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Speaker 2: on Disney Plas. Rady BG thirteen, Welcome back to Drilled.
Speaker 1: I'm Amy Westerveldt. We've covered a lot about propaganda and
Speaker 1: disinformation in this podcast over the years. Today, I'm pleased
Speaker 1: to bring you an extended conversation with someone I have
Speaker 1: gone to multiple times for information on this subject, Melissa Ron.
Speaker 1: She's a media studies scholar at Rutgers University. Her new book,
Speaker 1: A Strategic Nature is one of the best most helpful
Speaker 1: things I've read on how our understanding of the environment
Speaker 1: evolved in the US, how environmental communications in particular evolved,
Speaker 1: and what that all has to do with where we're
Speaker 1: at now on the climate crisis in particular, Melissa spent
Speaker 1: in particular Ironchik spent a large amount of time with
Speaker 1: one of our mad Men from season three E Bruce Harrison.
Speaker 1: In the last couple of years of his life. Harrison
Speaker 1: died earlier this year, in January twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 1: Aronchik spent and Ironchick was probably the last person to
Speaker 1: talk to him in depth about his contributions to Climate Spin,
Speaker 1: about his contributions to how we think and talk about
Speaker 1: climate change. We get into all of that and a
Speaker 1: whole lot more in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1: That's coming up after this quick break, Melissa, thanks for
Speaker 1: talking to me today. I'm super excited to dig into
Speaker 1: everything about this book, but I wanted to start with
Speaker 1: asking you what prompted you to start researching and writing
Speaker 1: this book in the first place.
Speaker 4: I was thinking that the only way to understand the
Speaker 4: role of the environment in our lives is to understand
Speaker 4: how something called the environment has been invented and communicated
Speaker 4: to us throughout history. So the actual concept of the
Speaker 4: environment as a social problem or as a moral problem
Speaker 4: would not really come out until the nineteen sixties. And
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people know this story, the
Speaker 4: story of the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's a landmark book for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 4: but one of the big reasons was how it spoke
Speaker 4: to a public that had not previously really thought about
Speaker 4: the environment at all. So before the book itself came out,
Speaker 4: there were excerpts of the book that appeared in the
Speaker 4: New Yorker magazine, and that meant a very different readership
Speaker 4: was exposed to the ideas in Rachel Carson's book. And
Speaker 4: that story that she told was an absolutely terrifying story.
Speaker 4: Silent Spring was about a landscape destroyed by pesticides where
Speaker 4: nothing more could grow or thrive, no more birds, hence
Speaker 4: the title of the book, No more Sounds in the Spring.
Speaker 4: So Carson was an amazing storyteller and she reached a
Speaker 4: lot of people. But of course she was not just
Speaker 4: an amazing storyteller. She worked with the Department of Fish
Speaker 4: and Wildlife for the federal government, and she was able
Speaker 4: in her book to show how government agencies were colluding
Speaker 4: with the irresponsibility of the chemical industry and with academic
Speaker 4: scientists to hide some of the really terrifying stories about
Speaker 4: environmental destruction. So what Carson's book did was create a public.
Speaker 4: It created a public that cared about the environment and
Speaker 4: that could then identify the environment as a precious set
Speaker 4: of resources of land and air and water that we
Speaker 4: needed to protect.
Speaker 1: You tell this story in the early chapters of your
Speaker 1: book about these kind of two flavors of understanding nature
Speaker 1: and the environment that started to emerge the end of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century in the US, and that really kind
Speaker 1: of went on to define how we think about nature
Speaker 1: and the environment, mostly down to the ideas of two men,
Speaker 1: John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. I want to have you
Speaker 1: summarize that history for us here.
Speaker 4: So essentially, if we want to look at the beginning
Speaker 4: of a twentieth century national awareness about the need to
Speaker 4: protect the natural environment, we have to look at the
Speaker 4: naturalist John Muir and the forester Gifford Pinchot. And we
Speaker 4: especially have to look at how they interacted, because each
Speaker 4: of them came to stand for a very different idea
Speaker 4: of what nature and forests in the environment meant in
Speaker 4: the United States. And we also need to look at
Speaker 4: who the winner was or what the outcome was of
Speaker 4: their interaction. And to avoid the mystery, I'll tell you
Speaker 4: the ending right now, which is Gifford Pinchot and the government. One.
Speaker 4: Gifford Pinchot was considered America's first forester in the sense
Speaker 4: of somebody who was professionally trained to manage forest, to
Speaker 4: manage nature in the United States, and that's really important
Speaker 4: because it introduces the idea that nature is something that
Speaker 4: should be managed. Many people have heard of John Muir.
Speaker 4: John Mure is considered in a way America's first naturalist,
Speaker 4: first environmentalist, even though the word the environment was not
Speaker 4: used at this time in history. But John Muir made
Speaker 4: preserving the natural environment his life's work, so we could
Speaker 4: if we had to distill Muir's vision of nature and
Speaker 4: Pinchot's vision of nature, we would say that Muir was
Speaker 4: interested in the preservation of the natural environment, or the
Speaker 4: preservationist movement as it's come to be known, and Pinchot
Speaker 4: was invested in the idea of conservation of nature. And
Speaker 4: those two terms, if you read about them now, people
Speaker 4: tend to mush them together or they're sometimes used to synonyms.
