Fighting for a More Ethical and Equitable World

To protect monarch butterfly habitat in Mexico, As You Sow didn’t begin with the ranchers clearing it. It began with Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, and Kroger.

A local Mexican NGO had acquired real-time satellite imagery to identify avocado farms encroaching on the monarch preserve, as well as to track the fruit coming from those farms. As You Sow then worked on the other end of the supply chain, persuading major retailers to pledge that they would purchase only certified avocados. Suddenly, fruit grown without illegal deforestation carried greater value – and farmers had an economic incentive to pull back and replant protected land.

“We use the leverage of markets,” says Andrew Behar, As You Sow’s CEO. “We also get one company to make a change, and then their competitors need to do it as well.”

That leverage is at the heart of an organization that has spent more than three decades using an unusual tool for environmental and social change: the power of the shareholder.

As You Sow engages directly with corporate executives, armed with research that identifies risks and opportunities within their businesses. Most conversations remain just that – conversations. Behar says the organization met with 131 companies in the past year, with the vast majority welcoming its analysis. “You guys are like McKinsey for free,” he says companies have told them.

When dialogue fails, As You Sow can escalate. As shareholders, the organization can file resolutions, bringing issues before other investors and, in more extreme cases, challenge corporate boards or pursue legal action.

The goal is not confrontation for its own sake. It is finding what Behar calls the “acupuncture points” where one corporate decision can ripple through millions of customers, employees, and suppliers.

The Ripple Effect of Systemic Change

Those points are everywhere. After three years of engagement, Abbott Laboratories introduced a non-GMO version of Similac baby formula that became a major seller. As You Sow helped persuade McDonald’s to commit to antibiotic-free poultry, then carried the effort to competitors and producers upstream. Its recent work with Amazon helped push the company away from plastic bubble mailers and toward compostable alternatives made with recycled paper.

The issues may appear disparate – climate change, plastics, biodiversity, toxic chemicals, food systems, and racial justice – but the mechanism connecting them is strikingly steady: identify a risk, find the leverage, and make the better choice economically compelling.

Forest Resener, the organization’s development manager, describes As You Sow as a kind of “corporate conscience,” able to bring ideas into rooms that affected communities and outside advocates may otherwise struggle to access.

Behar sees something larger underway. “We are the midwives of this great transformation,” he says, describing a shift from an extractive economy toward a regenerative one.

It is an ambitious vision built, paradoxically, on highly targeted interventions. Find the right pressure point. Move one company. Let competitors, customers, and supply chains carry the impact outward.

Sometimes, even a butterfly can feel the ripple.