The Environment Resisted, 1948–1973

American environmentalism is deeply shaped by the public relations industry. In a certain sense, this is not at all surprising. The monopoly companies of the early twentieth century in environmentally compromising industries like rail, steel, and coal faced considerable anxiety among Americans over their size and power. Corporate public relations emerged out of this anxiety, charged with a mission to invest the corporation with a “soul.”^{Footnote 11} While the concept of “the environment” as a social and moral problem would not be named until the 1960s, many pre-WWII public relations campaigns focused on mitigating the noxious effects of the corporation in their communities, whether direct ecological effects such as pollution and waste management or indirect effects such as employee health and welfare. In this era, public relations constituted the “feminine” face of the corporation’s “masculine” ethos of production and independence. Such feminine corporate practices involved “consciously catering to public opinion, adopting show-business techniques of display and publicity, and institutionalizing welfare and public relations programs.”^{Footnote 12}

In the postwar years, the PR industry enjoyed a relative boom. The Public Relations Society of America was founded in 1947–1948 (a merger of two regional associations) and professional journals appeared to catalog the profession’s development (PR News 1944, PR Journal 1945, PR Reporter 1958). Public relations research and education, as the historian Scott Cutlip has chronicled, also mushroomed in American academic institutions.^{Footnote 13}

Despite these efforts at respectability, corporate PR was still seen by many as a disreputable profession in the United States. This status was partly linked to business–government relations more generally in this era. In some corners, the taint of “big business” as an unchecked power over government that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century persisted even after WWII.^{Footnote 14} Part of it also lay in the seemingly ad hoc salesman-like aspect of the job. As one professional mused in the PR Journal in 1948:

During this time, as Andrew Hoffman writes, the environment was not an “issue” for corporations or for the public interest: “Particularly within the U.S. petroleum and chemical industries, the perception was that engineers and scientists were improving the quality of life for individual Americans and the strength of the nation as a whole.”^{Footnote 16} The corporate mood could be summed up in the DuPont chemical company’s famous slogan, “Better Things for Better Living … through Chemistry.” Companies saw themselves as providers of progress through technological and scientific advancements.

This is not to say there was no public awareness of the environment. Conservation groups, naturalists, and wilderness lovers, both in word and in deed, have been part of the American landscape since at least the turn of the twentieth century.^{Footnote 17} By the end of the 1950s, public concern mounted over the impacts of industrialization and the industrial ethos more generally; this concern would soon feed into a bona fide movement organized around controlling the environmental impact of industrial output, spurred especially over the next couple of decades by the revelation of risks contained in environmental accidents. Within corporate organizations in the 1950s, however, developing sound relations with the general public or with local residents where plants and communities operated was, if anything, a minor concern.

The activities of the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association (CMA) offer a case in point. Founded in 1872, the CMA was the major trade association for the chemical industry, which in 1960 was a $26 billion industry.^{Footnote 18} A large and well-fed organization, the CMA’s duties for its 195 member companies included monitoring legislative matters of importance to the industry; managing the sale, patenting, and taxation of chemicals; developing statistics and best practices for chemical-related issues such as food additives, labeling, transport, and medical concerns; preparing and distributing publications about and for the industry; and initiating partnerships and contractual agreements with government bureaus and other industry organizations (for example, plastics and atomic energy) for research projects. On its board sat representatives of some of the largest companies in the country: Shell, Monsanto, W. R. Grace & Co., Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., Allied Chemical Corp., Dow Chemical, and Du Pont, among others.^{Footnote 19} The CMA did maintain a public relations advisory committee, made up of representatives from these same companies, which promoted the industry in a general way—the CMA hosted, for instance, an annual “Chemical Progress Week” in various communities across the United States—but no sustained programs were in place to develop positive rapport with, or stem negative reactions by, public citizens.

In February 1961 the CMA’s Public Relations Advisory Committee attempted to draw its members’ attention to this fact in a thirty-page report. In hindsight, the report is the proverbial canary in the mine of public perceptions around environmental problems.