Speaker 4: But if we think about it, in that time period,
Speaker 4: preservationism what Mures stood for, was really about protecting the
Speaker 4: natural environment. That meant creating parkland, creating forests, or protecting
Speaker 4: forests and having boundaries drawn around them so that they
Speaker 4: were owned by the federal government and could not be
Speaker 4: used for any private purpose, and that you couldn't cut
Speaker 4: down the trees, you couldn't use the water for anything
Speaker 4: but the enjoyment of nature, Whereas for different Pinchot, natural
Speaker 4: resources were just that resources. It was lumber that Americans
Speaker 4: needed for development, it was water that maybe needed for
Speaker 4: serving cities that didn't have enough natural water resources. And
Speaker 4: there was an economic benefit to protecting forests, but you
Speaker 4: had to protect them for the service of American enterprise
Speaker 4: in the American economy. So those were the two really
Speaker 4: different points of view. So one of the ways that
Speaker 4: Gifford Pinchot's vision of conservation ended up winning out was
Speaker 4: that Pincho worked in the federal government with Theodore Roosevelt,
Speaker 4: and Theodore Roosevelt knew John Muir as well, But I
Speaker 4: don't think John Muir was ever taken quite as seriously.
Speaker 4: He was not a bureaucrat by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 4: He was an outdoor wilderness explorer. He you know, he
Speaker 4: was very poetic and lyrical, and he attempted to use
Speaker 4: pr in his way to get Americans to understand the
Speaker 4: value of nature. But the team of Gifford Pinchow as
Speaker 4: chief forester in the federal government and Theodore Roosevelt would
Speaker 4: end up dominating and defining what the public interest was
Speaker 4: when it came to the environment. Another way we could
Speaker 4: say that is it was John Muir who captured Roosevelt's
Speaker 4: imagination about the value of nature, but it was Gifford
Speaker 4: Pinchot who would ultimately win Theodore Roosevelt's favor when it
Speaker 4: came to national policy for the forests. And that just
Speaker 4: came down to, you know, Pincho's vision for forests was
Speaker 4: much more practical. It was more so to speak, scientific,
Speaker 4: and it was easier to manage. And this word management
Speaker 4: keeps coming back because it was really how the federal
Speaker 4: government came to understand what nature was for It was
Speaker 4: a resource to be managed. It was not something just
Speaker 4: beautiful out there that we should leave alone. It's really
Speaker 4: important to just mention that neither John Muir's nor Gifford
Speaker 4: Pinchot's visions included the indigenous people who were living on
Speaker 4: this land long before either of them came along. And
Speaker 4: that's that entire story of what the indigenous people's on
Speaker 4: the land did with nature, how they viewed nature, their
Speaker 4: relationship with nature, that was completely ignored in this American story.
Speaker 4: One other really important feature to mention with Pinchot's vision
Speaker 4: and why it went out, was that he was an
Speaker 4: absolute expert in managing not just natural resources, but also
Speaker 4: managing publics. From the very beginning of his life as
Speaker 4: a professional forester, Pinchot was constantly promoting himself and his work.
Speaker 4: He was very aware of the value of public support
Speaker 4: for his vision of forestry, and he used every means
Speaker 4: at his disposal to accomplish that. He wrote textbooks that
Speaker 4: he expected would be to from kindergarten on up about forestry,
Speaker 4: and indeed they were. There were thousands of copies of
Speaker 4: his book sold. He created what we would today call
Speaker 4: I guess press events, you know pr events, sometimes with
Speaker 4: Teddy Roosevelt, where he would be sure to invite all
Speaker 4: of the news media of the time to cover the
Speaker 4: event when he appeared to announce a new policy or
Speaker 4: in front of an important natural resource. And he also
Speaker 4: made very close behind the scenes connections with lumber operators
Speaker 4: and others who would then of course end up supporting
Speaker 4: Pinchot whenever he wanted a new policy to be put forward.
Speaker 4: He was so effective at managing public opinion and at
Speaker 4: controlling what kinds of information went out to the public.
Speaker 4: That he actually got investigated by the federal government at
Speaker 4: one point because they were concerned that he was spending
Speaker 4: too much time and too much of his per So
Speaker 4: now we're devoted to just publicity and not to the
Speaker 4: actual task of managing forestry. So Pinchell was, you know,
Speaker 4: and he was very He very handily got out of
Speaker 4: that investigation and managed to show that what he was
Speaker 4: doing was absolutely in the public interest. So part of
Speaker 4: that was that he was able to show us that
Speaker 4: forestry was a public matter and that that particular vision
Speaker 4: of forestry as a resource to be managed was the
Speaker 4: way to think about nature.
Speaker 1: Yes, so he was a really business friendly guy who
Speaker 1: was helping to craft some of the first policies around
Speaker 1: natural resources in the country. It's that sort of a
Speaker 1: fair assessment.
Speaker 4: That's right. Pinchell was really the earliest example of that.
