I did an interview Sunday night with a nationally syndicated columnist writing about an argument put forth in Grist (www.grist.org) and that I cannot now find, saying essentially that groups like NRDC which are working with Wal-Mart on various greening initiatives are only enabling the company to continue demolishing planet.

Not a new question. But the intersting twist this time was the idea that all the car trips to Wal-Mart trump all the savings in emissions from any of the good things they have said they will do to cut the corporate footprint. There was apparently a statistic from somebody observing that car trips for shopping are increasing faster than other types of journeys, and the observation that since the company announced a sustainability intiative they have gone open several hundred (or some Very Large Number) if new stores.

Naturally this chat happened via cell phone at about 10:45 pm on a Sunday night. He was at his summer cabin in New Hampshire. I was sitting in the middle of four lanes and a couple of miles of inexplicably stopped traffic on I-95 in the middle of nowhere (such as it is...on the Maryland/Delaware state line...maybe the border is closed?).

Does Wal-Mart drive auto traffic? Surely. Did the company speed the demise of Main Street American commerce? Doubtless.

But are they responsible for the 60 years of local, state and federal polices combined with massive technological changes that begat modern America's suburban paved landscape? I'm not so sure. There is more than enough blame to go around for that one.

In either case, digging ourselves out of that hole -- something we're working hard on -- isn't going to happen overnight. And we can't wait until that genie is stuffed back in the bottle before we start taking on other aspects of the environmental profile of the largest single business enterprise in human history.

We simply can't not have that conversation.