“There can be no doubt of the increasing public interest in pollution control,” reads the report. It was not only the growing slate of government controls on taxes and patents that were gaining public attention but also the surprising number of articles appearing in popular magazines in 1960 with titles like: “Subtle New Pollutants Endanger Health” (Time Magazine); “The Danger in Your Water” (Good Housekeeping), and “Our Polluted Inheritance” (Science Newsletter). The report noted:

The PR committee proposed a three-pronged strategy to reach the public. First, they advocated greater use of “mass communication media,” with increased staff devoted to press relations. Second, they advocated for the deployment of “Chemical Industry Councils” to become “the local voice of the chemical industry,” dedicated “to foster[ing], through responsible inter-relationships with neighbor communities, an environment of public acceptance and goodwill in which the chemical industry can continue to function profitably.”^{Footnote 21} The third idea was “to secure the support of those special groups, or opinion leaders, whose influence will enhance the possibility of favorable solutions to each of our problems.” The report concludes:

Fifteen months later, the publication of a singular book, Silent Spring, by the journalist Rachel Carson, propelled “the environment” into the public consciousness. Excerpted in the New Yorker magazine, which immediately galvanized its shocked and panicked readers, Carson’s flowing prose imagined a world without birdsong, a landscape ravaged by pesticides. A former federal employee with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, a naturalist, and a longtime science writer, Carson’s credibility was augmented by her clear and well-documented argument. Connecting government agencies with chemical industry irresponsibility and the collusion of academic scientists, her text had a damning effect on all three pillars of society.

Within the CMA, the reaction was immediate and sobering. As a member of the association’s PR Advisory Committee at that time recalls:

At the request of Settle, “a master of high-risk, high-profile chemical public relations,” the PR Advisory Committee swung into action.^{Footnote 24} The committee was made up of well-positioned counselors from major chemical companies: Glen Perry (DuPont); Bud Smith (Dow); Dan Forrestal (Monsanto); Art Northwood (Shell Chemical); Bud Lane (Goodrich Gulf); and Dick Moore (W. R. Grace), with E. Bruce Harrison coordinating as the CMA’s Manager of Environmental Information.^{Footnote 25} The scale and scope of the public relations war to counter the impact of Silent Spring was unprecedented. The chemical and agribusiness industries threw themselves into the attack, preparing damning book reviews, newsletter mailings, TV appearances by “expert” scientists, and letters to editors questioning the legitimacy of the book and its author.^{Footnote 26} Nevertheless, the public had been awakened and would not be lulled back into complacency.

At the same time, as Patricia Murphy has shown, the intensive media attention to the book’s impact did not only report on the rising antagonism between public and corporations but also helped to create it. “By the very fact of its advocacy, Silent Spring presented the media with the prospect of an ongoing story that was both larger and journalistically more attractive than pesticidal hazards—namely, a public debate.” Rebuttal to the book in any form, regardless of its accuracy, was a “reportable event.”^{Footnote 27} Media coverage, amplified by the placement of stories by the PR campaigns, accentuated the “battle” between “man and bug” or “man versus nature,” and subsequent actions related to environmental concerns were reported in this form as well.^{Footnote 28}

If this was a “battle,” corporations were losing. As Christopher Bosso writes in his study of the life cycle of a public issue, a number of factors converged in this period to ensure the lasting impact of Silent Spring: the presidency of John F. Kennedy and the federal administration’s active sympathy to the book’s argument; the spirit of reform, which spurred social movements to counter dominant beliefs about scientific and technological progress; and the thalidomide tragedy in Europe, which had already caused a ban on the chemical in the United States.^{Footnote 29}

Despite the increasing criticism by advocates of “nature” leveled against the foibles of “man” during this period, the chemical and oil industries persisted in seeing the environment primarily as a technological problem that could be solved within the company, not as a social problem in need of public response.^{Footnote 30} Articles in PR journals and speeches by PR men at professional industry events of the era described the public with marked disdain. Public concern was characterized either as misinformed, irrational, or unaware of the economic “reality” of environmental change. Throughout the 1960s, environmental public relations dealt with the public overall by either presenting environmentalism “realistically”—as a tradeoff between economic and environmental needs—or accusing public critics, along with government regulators, of making unreasonable demands on companies.