Speaker 4: And it's important to think about that because it reminds
Speaker 4: us that the state and corporations were often very very
Speaker 4: much on the same side when it came to talking
Speaker 4: about nature and the environment. In other words, if you
Speaker 4: think about the monopoly companies of the early twentieth century,
Speaker 4: these were mainly in heavy industry. These were in rail,
Speaker 4: in steel, and in coal, and these industries relied on
Speaker 4: the favors of the government to achieve their size and
Speaker 4: their power. So as we know now, of course, those
Speaker 4: industries were also terrible for the environment. And we also
Speaker 4: know that back in that era and what we call
Speaker 4: the progressive era, Americans were becoming increasingly worried over the
Speaker 4: size and power of corporations, and so we could think
Speaker 4: about how public relations was essentially designed to reassure Americans
Speaker 4: that these companies were good citizens and that their vision
Speaker 4: of how to use the environment as a resource was
Speaker 4: the right vision. I really like the quote or the
Speaker 4: concept that the historian Roland Marshall uses where he says
Speaker 4: that pr was charged with a mission to invest corporations
Speaker 4: with a soul. That's really key, I think to understanding
Speaker 4: how that vision of nature and of the environment as
Speaker 4: something for people to use and not something to be
Speaker 4: protected came to be so popular.
Speaker 1: That just reminds me a lot of the ways that
Speaker 1: we talk about corporate personhood. And I know that oil
Speaker 1: companies in particular have really leaned on that this idea
Speaker 1: that companies are people and that we should give them
Speaker 1: the same benefit of the doubt that we would give
Speaker 1: to individuals, or that they have souls and moral compasses
Speaker 1: and that they're really just trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 4: I mean, what legal fiction as it's known that corporate
Speaker 4: personhood idea. I don't know the direc legacy, but I
Speaker 4: have to imagine that it comes from this time period.
Speaker 4: I mean, we know this from that time period that
Speaker 4: the leaders of industry, especially in the nineteenth century, were
Speaker 4: considered the most important citizens in society. We looked up
Speaker 4: to these leaders of industry as people who only brought
Speaker 4: good things to the American public. They brought jobs, they
Speaker 4: brought welfare and employee health programs. They helped to create
Speaker 4: entire urban centers and areas with their infrastructure. So in
Speaker 4: the progressive era, when questions started to be asked about
Speaker 4: whether the size and power that corporate leaders had was
Speaker 4: really such a good thing, public relations was born essentially
Speaker 4: to restore that personhood to companies that they had enjoyed
Speaker 4: in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: I've always had this sense that pr sort of emerges
Speaker 1: at this point in history when these captains of industry
Speaker 1: are facing challenges from all sides, right like, you've got
Speaker 1: the journalists critiquing them, I to Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, all
Speaker 1: of that, You've got labor unions starting and asking for
Speaker 1: higher wages and better working conditions. You've got the vote
Speaker 1: extending to people who are not white land owning men.
Speaker 1: And you've got the government starting to pass some of
Speaker 1: the very first regulations on industry in the US. So
Speaker 1: they go fairly quickly from being revered and also kind
Speaker 1: of being able to do whatever they want to being criticized,
Speaker 1: held up to scrutiny, and expected to actually act on
Speaker 1: behalf of the public. So it seems like pr is
Speaker 1: a handy tool helped to shape the public's ideas in
Speaker 1: a way that will help industry do what it wants
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the entire history of this relationship between
Speaker 4: are and the environment, I see it as a cycle
Speaker 4: of exactly what you just described. So it's a cycle
Speaker 4: where the captains of industry are indeed the captains, and
Speaker 4: everybody looks to them to steer the ship, so to speak,
Speaker 4: and then they lose their power or their power is
Speaker 4: questioned in some way, and public relations is brought in
Speaker 4: to restore relationships with the public. Exactly as the term suggests,
Speaker 4: and that is that cycle has happened again in the
Speaker 4: nineteen sixties when the environmental movements started to really gain
Speaker 4: steam and all kinds of government regulations were passed to
Speaker 4: protect the environment. In this moment of awareness that these
Speaker 4: companies were maybe not so great after all, really not
Speaker 4: so committed to the well being of all Americans. Once again,
Speaker 4: public relations was brought in in the early seventies to
Speaker 4: restore the balance, so to speak, to bring corporate leaders,
Speaker 4: captains of industry back up onto the prows of their ship.
Speaker 4: And yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: There's this kind of push and pull throughout history, right
Speaker 1: where the public will challenge what industry is doing, and
Speaker 1: then pr will sort of help them be back that challenge.
Speaker 1: That'll work for a while, and then there will be
Speaker 1: another challenge. I keep thinking that we're kind of in
Speaker 1: one of those moments again right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're inter reckoning right now. We're in these moments
Speaker 4: of I think a lot of it is actually driven
Speaker 4: by people like you, by journalists who are exposing the
Speaker 4: companies for what they are, for what they're actually doing,
Speaker 4: and calling for reform. This prompts often a groundswell of
Speaker 4: reform and outrage by publics well deserved outrage, and then
Speaker 4: once we will not at all be surprised to see
Speaker 4: PR come onto the scene once again and restore the
Speaker 4: balance we already see it in terms of big tech companies,
Speaker 4: where these companies do things like censor the worst kinds
Speaker 4: of misinformation on their plots forms, or say they're actually
Speaker 4: working to help solve the problem, or partner with journalists
Speaker 4: and organizations to help promote certain kinds of information. Those
Speaker 4: are all really important PR maneuvers by those firms.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I want to take us back in time
Speaker 1: again and talk about one of my favorites, the first
Speaker 1: modern corporate PR, Guy iv Ledbetter Lee.
