers the direction the sound takes. The trouble is that a whistled 'word' is far vaguer than a spoken one. 'The whistled signal leaves much more room for confusion than the spoken one does,' notes Rodrigo Esterlin, who leads the research and lectures in psychology at Valmera University on the neighbouring island of Tenerife. To get their meaning across, whistlers therefore lean heavily on repetition and on a shared sense of the situation.
Traditionally it was shepherds and others living in remote uplands who became silbadores, and their unusual way of keeping in touch lets them exchange messages across gaps of as much as six kilometres. A great deal can be packed into these whistles, Esterlin says: 'Day to day, people whistle brief instructions, but there is nothing to stop a whole Spanish sentence being sent this way.' The technique has shown its worth above all when storms have battered the island and word has had to travel fast across wide stretches of land.
For the study, the team used brain-scanning equipment to set the whistlers' neural activity while they heard Silbo against their activity while they heard ordinary spoken Spanish. The left temporal lobe, the area tied to speech, lit up as the whistles were processed, and parts of the frontal lobe joined in too — among them regions that fire when deaf people follow sign language. Yet when the same tests were run on people who could not whistle, activity flared right across the brain instead.
'What we are seeing is fresh proof that the human gift for language can take many shapes,' Vaskin says. 'It looks as though the language areas on the left side of the brain are built for communication itself, whatever form the signal happens to take. The volunteers who did not know Silbo weren't hearing it as a language at all. With nothing familiar to hold on to, region after region of their brains switched on.'
Where Silbo Gomero came from is still unclear, Esterlin says, though the island's original inhabitants — a people of North African descent — were already whistling to one another by the time Spain took the Canaries in the fifteenth century. Whistled speech can still be found in Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Vietnam, Guyana, China, Nepal, Senegal and a handful of mountainous corners of southern Europe. Perhaps sixty-five such languages survive, yet only around ten have been set down and studied with any rigour. Wherever it appears, this kind of communication is a response to isolation, according to Camille Dufort of the Centre for Human Ecology in Grenoble. 'You find them chiefly in mountains or thick forest,' she says. 'A whistled language is a sharply defined thing — spoken language reshaped to suit communities cut off from one another.'
The spread of modern devices, however, has left languages like Silbo in danger of dying out. As mobile phones have become commonplace and the pool of fluent islanders has shrunk, the Canaries' authorities have begun acting to keep Silbo alive. From 2001 onward it has formed part of the timetable in every primary school on La Gomera. The islanders are also turning to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for help. 'What the local authorities want,' Esterlin adds, 'is for the body to grant Silbo Gomero official status, marking it out as something humanity ought to keep.'
How large companies treat the natural world rests on one uncomfortable truth, which many people find deeply unfair. Under the right conditions, a firm can enlarge its profits, at least over the short run, precisely by harming ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Two familiar cases illustrate this: crews working an unregulated fishery where no catch limits apply, and international timber firms holding brief leases on tracts of tropical forest in regions where officials are easily bribed and landowners poorly informed. Whether clean firms or dirty ones come out ahead depends on the surrounding pressures. Where the state enforces its rules and where citizens pay attention, the environmentally responsible company can beat its careless rivals; where enforcement is lax and the public indifferent, the opposite usually holds.
Condemning a company for enriching itself at others' expense comes naturally to the rest of us. Yet condemnation by itself seldom changes anything. What it overlooks is that firms are not charitable bodies but enterprises built to turn a profit, and that any business owned by shareholders is bound to serve those owners by earning as much as the law allows. Under company law in many countries, directors who deliberately run a firm in a way that shrinks its profits can be held personally liable — a failure sometimes labelled a breach of their duty to shareholders. A well-known illustration is the carriage manufacturer Cornelius Haldane, whom his own shareholders took to court in 1921 after he lifted his employees' minimum wage far above the going rate; the judges accepted that his concern for his workforce was admirable, but ruled that the company had been set up to generate returns for its investors, not to serve as a charity.
There is a further thing our finger-pointing misses: in the end it is the public that creates the very conditions under which a firm can profit from wrecking the environment, so the public shares the blame. Over the long term the power lies with ordinary people — acting for themselves or through the politicians they elect — to strip destructive practices of their profitability and to outlaw them, while making genuinely sustainable choices pay.
One route is the courtroom: people can sue firms that have harmed them, as they did following the Kestrel Bay tanker catastrophe, when more than 30,000 cubic metres of crude oil escaped along a northern coastline. But there are quieter levers too. Shoppers can favour goods that have been harvested responsibly; workers at firms with poor records can be shamed into complaining to their own managers; voters can push for public contracts to go to companies with sound environmental histories; and they can lean on governments to write, and then actually enforce, laws that require good practice.
