Melissa Aronczyk on the History of Greenwashing

She's a media studies scholar at Rutgers University. Her new book, A Strategic Nature is one of the best most helpful things I've read on how our understanding of the environment evolved in the US, how environmental communications in particular evolved, and what that all has to do with where we're at now on the climate crisis in particular, Melissa spent in particular Ironchik spent a large amount of time with one of our mad Men from season three E Bruce Harrison.

In the last couple of years of his life. Harrison died earlier this year, in January twenty twenty one, and Aronchik spent and Ironchick was probably the last person to talk to him in depth about his contributions to Climate Spin, about his contributions to how we think and talk about climate change. We get into all of that and a whole lot more in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. That's coming up after this quick break, Melissa, thanks for

talking to me today. I'm super excited to dig into everything about this book, but I wanted to start with asking you what prompted you to start researching and writing this book in the first place.

I mean, it's a landmark book for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons was how it spoke to a public that had not previously really thought about the environment at all. So before the book itself came out, there were excerpts of the book that appeared in the New Yorker magazine, and that meant a very different readership was exposed to the ideas in Rachel Carson's book. And that story that she told was an absolutely terrifying story.

Silent Spring was about a landscape destroyed by pesticides where nothing more could grow or thrive, no more birds, hence the title of the book, No more Sounds in the Spring. So Carson was an amazing storyteller and she reached a lot of people. But of course she was not just

an amazing storyteller. She worked with the Department of Fish and Wildlife for the federal government, and she was able in her book to show how government agencies were colluding with the irresponsibility of the chemical industry and with academic scientists to hide some of the really terrifying stories about environmental destruction. So what Carson's book did was create a public.

It created a public that cared about the environment and that could then identify the environment as a precious set of resources of land and air and water that we needed to protect.

their interaction. And to avoid the mystery, I'll tell you the ending right now, which is Gifford Pinchot and the government. One. Gifford Pinchot was considered America's first forester in the sense of somebody who was professionally trained to manage forest, to manage nature in the United States, and that's really important because it introduces the idea that nature is something that should be managed. Many people have heard of John Muir.

John Mure is considered in a way America's first naturalist, first environmentalist, even though the word the environment was not used at this time in history. But John Muir made preserving the natural environment his life's work, so we could if we had to distill Muir's vision of nature and Pinchot's vision of nature, we would say that Muir was interested in the preservation of the natural environment, or the preservationist movement as it's come to be known, and Pinchot

was invested in the idea of conservation of nature. And those two terms, if you read about them now, people tend to mush them together or they're sometimes used to synonyms. But if we think about it, in that time period, preservationism what Mures stood for, was really about protecting the

natural environment. That meant creating parkland, creating forests, or protecting forests and having boundaries drawn around them so that they were owned by the federal government and could not be used for any private purpose, and that you couldn't cut down the trees, you couldn't use the water for anything but the enjoyment of nature, Whereas for different Pinchot, natural

resources were just that resources. It was lumber that Americans needed for development, it was water that maybe needed for serving cities that didn't have enough natural water resources. And there was an economic benefit to protecting forests, but you had to protect them for the service of American enterprise in the American economy. So those were the two really

different points of view. So one of the ways that Gifford Pinchot's vision of conservation ended up winning out was that Pincho worked in the federal government with Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt knew John Muir as well, But I don't think John Muir was ever taken quite as seriously. He was not a bureaucrat by any stretch of the imagination.

He was an outdoor wilderness explorer. He you know, he was very poetic and lyrical, and he attempted to use pr in his way to get Americans to understand the value of nature. But the team of Gifford Pinchow as chief forester in the federal government and Theodore Roosevelt would end up dominating and defining what the public interest was

when it came to the environment. Another way we could say that is it was John Muir who captured Roosevelt's imagination about the value of nature, but it was Gifford Pinchot who would ultimately win Theodore Roosevelt's favor when it came to national policy for the forests. And that just came down to, you know, Pincho's vision for forests was much more practical. It was more so to speak, scientific,

and it was easier to manage. And this word management keeps coming back because it was really how the federal government came to understand what nature was for It was a resource to be managed. It was not something just beautiful out there that we should leave alone. It's really important to just mention that neither John Muir's nor Gifford Pinchot's visions included the indigenous people who were living on