Speaker 4: So ivy led Better Lee a very unusual name. He
Speaker 4: lived from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen thirty four, and
Speaker 4: he played a major role in shaping and influencing the
Speaker 4: idea of publicity as the most legitimate form of communication
Speaker 4: in American democratic life, no small task. During his career,
Speaker 4: Lee represented nearly every kind of big business you can imagine,
Speaker 4: both in the United States and abroad. It's a very
Speaker 4: long list. So the list includes public utilities, banks, shipping coal,
Speaker 4: oil metals, sugar, tobacco, meat packing, breakfast, cereals, soap, cement, rubber,
Speaker 4: and chemicals, in addition to major organizations like foundations, universities,
Speaker 4: and charities. So that's I don't think too many pr
Speaker 4: people could claim that many kinds of clients. What I
Speaker 4: really did was also found and advised trade associations, and
Speaker 4: that was key to his success as well, because trade
Speaker 4: associations are responsible for maintaining standards for the industries they represent.
Speaker 4: They interpret what government regulators say companies can and cannot do.
Speaker 4: So if you represent clients in the railway industry and
Speaker 4: then you create the trade association that enforces the rules
Speaker 4: for the railway industry, well your clients will be pretty
Speaker 4: pleased with you, say the least Lee. At the beginning
Speaker 4: of his career, nearly all of Lee's clients fit into
Speaker 4: two categories public utilities, which was railroads, electricity companies, public transit.
Speaker 4: But also then the energy and infrastructure required to support
Speaker 4: those public utilities. So, as you said, the coal mine operators,
Speaker 4: the shippers, and the steelmakers. And what Lee managed to
Speaker 4: do was to promote this idea that we rely on
Speaker 4: energy and its infrastructure and we cannot live without it.
Speaker 4: That's such an important idea that is still the kind
Speaker 4: of conversation we're having today when we talk about alternative energy.
Speaker 4: And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that
Speaker 4: what Ivy Le did for the railway companies is the same.
Speaker 4: He created a playbook that we are still using today,
Speaker 4: or that public relations people and company leaders are still
Speaker 4: using today when they try to promote oil as an
Speaker 4: ongoing energy source. So in Lee's time, in the early
Speaker 4: twentieth century, there was, as I said earlier, there was
Speaker 4: national concern over the abuses of power by monopoly interests,
Speaker 4: and there were a lot of calls for reform, and
Speaker 4: public utilities were not exempt from those calls for reform.
Speaker 4: There were a lot of campaigns calling for government ownership
Speaker 4: of the companies and the land that they occupied. And
Speaker 4: so what Ivy Lee came up with, the idea he
Speaker 4: came up with was to show that industrial power was
Speaker 4: directly serving the public interest. And we can look at
Speaker 4: a couple of events in particular to show how he
Speaker 4: did this. One was in nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen, Ivy
Speaker 4: Lee was trying to support the railroads as they called
Speaker 4: for a freight rate increase, so as you can imagine,
Speaker 4: that was not very popular at that time. Now, Ivyley
Speaker 4: had been publicity expert for the Pennsylvania Railroad since nineteen
Speaker 4: oh six, and he had worked on several other railroad
Speaker 4: accounts as well, and he also helped found and advise
Speaker 4: the Association of Railroad Executives and the Bureau of Railroad Economics.
Speaker 4: So Ivyley had this idea. When the freight rate increase
Speaker 4: was proposed, of course, there was public outcry. You know,
Speaker 4: we're talking about regulating these industries, not about giving them
Speaker 4: more money. What he did was to turn the railways
Speaker 4: into an information machine. In other words, rather than hiding
Speaker 4: behind their corporate leader or just saying nothing when there
Speaker 4: was a public out cry, Ivy Lee created public support
Speaker 4: for the railways by having the railways come out in
Speaker 4: front and communicate with all of the reasons that they
Speaker 4: could come up with to support them. So Lee placed
Speaker 4: ads in trade journals, he issued circulars and pamphlets. That
Speaker 4: was the usual stuff. But then he also created events
Speaker 4: where journalists were invited and railroad executives would be there
Speaker 4: to give exclusive interviews about what they were trying to
Speaker 4: do and why. Lee and his team also wrote news
Speaker 4: editorials and articles giving reasons for the proposed rate hike,
Speaker 4: and they placed those news editorials and articles in both
Speaker 4: the large metropolitan dailies and also in smaller local publications.