Large firms, in turn, can bring formidable pressure to bear on suppliers who might otherwise shrug off the disapproval of the public or the state. Consider what happened when people grew alarmed about an illness that could pass to humans through contaminated meat. The national food-safety authority responded by ordering processors to drop the practices that let the infection spread — yet for five years the processing firms refused, insisting the changes were simply too costly. The picture changed overnight once a nationwide restaurant chain, watching sales of its products collapse, issued exactly the same demand: within weeks the processors fell into line. The lesson for the public is to work out which points in the supply chain actually respond to pressure — restaurant chains or jewellery retailers, say, rather than the processors of meat or the miners who dig out gold.
Some readers will be dismayed, even angry, that I lay ultimate responsibility for harmful corporate behaviour at the public's own door. I would add something equally unwelcome: the public must also accept that goods may have to cost more wherever sound environmental practice adds to their price. Such a position can look as though it brushes aside the conviction that companies ought to behave ethically even when doing so eats into their profits. My answer is that human history points the other way. In every politically complex society, regulation has emerged for a reason: people found that moral expectations had not only to be spelled out plainly but also to be backed by enforcement.
For me, the finding that the public holds the ultimate say over even the mightiest corporations is a source of encouragement and hope, not gloom. It is not a verdict on who is virtuous and who is selfish, who wears the white hat and who the black. History shows that businesses have shifted course whenever the public began to want something different — rewarding the conduct that people approved of and making life awkward for the conduct they rejected. My prediction is that the pattern will hold: as before, it will be shifts in public attitude, more than anything else, that push companies to change how they treat the environment.
Peru's southern coast is a slender strip of desert, perhaps 1,800 kilometres long, hemmed in where the Andes meet the Pacific. It is also among the planet's most fragile ecosystems, its web of life easily upset. Rainfall is almost unknown, and whatever water lasts the year round lies far underground, well beneath the surface. That is why the huarango thrives where little else can: its roots outreach those of any tree on the planet. Plunging as deep as 75 metres, they serve the tree but do more besides, drawing water upward into the higher subsoil, where the plants around them can live on it.
How the huarango reshaped the land of the Lower Saran Valley, in southern Peru, is a question Dr Aurel Marchetti, an archaeobotanist at the University of Northmoor, has pursued for years. As he sees it, the tree lay at the heart of what the valley's earliest inhabitants ate, and because its roots could tap water lying far below, it saw those communities through the parched years when everything else they grew withered. Bit by bit, all the same, the huarangos came down and crops took their place. Clear the native woodland and the soil, with nothing left to bind it, simply washes away; let the huarangos vanish and desert is what remains. Today not a thing will grow in the Lower Saran Valley.
The neighbouring Middle Saran Valley leaned on the huarango just as heavily, and for just as long. In its shade people grew their vegetables, and from its seed pods they made food to eat. Herbal remedies were brewed from the leaves and bark; the branches, burned down, gave charcoal for cooking and warmth; and the trunk yielded the timber that raised their houses. That tree is now slipping away at speed. Fuel and farming have already claimed most of the valley's huarango forest, at first only smallholdings but these days sprawling estates that grow produce for buyers overseas.
'Of the forest that covered this ground eight centuries back, no more than four per cent is still standing,' says Emil Sotomayor, a botanist with the Aldergrove Botanic Institute, who, with the ethnobotanist Dr Petra Lindqvist, runs a pioneering scheme to save and rebuild the vanishing habitat. None of it can work unless local people are brought along, and that has meant chipping away at deep-set attitudes. 'These days, the higher a community sets its sights, the more it reads a food tree in your yard or street as a badge of poverty, proof you still grow your own,' he says. Determined not to let the Middle Saran Valley follow the Lower, Sotomayor is coaxing residents into valuing the huarango again, 'reviving a piece of the culture,' as he puts it. He has founded a huarango festival to reawaken local pride and set schoolchildren to planting trees by the thousand.
Sotomayor is convinced that usefulness is the key. 'People will only invest in bringing a habitat back if the tree you offer them earns its keep,' he says. Working alongside local families, he has set about building them a dependable income, converting what the huarango produces into things they can eat. Simmer the beans, he explains, and they reduce to a dark, treacle-thick syrup that can be stirred into a drink or added to a soup or stew. Ground-up pods make a flour for baking, and once the seeds are roasted they turn into a sweet drink, faintly of chocolate, that stands in for coffee. All of it, he notes, is rich in vitamins and minerals.