this land long before either of them came along. And that's that entire story of what the indigenous people's on the land did with nature, how they viewed nature, their relationship with nature, that was completely ignored in this American story. One other really important feature to mention with Pinchot's vision and why it went out, was that he was an absolute expert in managing not just natural resources, but also

managing publics. From the very beginning of his life as a professional forester, Pinchot was constantly promoting himself and his work. He was very aware of the value of public support for his vision of forestry, and he used every means at his disposal to accomplish that. He wrote textbooks that he expected would be to from kindergarten on up about forestry, and indeed they were. There were thousands of copies of

his book sold. He created what we would today call I guess press events, you know pr events, sometimes with Teddy Roosevelt, where he would be sure to invite all of the news media of the time to cover the event when he appeared to announce a new policy or in front of an important natural resource. And he also made very close behind the scenes connections with lumber operators and others who would then of course end up supporting Pinchot whenever he wanted a new policy to be put forward.

He was so effective at managing public opinion and at controlling what kinds of information went out to the public. That he actually got investigated by the federal government at one point because they were concerned that he was spending too much time and too much of his per So now we're devoted to just publicity and not to the actual task of managing forestry. So Pinchell was, you know, and he was very He very handily got out of that investigation and managed to show that what he was

doing was absolutely in the public interest. So part of that was that he was able to show us that forestry was a public matter and that that particular vision of forestry as a resource to be managed was the way to think about nature.

these were mainly in heavy industry. These were in rail, in steel, and in coal, and these industries relied on the favors of the government to achieve their size and their power. So as we know now, of course, those

industries were also terrible for the environment. And we also know that back in that era and what we call the progressive era, Americans were becoming increasingly worried over the size and power of corporations, and so we could think about how public relations was essentially designed to reassure Americans that these companies were good citizens and that their vision of how to use the environment as a resource was

the right vision. I really like the quote or the concept that the historian Roland Marshall uses where he says that pr was charged with a mission to invest corporations with a soul. That's really key, I think to understanding how that vision of nature and of the environment as something for people to use and not something to be protected came to be so popular.

brought welfare and employee health programs. They helped to create entire urban centers and areas with their infrastructure. So in the progressive era, when questions started to be asked about whether the size and power that corporate leaders had was really such a good thing, public relations was born essentially to restore that personhood to companies that they had enjoyed in the nineteenth century.

the very first regulations on industry in the US. So they go fairly quickly from being revered and also kind of being able to do whatever they want to being criticized, held up to scrutiny, and expected to actually act on behalf of the public. So it seems like pr is a handy tool helped to shape the public's ideas in a way that will help industry do what it wants to do.

to restore relationships with the public. Exactly as the term suggests, and that is that cycle has happened again in the nineteen sixties when the environmental movements started to really gain steam and all kinds of government regulations were passed to protect the environment. In this moment of awareness that these companies were maybe not so great after all, really not

so committed to the well being of all Americans. Once again, public relations was brought in in the early seventies to restore the balance, so to speak, to bring corporate leaders, captains of industry back up onto the prows of their ship. And yeah, yeah, right.

and calling for reform. This prompts often a groundswell of reform and outrage by publics well deserved outrage, and then once we will not at all be surprised to see PR come onto the scene once again and restore the balance we already see it in terms of big tech companies, where these companies do things like censor the worst kinds of misinformation on their plots forms, or say they're actually working to help solve the problem, or partner with journalists

and organizations to help promote certain kinds of information. Those are all really important PR maneuvers by those firms.

long list. So the list includes public utilities, banks, shipping coal, oil metals, sugar, tobacco, meat packing, breakfast, cereals, soap, cement, rubber, and chemicals, in addition to major organizations like foundations, universities, and charities. So that's I don't think too many pr

people could claim that many kinds of clients. What I really did was also found and advised trade associations, and that was key to his success as well, because trade associations are responsible for maintaining standards for the industries they represent. They interpret what government regulators say companies can and cannot do.

So if you represent clients in the railway industry and then you create the trade association that enforces the rules for the railway industry, well your clients will be pretty pleased with you, say the least Lee. At the beginning of his career, nearly all of Lee's clients fit into two categories public utilities, which was railroads, electricity companies, public transit. But also then the energy and infrastructure required to support

those public utilities. So, as you said, the coal mine operators, the shippers, and the steelmakers. And what Lee managed to do was to promote this idea that we rely on energy and its infrastructure and we cannot live without it. That's such an important idea that is still the kind of conversation we're having today when we talk about alternative energy. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that what Ivy Le did for the railway companies is the same.