Speaker 4: They reached somewhere in the vicinity of twenty two thousand
Speaker 4: news outlets with that work. Lee was, however, not satisfied
Speaker 4: with just putting information into the newspapers, so he ended
Speaker 4: up writing and mailing personal letters directly to the people
Speaker 4: that he called leaders of opinion. That included congressmen and
Speaker 4: state legislators. It included mayors, It included college presidents, economists, bankers,
Speaker 4: and clergymen, among others. Finally, to reach everyday passengers, he
Speaker 4: put bulletins in railway stations and left information folders in
Speaker 4: passenger railway cars. So one of the things we need
Speaker 4: to understand here in terms of how successful this campaign was,
Speaker 4: was that ivyly wanted ordinary individuals to feel connected to
Speaker 4: the larger issues that were being lobbied in Congress, and
Speaker 4: by reaching out to them by putting bulletins in the
Speaker 4: railway stations and newsletters in the train cars, he managed
Speaker 4: to convince those people to also then become part of
Speaker 4: the public that had to say in what kinds of
Speaker 4: decisions got made in Washington. So while Thee's campaign was
Speaker 4: organizing meetings with you know, special audiences, he was also
Speaker 4: trying to get a letter writing campaign going by ordinary,
Speaker 4: everyday individuals, people who just rode the rails to get
Speaker 4: where they were trying to go. And once you had
Speaker 4: that kind of public support behind a campaign, it became
Speaker 4: really hard to justify turning it down once it got
Speaker 4: into Congress. So those letters of support, you know, and
Speaker 4: of course, being Ivy Lee, not only did he get
Speaker 4: people to write letters of support, he then obtained copies
Speaker 4: of those letters of support and reprinted them in the media.
Speaker 4: So what ivy Le did was create and coordinate an
Speaker 4: unbelievably unified campaign through the railways pushing through the freight
Speaker 4: rate hike as something that the public absolutely wanted.
Speaker 1: Okay, And then I know that another one of these
Speaker 1: kind of pr grades is someone that you spent quite
Speaker 1: a bit of time talking to and researching in his
Speaker 1: later years, E. Bruce Harrison. So tell us about who E.
Speaker 1: Bruce Harrison was.
Speaker 4: So E Bruce Harrison is the consummate or was, I'm
Speaker 4: sorry to say, was the consummate public relations professional in
Speaker 4: the United States. And I say that because he checks
Speaker 4: all the boxes in terms of what is underlying the
Speaker 4: power of public relations in American life. One is that
Speaker 4: he was virtually unknown to most people. That is, you know,
Speaker 4: e Bruce Harrison is not a household name by any stretch.
Speaker 4: He was incredibly powerful. He had hundreds of clients in
Speaker 4: all kinds of industries. I dare say as many kinds
Speaker 4: of industries as ivy Le did, actually, although it's much
Speaker 4: much less well known and Ebrews Harrison was also he
Speaker 4: was just incredibly charming. The charisma of this individual I
Speaker 4: think was in a way at the heart or the
Speaker 4: secret to his success, because he was so good at
Speaker 4: talking to absolutely everyone. He always made you feel like
Speaker 4: he was really listening to you. He really took you seriously,
Speaker 4: he was very grateful for the time you spent with him,
Speaker 4: and he was just so charming. And I really do
Speaker 4: think there's a lot to be said about how public
Speaker 4: relations people. The most successful public relations people are people
Speaker 4: who fit that persona So depending on who you talk to,
Speaker 4: Ebrewce Harrison is either considered the founder of environmental PR
Speaker 4: or the founder of anti environmental pr and you know,
Speaker 4: you pick depending on what side you're on, essentially, but
Speaker 4: either way, I think the signature move of Ebruce Harrison
Speaker 4: was to give companies, especially the most environmentally contentious companies,
Speaker 4: a language and a voice to speak about the environment
Speaker 4: and be taken seriously by their publics. His nineteen ninety
Speaker 4: two book Going Green kind of says it all. The
Speaker 4: subtitle of the book is how to Communicate your Company's
Speaker 4: environmental commitment, And that was precisely what E. Bruce Harrison
Speaker 4: did throughout his career. And the key was that he
Speaker 4: looked at how companies could communicate an environmental commitment. They
Speaker 4: were not necessarily walking the talk, they were not necessarily
Speaker 4: enforcing behaviors or changing their production style to demonstrate an
Speaker 4: environmental commitment, but they got really good at communicating their
Speaker 4: environmental commitment.
Speaker 1: So interesting, Okay, So I know that one of E.
Speaker 1: Bruce Harrison's big things in general was to really push
Speaker 1: the idea of corporate sustainability and you know, advise his
Speaker 1: clients to highlight all of the good things they were
Speaker 1: doing about the environment. I'm wondering if you can tell me,
Speaker 1: if you can share a bit about I'm wondering what
Speaker 1: you found out about him from you know, both his
Speaker 1: documents and from talking to him about sort of where
Speaker 1: that idea came from and why it was so effective.
Speaker 4: Well, okay, So one of the most important things that
Speaker 4: Ebruce Harrison did to earn that title of the kind
Speaker 4: of founder of environmental pr or green prs he liked
Speaker 4: to call it, was to create an environmental coalition. And
Speaker 4: this coalition was called the National Environmental Development Association or
Speaker 4: NIDA NIDA. You know, the name was appropriately vague. It
Speaker 4: was meant to be vague so that it would not
Speaker 4: be obvious what side of the aisle, so to speak.
Speaker 4: This organization or coalition sat on. NITA was a coalition
Speaker 4: of a number of industry groups and labor groups that
Speaker 4: were trying in the nineteen seventies to mitigate or soften
Speaker 4: federal environmental restrictions. And when Bruce Harrison founded his own
Speaker 4: public relations firm in nineteen seventy three called the Bruce
Speaker 4: Harrison Company, NIDA was its first client. So again you
Speaker 4: have to really admire a person who starts his own
Speaker 4: agency with a client that he has created himself, which
Speaker 4: was a coalition of people, you know, companies, that he
Speaker 4: had worked with previously, Companies that were involved in the
Speaker 4: Chemical Manufacturers Association where he had begun his public relations career.