Such a tone-deaf response would have a devastating impact on company operations. It perpetuated a growing perception of business as rapacious and uncaring. Civil society and government concern over environmental hazards only accelerated throughout the decade, punctuated by a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969.^{Footnote 31} Between 1967 and 1972, two federal environmental laws were passed, two more laws were amended to tighten earlier restrictions, and five national environmental organizations were established. The new laws were the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970); the important amendments were to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act (1972); and the organizations created were the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Environmental Defense Fund (1967), the Natural Resources Defense Council (1970), the Union for Concerned Scientists (1969), and Environmental Action (1970).^{Footnote 32} It was a watershed moment for the environmental movement, made more meaningful still by the participation of twenty million people in America’s first “Earth Day” on April 22, 1970.

In 1973 the PR Journal hosted its first special issue devoted to the environment, but even then the focus was still on environmental–economic tradeoffs and technical fixes. The energy crisis later that year made environmental issues still more urgent for firms and their extant slate of responses even more anachronistic. By this time, environmentalism now had a self-defined “public,” and it had incontrovertibly become an “issue.” Nevertheless, business leaders remained on the defensive. Some challenged the “advocacy” of environmental journalism and pushed for less “biased” reporting.^{Footnote 33} Others complained that the technical requirements of stringent federal legislation exceeded companies’ innovative capacity. Still others continued to claim that environmental legislation was too expensive and would affect employment.^{Footnote 34} In any case, as far as managerial elites were concerned, the issue of the environment was best handled internally. CEOs wrung their hands over “the growing burden of government regulation on business” and thumped their chests over the moral benefits of entrepreneurialism, remaining essentially blind to the public implications of their actions.^{Footnote 35}

The Environment Accommodated, 1969–1979

On November 18, 1969, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California, W. Howard Chase addressed a roomful of PR practitioners at the annual conference of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Chase, who grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, was a founding member of the PRSA in 1947–48 and its president in 1956. A onetime partner at the agency Selvage, Lee, & Chase (now Manning, Selvage, & Lee), president of the PR arm of the multinational advertising agency McCann-Erickson, and founder of an eponymous PR firm in 1959, by October 1970 the PRSA would call him one of the top ten outstanding PR figures of the twentieth century. ^{Footnote 36} For now, however, Chase’s lecture mingled paternal pride and professional devotion with deep dismay.

“Public relations—like theology, law, medicine, and journalism—is under fire,” Chase told his colleagues. “I don’t believe that we—even as comfortable and well-fed as we now are—can ignore significant evidences of apathy or even disrespect for what we are or what we stand for.”^{Footnote 37} The problem, in Chase’s view, was that PR professionals had not demonstrated their worth to the leaders of organizations at which vital decisions were being made. The “managers of money, men, machines and marketing” needed now a “fifth M”—a manager of the mind. This was the new role that public relations ought to occupy.

Chase envisioned a systematic approach to information, one that not only communicates preestablished ideas but also forms them; that would not only “create broad public awareness of how smart or innovative someone else may be” but also makes others aware of how smart and innovative PR can be; one that not merely manages client objectives but also anticipates and constructs them. Rather than asserting that the values of the corporation are in the public interest, the PR professional ought to create the public interest by helping to direct and indeed make public policy.^{Footnote 38}

