On this day in 1971, at the conference of the “Economic Council of the Forest Products Industry” in Phoenix Arizona some chap called Richard W. Darrow gave a speech “Communication in an Environmental Age”
“We will do those things that earn us attention and gain us understanding, or we will live out the remainder of our professional lives in the creeping, frustrating, stultifying, stifling grasp of unrealistic legislative restraints and crippling administrative restriction. A public that ought to understand us – and thank us for what we are and what we do – will instead clamor for our scalps.”
There was, as you can see, a real panic in business circles. The fear was that previously quiescent ‘citizens’, at first cowed by so-called “McCarthyism”[it pre-dated that drunk] and then stupefied by consumerism – might actually get up on their hind legs. If they demanded real regulation, real control, so the planet didn’t get turned into an uninhabitable slagheap, then the fun times (for business) would be over. In 1971, before neoliberalism, before pervasive computing, before all the other wonders that the last 51 years have brought us, such fears were legit.
What has happened since? The kinds of “public relations” “professionals” Darrow represented have honed their game. Seven months later, the Powell Memorandum and the rise of the neoliberal think tanks. The crushing of labour unions, the spectacularisation of everything (to go all Debord for a minute). Greenwash, the constraining of imagination, the destruction of hope. Yeah, it’s not looking good for our species, is it?
“Source: Conley, J. (2006) , ENVIRONMENTALISM CONTAINED: A HISTORY OF CORPORATE RESPONSES
TO THE NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM. PhD thesis
Conley, 2006: p69-70.
Conley continues – “Having established a special unit to provide services on environmental health issues in 1966, Hill & Knowlton became a leading advocate and provider of environmental PR in the 1970s and beyond.”
See also
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky
Taking the Risk out of Democracy by Alex Carey
Global Spin by Sharon Beder
This isn’t just a battle of “ideas”: this gets very ‘kinetic’
The War against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti-Environmental Violence by David Helvarg
FT 12th January 2022 Activists target public relations groups for greenwashing fossil fuels