Speaker 4: Companies that were connected in some way to people he
Speaker 4: had met while working on the hill. So this was
Speaker 4: a kind of insider group, and the group grew quite
Speaker 4: a bit over the years. Over the next twenty to
Speaker 4: thirty years. Under this umbrella coalition of MEEDA were single
Speaker 4: issue groups, and by single issue groups, I mean groups
Speaker 4: that were organized around a specific piece of environmental legislation
Speaker 4: that they wanted to chip away at. So you had
Speaker 4: the NEDA Clean Air Act project, and you had the
Speaker 4: need a Clean Water Act coalition, and so on. There
Speaker 4: there were I think six or seven MEEDA coalitions that
Speaker 4: ended up being developed, and each of these smaller coal
Speaker 4: did a number of things. They would initially identify the
Speaker 4: problems that the company members had with that piece of legislation.
Speaker 4: You know, what aspects of the legislation were harming corporate profits,
Speaker 4: what aspects were problematic in other ways in terms of
Speaker 4: requiring reporting from these companies or costing them additional you know,
Speaker 4: they had to pay extra to kind of change something
Speaker 4: about their production process, and so on. The second thing
Speaker 4: that this coalition would then do would be to identify
Speaker 4: and contact the local industry or labor congressional representatives in
Speaker 4: their home states. Then they would try to reach executive
Speaker 4: agency officials at the federal and state levels who were
Speaker 4: responsible for administering that piece of legislation. Next came the
Speaker 4: press offensive, the publications that would be distributed, the information
Speaker 4: fact sheets, the lobbying points. But in addition to media relations,
Speaker 4: a really important feature of what NITA did was grassroots
Speaker 4: lobbying grassroots communications. I don't think it's fair to say
Speaker 4: that Bruce Harrison created the idea of grassroots communication, but
Speaker 4: he certainly expanded and developed it in a very important way.
Speaker 4: So what his coalition members would do would would be
Speaker 4: to talk to these representatives on the ground in their
Speaker 4: local among their local constituencies, and make sure that these
Speaker 4: local constituents understood the value of voting against the legislation
Speaker 4: or voting to soften the legislation in some way to
Speaker 4: profit the companies that were operating in those jurisdictions. And
Speaker 4: it was it was enormously effective. I mean, there are
Speaker 4: so many documents that I have, you know, piles all
Speaker 4: over my library at home, of the test simony that
Speaker 4: they delivered the papers that they authored, you know, the
Speaker 4: white papers, the way they got their messages into the media,
Speaker 4: the spokespeople that they worked with who carried the messages
Speaker 4: and wrote off eds. So it was a very modern
Speaker 4: day Ivy League kind of process where it was made
Speaker 4: very clear to all kinds of publics and stakeholders why
Speaker 4: they should support softening the environmental legislation. I think it
Speaker 4: would be unfair to say, you know, he invented the
Speaker 4: idea of corporate social responsibility. That would be a little
Speaker 4: too much. But what we can say is that he
Speaker 4: did invent the idea of sustainable communication, which was again
Speaker 4: so genius when you think about it, because what a
Speaker 4: sustainable communication means. It means communicating in such a way
Speaker 4: as to maintain sustainable relationships with the people that matter,
Speaker 4: the people who are going to vote for you, or
Speaker 4: the people who are going to support whatever it is
Speaker 4: your clients are doing. It does not mean sustainable practices
Speaker 4: or behaviors to protect the environment. So Bruce Harrison pioneered
Speaker 4: this idea of sustainable communication and used every means at
Speaker 4: his disposal to enforce that that was what companies needed
Speaker 4: to do to convey their environmental commitment. What we see
Speaker 4: today with all kinds of campaigns by some of even
Speaker 4: the very worst environmental offenders, you know, the exonmobiles of
Speaker 4: the world is all about sustainability communication. And I do
Speaker 4: think it's fair in that case to say that Bruce
Speaker 4: Harrison was the pioneer in that universe of communicating sustainably.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then that leads into his work kind of
Speaker 1: leading up to and at the very first international climate summit,
Speaker 1: the Real Earth Summit in nineteen ninety two tell us
Speaker 1: about what Ebruce Harrison was getting up to in Rio.