Chase was a strong proselytizer and a savvy strategist in his own right. In addition to his prolific writings on the topic of corporate issue management, he created a series of institutions to accommodate his ideas.^{Footnote 39} In 1963 “Chase created the Council for Management of Change, with the monthly newsletter, The Innovation and Management of Change (IMC), as an incubator of his ideas.”^{Footnote 40} As the founder of another newsletter, Corporate Public Issues and their Management (wherein he introduced the term issue management) in 1976, Chase created the Institute for Public Issues Management and taught a graduate MBA course in Public Issues Management at the University of Connecticut in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Public Affairs Council offered the first of several seminars on issue management in 1977; and, starting in 1979, George Washington University offered semiannual seminars on the topic.^{Footnote 41} Buoyed by a two-paragraph mention in the Wall Street Journal of the growing trend in companies to hire issue management directors in 1981, in 1982 Chase cofounded the Issue Management Association.^{Footnote 42}

Chase furthered his mission to promote the legitimacy of issue management by drawing connections to ongoing social scientific, market, and government research. Making these connections allowed Chase to situate other initiatives as precursors to his work as well as project his ideas into a range of organizational fields.

“Futures” research was a major influence on Chase’s ideas, as the subtitle of his book indicates (Issue Management: Origins of the Future). Economic futures research and forecasting gained popularity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Companies assembled economists, accountants, statisticians, and computer scientists to control for risks inherent to physical planning and budgeting. Such efforts spawned societies and journals to report on and analyze these long-range planning processes.^{Footnote 43}

In the 1970s, futures research took on a more social–behavioral aspect. Company analysts began to see the value of psychological principles of decision making, referring to “mental models” and managers’ “worldviews.”^{Footnote 44} Company futures research combined numerical or statistical analyses with improvisatory, image-based techniques such as decision scenarios, Delphi polls, and models or simulations.^{Footnote 45} These “soft” methods for assessing future problems were seen as important complements to quantitative econometric evaluations. The head of the governmental issues management team of the American oil company Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) explained to the Wall Street Journal in 1982, “Single-line numbers forecasting, typically done by economic planners, didn’t predict the Arab oil embargo or the environmental revolution. …We needed a wider, more qualitative approach to supplement the other work.”^{Footnote 46}

The federal government tried its hand at futures research, forming a Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and sponsoring hearings and workshops in 1981 and 1982 on “congressional foresight capability and the strategic future.”^{Footnote 47} Chase capitalized on the growing interest, inviting one of the group’s representatives, Senator Al Gore (D-Tenn.), to be the keynote speaker at the third annual meeting of the Issues Management Association on May 18–19, 1983.^{Footnote 48}

Recent developments in public opinion polling and mass media analysis were also inputs to Chase’s thinking. Chase advocated the study of opinion polls from well-known pollsters such as Yankelovich, Skelly & White, and Cambridge Survey Reports as well as think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; surveys of “opinion leaders” based on studies by Everett M. Rogers and Paul Lazarsfeld; media content analysis using methods advocated by W. J. Paisley; and legislative trend and voter behavior analysis via the views of V. O. Key.^{Footnote 49} Here, Chase drew on the postwar tendency to “scientize” public relations and the management of public opinion. G. Edward Pendray, owner of an eponymous PR firm and founder of the American Rocket Society, had decades earlier proposed the application of semantics, social psychology, and social physics to PR.^{Footnote 50} These principles were applied by major public relations firms such as Hill & Knowlton. During labor negotiations in the steel industry in 1959, Hill & Knowlton used semantic and psychological tactics to influence steelworkers and sway public opinion.^{Footnote 51}

One major object of this research was to analyze and ultimately neutralize public policy influence by “activists.” Public interest groups (pressure groups, reformists) such as environmental activists were the clear antagonists and obstacles to corporate affairs, and PR actors spilled considerable ink searching for ways to deal with the challenge. In a lengthy review of research on environmental public relations conducted for the Foundation for PR Research and Education in 1977, the public relations theorist James Grunig noted that activists ought to form a key “public” for corporate communicators to engage with:

Similar concerns were voiced within firms, which created charts and offered case studies to define environmental group actions. Public relations counselors carefully tracked initiatives such as the National Coal Policy Project (NCPP), which employed a “consensus” approach to resolving environmental issue management, and subsequently promoted them to colleagues and clients.^{Footnote 53} The NCPP forum adopted a “rule of reason” negotiation method, developed by corporate attorney Milton Wessel, which advocated that corporations take rational control of antagonistic situations in order to sidestep government intervention and legislation.^{Footnote 54} Wessel, general counsel of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, had already worked closely with Dow Chemical on a series of arbitrations and was therefore familiar with the framing tactics used by environmental groups. Notably, Wessel was a staunch advocate of the concept of risk–benefit analysis, a theme he explored in detail in his 1980 book, Science and Conscience. ^{Footnote 55} Risk–benefit analysis, as the environmental historian Joe Greene Conley II has documented, was a core strategy by corporations to narrow and weaken environmental politics by forcing cost-centered analyses of pollution control.^{Footnote 56}

In some cases, the goal was not only to define but also to discredit the claims of activists. A 1978 PR Journal opinion piece by an electric utility company manager about antinuclear activists supports harsh tactics:

If the ostensible aim of these publications was to assist corporate managers in understanding the need for action around environmental issues, the actual effect was to reinforce the “us versus them” perspective begun with the public relations around Carson’s Silent Spring (Table 1). Environmental groups were “perceived as representing the public interest,” and this was a threat to corporate business as usual. Beginning in 1978, the Foundation for Public Affairs began publishing a periodic review entitled Public Interest Profiles, which identified and described prominent activist groups in environmental arenas (among others).^{Footnote 58} For Chase and other management thinkers, activist groups were leading the charge in defining public problems and pressuring governments to take action. Companies needed to move from accommodating activist pressures and public controls to anticipating and shaping them. “Politically astute activists demand that business leaders change the way they do business. In the face of such challenges, a CEO is left with two choices: Inaction or action. If he doesn’t act, his adversaries will. And then he will be defending himself on their turf, not his.”^{Footnote 59}

Table 1 Comparison of factors affecting environmental communication

Source: Adapted from Harrison, Environmental Communication, 163.

Issue management—the anticipation and control of an issue before it becomes a legislative problem—offered a pathway for companies to move the action onto their turf. Management journals began to describe a “life cycle” for public issues according to which an issue moves from social concerns to social controls through the medium of government regulation (Table 2). The goal of issue management (if the issue was not in the company’s interests) was to head off the issue before it became a matter of policy. As a General Electric manager explained the cycle: “The societal expectations of yesterday become the political issue of today, and the legislative requirement of tomorrow, and the litigated penalties of the day after.”^{Footnote 60}

Table 2 The life cycle of an environmental issue

Note: A General Motors’ executive’s depiction of the life cycle of two issues: environmental protection and energy conservation.

Source: Adapted from Marx, “Integrating Public Affairs,” 145. See also Marx, “Social Legitimacy.”

As professor of Management Thomas Marx put it,

In the next section I describe how corporate PR counselors succeeded in taking control of the environmental issue by framing corporate responses to environmentalism in terms of existing cultural structures in the post-Watergate era: transparency, public participation, and the public interest.^{Footnote 62} This cultural alignment contributed to renewed confidence in private companies as stewards of environmental protection.

The Environment Anticipated, 1986–1991

The Watergate scandal was a point of inflection for the public relations industry. Increasing public scrutiny in the mid-1970s, as well as congressional reforms distributing power among subcommittees, made old-style centralized lobbying ineffective.^{Footnote 63} For many PR firms, the solution was to gain distance—at least in appearance—from lobbying activities. As managerial elites began to consider a stronger role in public policy making, business groups sought more, not less, access to Washington corridors.