He created a playbook that we are still using today, or that public relations people and company leaders are still using today when they try to promote oil as an ongoing energy source. So in Lee's time, in the early twentieth century, there was, as I said earlier, there was national concern over the abuses of power by monopoly interests, and there were a lot of calls for reform, and public utilities were not exempt from those calls for reform.

There were a lot of campaigns calling for government ownership of the companies and the land that they occupied. And so what Ivy Lee came up with, the idea he came up with was to show that industrial power was directly serving the public interest. And we can look at a couple of events in particular to show how he did this. One was in nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen, Ivy Lee was trying to support the railroads as they called for a freight rate increase, so as you can imagine,

that was not very popular at that time. Now, Ivyley had been publicity expert for the Pennsylvania Railroad since nineteen oh six, and he had worked on several other railroad accounts as well, and he also helped found and advise the Association of Railroad Executives and the Bureau of Railroad Economics. So Ivyley had this idea. When the freight rate increase was proposed, of course, there was public outcry. You know, we're talking about regulating these industries, not about giving them

more money. What he did was to turn the railways into an information machine. In other words, rather than hiding behind their corporate leader or just saying nothing when there was a public out cry, Ivy Lee created public support for the railways by having the railways come out in front and communicate with all of the reasons that they could come up with to support them. So Lee placed ads in trade journals, he issued circulars and pamphlets. That

was the usual stuff. But then he also created events where journalists were invited and railroad executives would be there to give exclusive interviews about what they were trying to do and why. Lee and his team also wrote news editorials and articles giving reasons for the proposed rate hike, and they placed those news editorials and articles in both the large metropolitan dailies and also in smaller local publications. They reached somewhere in the vicinity of twenty two thousand

news outlets with that work. Lee was, however, not satisfied with just putting information into the newspapers, so he ended up writing and mailing personal letters directly to the people that he called leaders of opinion. That included congressmen and state legislators. It included mayors, It included college presidents, economists, bankers, and clergymen, among others. Finally, to reach everyday passengers, he put bulletins in railway stations and left information folders in

passenger railway cars. So one of the things we need to understand here in terms of how successful this campaign was, was that ivyly wanted ordinary individuals to feel connected to the larger issues that were being lobbied in Congress, and by reaching out to them by putting bulletins in the railway stations and newsletters in the train cars, he managed to convince those people to also then become part of the public that had to say in what kinds of

decisions got made in Washington. So while Thee's campaign was organizing meetings with you know, special audiences, he was also trying to get a letter writing campaign going by ordinary, everyday individuals, people who just rode the rails to get where they were trying to go. And once you had that kind of public support behind a campaign, it became really hard to justify turning it down once it got

into Congress. So those letters of support, you know, and of course, being Ivy Lee, not only did he get people to write letters of support, he then obtained copies of those letters of support and reprinted them in the media. So what ivy Le did was create and coordinate an unbelievably unified campaign through the railways pushing through the freight rate hike as something that the public absolutely wanted.

all kinds of industries. I dare say as many kinds of industries as ivy Le did, actually, although it's much much less well known and Ebrews Harrison was also he was just incredibly charming. The charisma of this individual I think was in a way at the heart or the secret to his success, because he was so good at talking to absolutely everyone. He always made you feel like he was really listening to you. He really took you seriously, he was very grateful for the time you spent with him,

and he was just so charming. And I really do think there's a lot to be said about how public

relations people. The most successful public relations people are people who fit that persona So depending on who you talk to, Ebrewce Harrison is either considered the founder of environmental PR or the founder of anti environmental pr and you know, you pick depending on what side you're on, essentially, but either way, I think the signature move of Ebruce Harrison was to give companies, especially the most environmentally contentious companies,

a language and a voice to speak about the environment and be taken seriously by their publics. His nineteen ninety two book Going Green kind of says it all. The subtitle of the book is how to Communicate your Company's environmental commitment, And that was precisely what E. Bruce Harrison did throughout his career. And the key was that he

looked at how companies could communicate an environmental commitment. They were not necessarily walking the talk, they were not necessarily enforcing behaviors or changing their production style to demonstrate an environmental commitment, but they got really good at communicating their environmental commitment.