Speaker 4: So Ebruce Harrison was already working internationally by the time
Speaker 4: the Earth Summit rolled around the United Nations conference in Rio,
Speaker 4: and sustainable development was the theme that everyone was talking
Speaker 4: about at that conference. So Harrison was already working with
Speaker 4: a lobby group in Brussels and was creating a kind
Speaker 4: of franchise network that was called Envirocom, whereby his firm
Speaker 4: in Washington would partner with or you know, sort of
Speaker 4: license is a better way putting. His firm would license
Speaker 4: the rights to use his sustainable communications strategies in whatever
Speaker 4: country they were located, and he was working with countries Italy, France, Germany,
Speaker 4: the Netherlands, and he also had franchises in Mexico. He
Speaker 4: was working with He was really everywhere, So that's important
Speaker 4: to know because he already had a network of companies
Speaker 4: and clients in Europe who supported the environmental communications strategies
Speaker 4: that he was working with. So he was invited as
Speaker 4: communications council to the CEOs who were participating at that
Speaker 4: Earth Summit in Rio in nineteen ninety two, and it
Speaker 4: was at the events run by business surrounding that conference,
Speaker 4: of which there were many, that he presented his paper
Speaker 4: on the concept of sustainable communication, and he had very
Speaker 4: willing ears of all the CEOs from all over the
Speaker 4: world who were interested in this idea. He was also
Speaker 4: chairman of the International Public Relations Association at that time,
Speaker 4: and the International Public Relations Association was also holding events
Speaker 4: around the Earth Summit. The environment was a very very
Speaker 4: hot topic at that time, of real concern to corporate leaders,
Speaker 4: and I think it's also really important to remember that
Speaker 4: Maurice Strong, who was the organizer of that United Nations conference,
Speaker 4: was committed to having business participate in the conference. Maurice
Speaker 4: Strong was quite compelled or convinced by the idea that
Speaker 4: if you did not have business as a key stakeholder
Speaker 4: in these conversations about sustainable development, that you would never
Speaker 4: be able to enforce it. You needed to have business
Speaker 4: at the table and in agreement, and that aspect ended up.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's a lot of books written about how
Speaker 4: problematic that was, how it ended up creating a real
Speaker 4: compromise in terms of what environmentalism could be. Because you
Speaker 4: had to have business buy in. It meant for some
Speaker 4: people that the entire conference ended up being a bit
Speaker 4: of a sham, or as kind of very watered down
Speaker 4: version of what it could have been. But the point
Speaker 4: is that because business communities had been invited to the conference,
Speaker 4: and because they knew that their buying was so important,
Speaker 4: they planned extensively in the lead up to the conference
Speaker 4: to be able to present what they called their own
Speaker 4: Sustainable Development Charter, a kind of again non binding, non
Speaker 4: not legal document, but a kind of voluntary self regulating
Speaker 4: document with a set of rules that business agreed to
Speaker 4: operate by when it came to environmental sustainability. And as
Speaker 4: you can imagine, this charter was you know, it did
Speaker 4: not contain anything that would have really transformed how companies
Speaker 4: did business. It was a very business as usual document,
Speaker 4: but it paid a lot of lip service to the
Speaker 4: idea of going green, being sustainable, being very concerned about
Speaker 4: the environment. And because they got out in front of
Speaker 4: the actual the other the actual conference and the other
Speaker 4: types of events that were being designed, they were really
Speaker 4: able to put that document forward and stave off other
Speaker 4: kinds of more binding legislation or more draconian regulations that
Speaker 4: would have caused problems for these companies' profits.
Speaker 1: I know that E. Bruce Harrison really learned a lot
Speaker 1: from sort of his first foray into environmental pr which
Speaker 1: was actually trying to counter Rachel Carson's book in the sixties.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about that story. I'm very
Speaker 1: curious to hear what he said to you about it
Speaker 1: in terms of the impression that that left on him
Speaker 1: and how it informed what he ended up doing to
Speaker 1: try to combat regulations on climate change.
Speaker 4: Oh. Absolutely, I would say that that was perhaps Harrison's
Speaker 4: biggest lesson. So, yeah, just to get that backstory a
Speaker 4: little bit. So, Harrison starts working at the Manufacturing Chemists Association,
Speaker 4: which is now called the American Chemistry Council, so he
Speaker 4: starts working there as their environmental Sorry, I should back up,
Speaker 4: he starts working there as just a PR person. And
Speaker 4: that's important because there was not really a sense of
Speaker 4: this environmental importance until Carson's book came out. But the
Speaker 4: book came out maybe fifteen months later, so very shortly
Speaker 4: after Harrison arrives at the Manufacturing Chemists Association, Rachel Carson's
Speaker 4: book appears, and Chaos and zus and people are extremely
Speaker 4: concerned about the environment, and they're especially concerned about pesticides,
Speaker 4: which was the focus of Rachel Carson's book. So the
Speaker 4: Manufacturing Chemist Association was absolutely caught off guard when that happened.
Speaker 4: They did not see that coming and it was an
Speaker 4: utter disaster, as you can imagine for their trade association.
Speaker 4: So it's at that moment that Harrison is appointed the
Speaker 4: Environmental Information Manager and sort of given a team of
Speaker 4: other PR people who worked at companies like DuPont, Dell, Monsanto,
Speaker 4: and Shell and told you designed the PR response to
Speaker 4: Rachel Carson, this is a disaster, and you guys head
Speaker 4: up the PR response to fix it. And as you said, Amy,
Speaker 4: it did not work. It just didn't work. They tried
Speaker 4: absolutely everything to discredit Rachel Carson herself, to discredit the
Speaker 4: findings in the book, to discredit all of the scientific
Speaker 4: evidence and her role as a scientist. And it failed,
Speaker 4: and it partly failed because of this momentum that had
Speaker 4: been building up. It's not as though Rachel Carson's book
Speaker 4: dropped out of nowhere. There had been increasingly throughout the
Speaker 4: nineteen fifties concerns about industry science. There had been concerns
Speaker 4: about pollution. There were growing cases of pollution and smog
Speaker 4: and cities. But the book really did catalyze this movement,
Speaker 4: and when Harrison tried to offset that momentum, he was
Speaker 4: not successful. So what did Harrison learn? I think from
Speaker 4: that time He spoke with me at great length about
Speaker 4: that moment as being a defining moment, because he felt
Speaker 4: that the big mistake had been not understanding how to
Speaker 4: communicate with the public, to convey a sense of compromise
Speaker 4: and a sense of consensus among all of the interested parties.