In this context, some corporate communicators proceeded to make two structural changes that would have major impacts on both the PR industry and on environmental regulation. First, PR firms and companies began to employ well-connected lobbyists to operate from within their firms.^{Footnote 64} Traditionally, the tasks of negotiating with power brokers in Congress (“government relations”) and appealing to audiences in state and local arenas to gain support for a policy position (“public relations”) were discrete functions carried out by separate and not necessarily related authorities. Companies integrated the two types of advocacy, either by assembling an in-house public affairs team or by working with external PR/public affairs firms (some of which were staffed with former employees). By connecting government relations with public relations, the effect was to dramatically increase the channels of communication of an issue, so that constituents “back home” effectively joined Washington negotiators in lobbying around questions of public policy.^{Footnote 65} This allowed contentious industry players to “decentralize” their efforts, impacting municipal or state populations instead of just on Capitol Hill. For example, in the 1980s, the tobacco industry encouraged states to adopt laws that preempted cities from approving antismoking ordinances. This strategy not only projected the idea of a tobacco industry supportive of new regulation but also “shifted the battle from the halls of Congress to states and cities,” as the Washington Post observed.^{Footnote 66}

A second change was both structural and conceptual. Increasingly, articles about corporate political involvement characterized companies as “activists” in their own right.^{Footnote 67} Writing in the California Management Review, Business professor Prakash Sethi described an evolutionary process by which companies became “activist” organizations to influence public policy. Companies were moving from (1) a defensive, adversarial mode devoted to maintaining the status quo, past (2) an accommodative mode engaged in short-term campaigns in response to external factors, into (3) a stage of “positive activism.” The positive activism mode involved long-term strategic planning “on the basis of a normative concept of ‘public interest’ and ‘policy agenda’ supported by the corporation.” In this mode, senior management moved from “informal and secretive lobbying of key legislators” to “speaking out on public issues and offering advice and assistance to executive and legislative branches [of Congress]”; from noncontroversial community affairs and corporate contributions to the “development of new groups … in support of a national policy agenda”; and from resistance to other groups’ viewpoints to “emphasis on the development of third sector as bulwark against increasing government encroachment in the social arena” as well as public communications and education to advocate for specific policies and programs.^{Footnote 68}

“The essence of corporate political activism,” Sethi concluded, “is for the corporation to develop a cogent view of the public interest and, then, political positions and strategies that embody this notion.”^{Footnote 69} Corporate communicators helped their clients become “activists” by adopting not only the title but also the techniques of public interest groups. This approach caused the director of one of Ralph Nader’s research groups to complain to the National Journal, “[Business coalitions] have taken the techniques, such as working with the press and grass roots, that we’ve been successful with, but they do it better because they have more money and manpower.”^{Footnote 70}

In the environmental arena, the role of corporations as “activist” organizations was crystallized in the preparations for the United Nations Conference and Environment and Development (UNCED, or “Earth Summit”) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. With the support of Maurice Strong, secretary-general for the UNCED, the Business Council on Sustainable Development was formed, and a coordinated network of business organizations assembled to prepare a series of publications, codes of conduct, and a Business Charter for proactive environmental management.^{Footnote 71} These guidelines for the management and communication of corporate environmental principles were formalized and coordinated at the World Industry Conference on Environmental Management in Rotterdam in 1991 and fed back to the UNCED organizers.^{Footnote 72} By the time of the conference in 1992, the business sector had not only crafted a tightly organized and coherent response to the environmental issues but also had participated in creating them.

One public relations counselor who had been part of the UNCED preparations described the outcome of UNCED as a turning point for “corporate environmental activism,” explaining that while companies have been practicing “corporate green reactivity” for some time—such as pollution prevention and partnerships with activist groups— proactive measures “seek to institutionalize contact and cooperation among industry, activists, government agencies and other groups.”^{Footnote 73}

Three of the most prominent proactive measures around environmental issues were grassroots public relations, issue coalitions, and educational initiatives. Each of these tactics borrowed from the activist repertoire, adapting established norms of dialogue and deliberation to corporate communication. Grassroots public relations, or “the art of advocacy stimulation to affect public policy,” was especially popular in the environmental arena.^{Footnote 74} PR counselors saw grassroots communications as the means of aligning public and private interests:

An example provided in the article quoted above dealt with CAFE standards. During the energy crisis in 1975, Congress passed the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) law to regulate auto emissions standards. The law would have the greatest effect on heavy and large motorized vehicles. In the mid-1980s, authority to adjust emissions standards resided with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Corporate leaders therefore focused their attention on convincing the NHTSA to relax the standards. On behalf of the Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association, the environmental public relations counselor E. Bruce Harrison formed a group called the Coalition for Vehicle Choice (CVC) to reframe the debate from one of fuel efficiency to one of consumer preferences. In 1986, the American public, it seemed, wanted larger, gas-guzzling cars. The CVC was funded by large auto manufacturers: General Motors, Chrysler, and the Ford Motor Company.^{Footnote 76} Harrison’s consumer polling revealed that framing the CAFE law in terms of a restriction on consumers’ right to drive any car they wanted would sway public opinion. In addition, as Harrison explained,

The result: after six months of an intensive media and grassroots campaign, the NHTSA voted to lower the emissions standards.

Coalitions were another important tactic to influence public policy. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, forward-looking companies had begun to use coalitions to their advantage in multiple policy matters. In 1980, an article in the National Journal listed fifty-nine legislative strategy coalitions in which the Chamber of Commerce actively participated, of which twelve addressed environmental issues.^{Footnote 78} In 1973 the E. Bruce Harrison public relations firm—the first to specialize in environmental public relations—created a coalition called the National Environmental Development Association (NEDA), made up of contractors, shipping operators, labor unions, “and other interests opposed to some kind of environmental control.”^{Footnote 79} NEDA quickly became an umbrella organization of single-issue coalitions organized around specific U.S. environmental bills, including NEDA/Clean Air Act Project, assembled in 1973 to counter the effects of the 1970 Clean Air Act; NEDA/Clean Water Project, also put together in 1973 to manage industry interests against the 1972 Water Pollution Control Act; and NEDA/RCRA, mobilized in the mid-1980s against the pollution limitations established by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976.

A third tactic lay in educational initiatives. The publication of Managing Environmental Issues: A Casebook by three management professors in 1992 was a curriculum-building effort for business schools.^{Footnote 80} Sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation’s Corporate Conservation Council—comprising business leaders mainly from the chemical and petroleum industries—the casebook was meant to “begin the process of correcting the mythology that ‘business as usual’ can be conducted without attention to environmental performance.”^{Footnote 81} At the same time, the book was clear that “public policy and economics provide an analytical alternative to the environmentalists’ perspective” and that “rather than limits to growth, the emphasis is on the role of human ingenuity in overcoming these limits. … The public policy and economic approaches intend to introduce a sense of realism into the debate about environmental protection.”^{Footnote 82}

Companies in the chemical, automotive and oil industries—that is, those whose fortunes stood to be most affected by environmental regulations—appear to have taken issue management the most seriously. Monsanto, Gulf Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Sun Company, Dow Chemical, and General Motors all adopted or developed schemes of public affairs management between 1971 and the early 1980s.^{Footnote 83} Royal Dutch/Shell may have been the earliest adopter with its program of scenario planning, a set of techniques inspired by physicist Herman Kahn’s pioneering work on forecasting for the RAND Corporation. Shell compiled lists of potential “uncertainties” facing the company; that is, a cultural scan of the domestic and international horizon to complement its already existing “hard” economic and energy supply data. It then established a series of possible “futures,” or scenarios, that the company narrative could follow should the issue rise to the top of the public or political agenda.^{Footnote 84}

Corporate political activism was so successful that PR men claimed there was less and less difference between what businesses did and what activists did: “Having accepted the enduring power of the environmental consciousness and acquired wisdom during the expenditure of billions of compliance dollars, industry has begun to get ahead of the curve. Corporations have not only become activists, they have begun to define what activism means.”^{Footnote 85} It was not so much co-optation as it was a matter of redefining the public interest to suit the corporate interest, since by this point corporate leaders had decided that “business management is primarily responsible for the way the environment as an issue is perceived and the way it was handled.”^{Footnote 86}