This organization or coalition sat on. NITA was a coalition of a number of industry groups and labor groups that were trying in the nineteen seventies to mitigate or soften federal environmental restrictions. And when Bruce Harrison founded his own public relations firm in nineteen seventy three called the Bruce

Harrison Company, NIDA was its first client. So again you have to really admire a person who starts his own agency with a client that he has created himself, which was a coalition of people, you know, companies, that he had worked with previously, Companies that were involved in the Chemical Manufacturers Association where he had begun his public relations career. Companies that were connected in some way to people he

had met while working on the hill. So this was a kind of insider group, and the group grew quite a bit over the years. Over the next twenty to thirty years. Under this umbrella coalition of MEEDA were single issue groups, and by single issue groups, I mean groups that were organized around a specific piece of environmental legislation that they wanted to chip away at. So you had the NEDA Clean Air Act project, and you had the

need a Clean Water Act coalition, and so on. There there were I think six or seven MEEDA coalitions that ended up being developed, and each of these smaller coal did a number of things. They would initially identify the problems that the company members had with that piece of legislation.

You know, what aspects of the legislation were harming corporate profits, what aspects were problematic in other ways in terms of requiring reporting from these companies or costing them additional you know, they had to pay extra to kind of change something about their production process, and so on. The second thing that this coalition would then do would be to identify and contact the local industry or labor congressional representatives in

their home states. Then they would try to reach executive agency officials at the federal and state levels who were responsible for administering that piece of legislation. Next came the press offensive, the publications that would be distributed, the information fact sheets, the lobbying points. But in addition to media relations, a really important feature of what NITA did was grassroots

lobbying grassroots communications. I don't think it's fair to say that Bruce Harrison created the idea of grassroots communication, but he certainly expanded and developed it in a very important way. So what his coalition members would do would would be to talk to these representatives on the ground in their local among their local constituencies, and make sure that these local constituents understood the value of voting against the legislation or voting to soften the legislation in some way to

profit the companies that were operating in those jurisdictions. And it was it was enormously effective. I mean, there are so many documents that I have, you know, piles all over my library at home, of the test simony that they delivered the papers that they authored, you know, the white papers, the way they got their messages into the media, the spokespeople that they worked with who carried the messages

and wrote off eds. So it was a very modern day Ivy League kind of process where it was made very clear to all kinds of publics and stakeholders why they should support softening the environmental legislation. I think it would be unfair to say, you know, he invented the idea of corporate social responsibility. That would be a little too much. But what we can say is that he did invent the idea of sustainable communication, which was again so genius when you think about it, because what a

sustainable communication means. It means communicating in such a way as to maintain sustainable relationships with the people that matter, the people who are going to vote for you, or the people who are going to support whatever it is your clients are doing. It does not mean sustainable practices or behaviors to protect the environment. So Bruce Harrison pioneered this idea of sustainable communication and used every means at his disposal to enforce that that was what companies needed

to do to convey their environmental commitment. What we see today with all kinds of campaigns by some of even the very worst environmental offenders, you know, the exonmobiles of the world is all about sustainability communication. And I do think it's fair in that case to say that Bruce Harrison was the pioneer in that universe of communicating sustainably.

license is a better way putting. His firm would license the rights to use his sustainable communications strategies in whatever country they were located, and he was working with countries Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and he also had franchises in Mexico. He was working with He was really everywhere, So that's important to know because he already had a network of companies and clients in Europe who supported the environmental communications strategies

that he was working with. So he was invited as communications council to the CEOs who were participating at that Earth Summit in Rio in nineteen ninety two, and it was at the events run by business surrounding that conference, of which there were many, that he presented his paper on the concept of sustainable communication, and he had very willing ears of all the CEOs from all over the

world who were interested in this idea. He was also chairman of the International Public Relations Association at that time, and the International Public Relations Association was also holding events around the Earth Summit. The environment was a very very hot topic at that time, of real concern to corporate leaders, and I think it's also really important to remember that Maurice Strong, who was the organizer of that United Nations conference,

was committed to having business participate in the conference. Maurice Strong was quite compelled or convinced by the idea that if you did not have business as a key stakeholder in these conversations about sustainable development, that you would never be able to enforce it. You needed to have business at the table and in agreement, and that aspect ended up. I mean, there's a lot of books written about how problematic that was, how it ended up creating a real

compromise in terms of what environmentalism could be. Because you had to have business buy in. It meant for some people that the entire conference ended up being a bit of a sham, or as kind of very watered down

version of what it could have been. But the point is that because business communities had been invited to the conference, and because they knew that their buying was so important, they planned extensively in the lead up to the conference to be able to present what they called their own Sustainable Development Charter, a kind of again non binding, non not legal document, but a kind of voluntary self regulating document with a set of rules that business agreed to

operate by when it came to environmental sustainability. And as you can imagine, this charter was you know, it did not contain anything that would have really transformed how companies did business. It was a very business as usual document, but it paid a lot of lip service to the idea of going green, being sustainable, being very concerned about

the environment. And because they got out in front of the actual the other the actual conference and the other types of events that were being designed, they were really able to put that document forward and stave off other kinds of more binding legislation or more draconian regulations that would have caused problems for these companies' profits.