Speaker 4: If you just try to discredit existing knowledge by saying
Speaker 4: it's wrong, you'll meet with a lot of resistance. You're
Speaker 4: essentially saying to people you don't know what you're talking about,
Speaker 4: or your beliefs that your ideas, your understanding is not valid,
Speaker 4: and that's no way to get people to listen to you.
Speaker 4: So what Harrison understood and what ended up defining the
Speaker 4: rest of his career was in developing public relations strategies
Speaker 4: where consensus was the order of the day. It was
Speaker 4: always about the spirit of compromise that required everyone having
Speaker 4: a voice, everyone sitting at the table to discuss environmental problems.
Speaker 4: And for Harrison that included his clients. His clients deserved,
Speaker 4: in his eyes, a voice at the table. And to me,
Speaker 4: that's one of the biggest liabilities. That's essentially the beginning
Speaker 4: of the end as far as environmental policy in the
Speaker 4: United States is concerned, because what you have if you
Speaker 4: always have business voices at the table, is a sense
Speaker 4: of the self interest of business, which is always going
Speaker 4: to be at odds with the need to protect the environment.
Speaker 1: So, in looking at everything that you've been looking at
Speaker 1: over the years, is there any one or maybe you know,
Speaker 1: a few kind of fixes or updates to how we
Speaker 1: understand the environment or how maybe environmental issues are communicated
Speaker 1: that you think could really So, in looking at everything
Speaker 1: that you've been looking at over the past several years,
Speaker 1: where do you think are sort of the key points
Speaker 1: where the framing of the story around the environment and
Speaker 1: humans and sort of our relationship really kind of went
Speaker 1: off the rails in a way that you could see
Speaker 1: sort of leading to the impact that we're at on
Speaker 1: climate right now.
Speaker 4: There's so much to unpack there, just our relationship to
Speaker 4: nature and how right from the beginning, of course, the
Speaker 4: conceptions of nature that became dominant in the American imagination
Speaker 4: about preservation and conservation really didn't even from the beginning
Speaker 4: include the indigenous peoples who were on the land long
Speaker 4: before those conversations started to take place, So right from
Speaker 4: the beginning, I would say, there was a kind of
Speaker 4: manipulation of the way that Americans thought about nature and
Speaker 4: what that was for them. But I think also a
Speaker 4: really important argument that we try to make in the
Speaker 4: book is that the origins of the public relations industry
Speaker 4: in the United States is connected to environmental problems, because
Speaker 4: it was right around the turn of the nineteenth to
Speaker 4: the twentieth century that we saw companies realizing that they
Speaker 4: had a problem, and that problem was often about having
Speaker 4: the people and their communities where they were operating being
Speaker 4: uncomfortable with the size of the companies or the impact
Speaker 4: these companies were having on reorganizing the community or the
Speaker 4: land they were taking up. There was no we say
Speaker 4: at the beginning of the book, you know, there was
Speaker 4: no such thing as an environmental problem in those days.
Speaker 4: Of course that isn't true, but what we mean is
Speaker 4: there was no conception of the environment as something in
Speaker 4: need of protection. So there were just individual sets of
Speaker 4: problems connected to nature, but most of those problems were
Speaker 4: eliminated in the name of, for instance, manifest destiny, that
Speaker 4: you know, it's right and normal for humans to extend
Speaker 4: their power over wider and wider swaths of land, and
Speaker 4: that the waterways were about forging trade routes. You know,
Speaker 4: there was no sense, of course at that time, that
Speaker 4: these were resources in need of protection in some way.
Speaker 4: That would only come much much later, really, with the
Speaker 4: environmental movement in the sixties and the problems then that
Speaker 4: started to surface in the sixties, and the ways that
Speaker 4: companies were taken to task then was really, i would say,
Speaker 4: the first time that people actually conceptualized nature as something
Speaker 4: that was scarce and something that was very limited and
Speaker 4: something that could be degraded. Or eroded in the need
Speaker 4: of protection. And it was then that companies were situated
Speaker 4: more as the enemies of that desire to protect nature,
Speaker 4: that they were really actively destroying nature, and that people
Speaker 4: needed to do something to fight back. And I would
Speaker 4: say that moment was, in a way the beginning of
Speaker 4: it was the beginning of a real sense of us
Speaker 4: in them in environmental politics, and as we now know
Speaker 4: that us in them has been very entrenched in our
Speaker 4: thinking about the environment and environmental protection. Uptil now.
Speaker 1: That's it for this time. I hope you enjoyed that
Speaker 1: conversation with Melissa. We will stick a link to her
Speaker 1: book in the show notes as well. I highly recommend
Speaker 1: checking that out if you're interested in this stuff. I
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