A few farmers have taken the plunge already. The certified organic farm run by Rodrigo Manrique, the only one of its kind in the Saran Valley and another that owes its start to Sotomayor, has carried huarangos for eleven years. From them he makes syrup and flour, sold at an organic market up in the regional capital. The plot is small and still falls short of supporting him, yet he is sure that will not last. 'Here in Peru the appetite for organic food is growing fast,' he says. 'The future is where I'm putting my money.'
Yet even if Sotomayor manages to rekindle local affection for the huarango, the larger farms remain a danger. Some of them slice straight through the forest, severing the corridors along which mammals, birds and pollen must travel up and down the slender belt of woodland. To counter this, he is persuading landowners to let him plant forest corridors across their property. The added trees, he argues, will help the farms as well, cutting their water consumption by reducing evaporation and offering shelter to the insects that keep pests in check.
'Once we can map the biodiversity and grasp how the pieces connect, we have a foundation to build on. In the desert, a habitat can contract until almost nothing is left,' Sotomayor observes. A rainforest depends on a huge, continuous stretch of land; this place never has. Here life has survived in nothing more than narrow corridors and scattered pockets, and where a handful of trees hang on, numbers climb again rapidly, the species having learned to grab water the instant it comes. He sees the project as a blueprint that might be carried to arid country elsewhere. 'If it works here, in the most fragile system on Earth, that's a real message of hope for many regions, Africa among them, where drought bites hard and waiting for rain is not an option.'
Off the north-western shoulder of Africa, in the waters of the Atlantic, lies La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. Volcanic in origin and thickly ridged, it climbs through steep stony inclines and deep wooded gorges to a summit of 1,502 metres. What has made the island famous, though, is not its scenery but its whistle 'language' — a way of carrying information across great distances that could hardly be better matched to such rugged, broken country.
Scientists now argue that this 'language', called 'Silbo' or 'Silbo Gomero' after the Spanish verb 'to whistle', has a good deal to teach us about how the human brain deals with language. When people listen to Silbo, the researchers report, regions of the brain that ordinarily handle speech spring into action — a sign, they suggest, of just how adaptable the brain is when it comes to reading meaning into sound.
'For a long time we have pictured certain patches of the brain as reserved for language, and only now are we grasping how wide a range of signals can count as one,' says Petra Vaskin, who co-wrote a recent study and teaches psycholinguistics at Askeby University.
In effect, Silbo re-encodes Spanish, each word turning into a whistle pitched high or low. To push the pitch upward, a silbador slips a finger between the lips, while the free hand, held in a cup shape, steers the direction the sound takes. The trouble is that a whistled 'word' is far vaguer than a spoken one. 'The whistled signal leaves much more room for confusion than the spoken one does,' notes Rodrigo Esterlin, who leads the research and lectures in psychology at Valmera University on the neighbouring island of Tenerife. To get their meaning across, whistlers therefore lean heavily on repetition and on a shared sense of the situation.
Traditionally it was shepherds and others living in remote uplands who became silbadores, and their unusual way of keeping in touch lets them exchange messages across gaps of as much as six kilometres. A great deal can be packed into these whistles, Esterlin says: 'Day to day, people whistle brief instructions, but there is nothing to stop a whole Spanish sentence being sent this way.' The technique has shown its worth above all when storms have battered the island and word has had to travel fast across wide stretches of land.
For the study, the team used brain-scanning equipment to set the whistlers' neural activity while they heard Silbo against their activity while they heard ordinary spoken Spanish. The left temporal lobe, the area tied to speech, lit up as the whistles were processed, and parts of the frontal lobe joined in too — among them regions that fire when deaf people follow sign language. Yet when the same tests were run on people who could not whistle, activity flared right across the brain instead.
'What we are seeing is fresh proof that the human gift for language can take many shapes,' Vaskin says. 'It looks as though the language areas on the left side of the brain are built for communication itself, whatever form the signal happens to take. The volunteers who did not know Silbo weren't hearing it as a language at all. With nothing familiar to hold on to, region after region of their brains switched on.'