this environmental importance until Carson's book came out. But the book came out maybe fifteen months later, so very shortly after Harrison arrives at the Manufacturing Chemists Association, Rachel Carson's book appears, and Chaos and zus and people are extremely concerned about the environment, and they're especially concerned about pesticides, which was the focus of Rachel Carson's book. So the Manufacturing Chemist Association was absolutely caught off guard when that happened.

They did not see that coming and it was an utter disaster, as you can imagine for their trade association. So it's at that moment that Harrison is appointed the Environmental Information Manager and sort of given a team of other PR people who worked at companies like DuPont, Dell, Monsanto, and Shell and told you designed the PR response to Rachel Carson, this is a disaster, and you guys head up the PR response to fix it. And as you said, Amy,

it did not work. It just didn't work. They tried absolutely everything to discredit Rachel Carson herself, to discredit the findings in the book, to discredit all of the scientific evidence and her role as a scientist. And it failed, and it partly failed because of this momentum that had been building up. It's not as though Rachel Carson's book dropped out of nowhere. There had been increasingly throughout the nineteen fifties concerns about industry science. There had been concerns

about pollution. There were growing cases of pollution and smog and cities. But the book really did catalyze this movement, and when Harrison tried to offset that momentum, he was

not successful. So what did Harrison learn? I think from that time He spoke with me at great length about that moment as being a defining moment, because he felt that the big mistake had been not understanding how to communicate with the public, to convey a sense of compromise and a sense of consensus among all of the interested parties. If you just try to discredit existing knowledge by saying

it's wrong, you'll meet with a lot of resistance. You're essentially saying to people you don't know what you're talking about, or your beliefs that your ideas, your understanding is not valid, and that's no way to get people to listen to you. So what Harrison understood and what ended up defining the rest of his career was in developing public relations strategies

where consensus was the order of the day. It was always about the spirit of compromise that required everyone having a voice, everyone sitting at the table to discuss environmental problems. And for Harrison that included his clients. His clients deserved, in his eyes, a voice at the table. And to me,

that's one of the biggest liabilities. That's essentially the beginning of the end as far as environmental policy in the United States is concerned, because what you have if you always have business voices at the table, is a sense of the self interest of business, which is always going to be at odds with the need to protect the environment.

humans and sort of our relationship really kind of went off the rails in a way that you could see sort of leading to the impact that we're at on climate right now.

what that was for them. But I think also a really important argument that we try to make in the book is that the origins of the public relations industry in the United States is connected to environmental problems, because it was right around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century that we saw companies realizing that they had a problem, and that problem was often about having the people and their communities where they were operating being

uncomfortable with the size of the companies or the impact these companies were having on reorganizing the community or the land they were taking up. There was no we say at the beginning of the book, you know, there was no such thing as an environmental problem in those days. Of course that isn't true, but what we mean is there was no conception of the environment as something in

need of protection. So there were just individual sets of problems connected to nature, but most of those problems were eliminated in the name of, for instance, manifest destiny, that you know, it's right and normal for humans to extend their power over wider and wider swaths of land, and that the waterways were about forging trade routes. You know, there was no sense, of course at that time, that these were resources in need of protection in some way.

That would only come much much later, really, with the environmental movement in the sixties and the problems then that started to surface in the sixties, and the ways that companies were taken to task then was really, i would say, the first time that people actually conceptualized nature as something that was scarce and something that was very limited and something that could be degraded. Or eroded in the need

of protection. And it was then that companies were situated more as the enemies of that desire to protect nature, that they were really actively destroying nature, and that people needed to do something to fight back. And I would say that moment was, in a way the beginning of it was the beginning of a real sense of us in them in environmental politics, and as we now know that us in them has been very entrenched in our thinking about the environment and environmental protection. Uptil now.

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