Where Silbo Gomero came from is still unclear, Esterlin says, though the island's original inhabitants — a people of North African descent — were already whistling to one another by the time Spain took the Canaries in the fifteenth century. Whistled speech can still be found in Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Vietnam, Guyana, China, Nepal, Senegal and a handful of mountainous corners of southern Europe. Perhaps sixty-five such languages survive, yet only around ten have been set down and studied with any rigour. Wherever it appears, this kind of communication is a response to isolation, according to Camille Dufort of the Centre for Human Ecology in Grenoble. 'You find them chiefly in mountains or thick forest,' she says. 'A whistled language is a sharply defined thing — spoken language reshaped to suit communities cut off from one another.'
The spread of modern devices, however, has left languages like Silbo in danger of dying out. As mobile phones have become commonplace and the pool of fluent islanders has shrunk, the Canaries' authorities have begun acting to keep Silbo alive. From 2001 onward it has formed part of the timetable in every primary school on La Gomera. The islanders are also turning to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for help. 'What the local authorities want,' Esterlin adds, 'is for the body to grant Silbo Gomero official status, marking it out as something humanity ought to keep.'
How large companies treat the natural world rests on one uncomfortable truth, which many people find deeply unfair. Under the right conditions, a firm can enlarge its profits, at least over the short run, precisely by harming ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Two familiar cases illustrate this: crews working an unregulated fishery where no catch limits apply, and international timber firms holding brief leases on tracts of tropical forest in regions where officials are easily bribed and landowners poorly informed. Whether clean firms or dirty ones come out ahead depends on the surrounding pressures. Where the state enforces its rules and where citizens pay attention, the environmentally responsible company can beat its careless rivals; where enforcement is lax and the public indifferent, the opposite usually holds.
Condemning a company for enriching itself at others' expense comes naturally to the rest of us. Yet condemnation by itself seldom changes anything. What it overlooks is that firms are not charitable bodies but enterprises built to turn a profit, and that any business owned by shareholders is bound to serve those owners by earning as much as the law allows. Under company law in many countries, directors who deliberately run a firm in a way that shrinks its profits can be held personally liable — a failure sometimes labelled a breach of their duty to shareholders. A well-known illustration is the carriage manufacturer Cornelius Haldane, whom his own shareholders took to court in 1921 after he lifted his employees' minimum wage far above the going rate; the judges accepted that his concern for his workforce was admirable, but ruled that the company had been set up to generate returns for its investors, not to serve as a charity.
There is a further thing our finger-pointing misses: in the end it is the public that creates the very conditions under which a firm can profit from wrecking the environment, so the public shares the blame. Over the long term the power lies with ordinary people — acting for themselves or through the politicians they elect — to strip destructive practices of their profitability and to outlaw them, while making genuinely sustainable choices pay.
One route is the courtroom: people can sue firms that have harmed them, as they did following the Kestrel Bay tanker catastrophe, when more than 30,000 cubic metres of crude oil escaped along a northern coastline. But there are quieter levers too. Shoppers can favour goods that have been harvested responsibly; workers at firms with poor records can be shamed into complaining to their own managers; voters can push for public contracts to go to companies with sound environmental histories; and they can lean on governments to write, and then actually enforce, laws that require good practice.
Large firms, in turn, can bring formidable pressure to bear on suppliers who might otherwise shrug off the disapproval of the public or the state. Consider what happened when people grew alarmed about an illness that could pass to humans through contaminated meat. The national food-safety authority responded by ordering processors to drop the practices that let the infection spread — yet for five years the processing firms refused, insisting the changes were simply too costly. The picture changed overnight once a nationwide restaurant chain, watching sales of its products collapse, issued exactly the same demand: within weeks the processors fell into line. The lesson for the public is to work out which points in the supply chain actually respond to pressure — restaurant chains or jewellery retailers, say, rather than the processors of meat or the miners who dig out gold.
Some readers will be dismayed, even angry, that I lay ultimate responsibility for harmful corporate behaviour at the public's own door. I would add something equally unwelcome: the public must also accept that goods may have to cost more wherever sound environmental practice adds to their price. Such a position can look as though it brushes aside the conviction that companies ought to behave ethically even when doing so eats into their profits. My answer is that human history points the other way. In every politically complex society, regulation has emerged for a reason: people found that moral expectations had not only to be spelled out plainly but also to be backed by enforcement.
For me, the finding that the public holds the ultimate say over even the mightiest corporations is a source of encouragement and hope, not gloom. It is not a verdict on who is virtuous and who is selfish, who wears the white hat and who the black. History shows that businesses have shifted course whenever the public began to want something different — rewarding the conduct that people approved of and making life awkward for the conduct they rejected. My prediction is that the pattern will hold: as before, it will be shifts in public attitude, more than anything else, that push companies to change how they treat the environment.
