Abstract
“Public relations is not invested in truth,” Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza assert. “It is invested in legitimacy” (p. 9). Based on this premise, their book examines the development of the art and science of corporate public relations over the 20th century and the simultaneous creation of environmentalism, each influencing the growth of the other.
Their book aims to show how public relations actively constructs and manages public understanding of the environment, including the behind-the-scenes strategies and tactics employed by environmental communicators, whether for corporate, government, media, or civic organizations. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, including company and trade association archives, government records, trade journals, news coverage, interviews, and ethnographic observation, the authors trace the history of public relations and environmental communication through close examination of pivotal moments.
Aroncyzk and Espinoza locate the origin of American environmental communication in the Progressive era, when naturalist John Muir and government official Gifford Pinchot each used publicity to promote concern about “conservation,” the former with a private approach and the latter with an eye toward public administration of environmental action. Pinchot’s ability to manage information together with his network of political influence meant that his perspective became dominant. Shortly thereafter followed the development of long-term structures of advocacy, the creation of industrial public relations agencies for external counsel and the establishment of internal departments within companies and trade associations. Public relations is not, they argue, just spin. Powerful and highly-connected practitioners, represented by Ivy Lee and John Hill of Hill & Knowlton, built networks of like-minded corporations and executives and aligned their purpose, strategy, and messages, conferring legitimacy on their ideas and authoritativeness to messaging.
Another pivotal moment was the 1961 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which blamed government agencies, the chemical industry, and scientists for collusion in environmental irresponsibility, provoking public demand for environmental reform. Industry’s initial response included efforts to discredit Carson and her book, which seemed only to buttress her claims. Then E. Bruce Harrison developed a PR strategy of “balance,” apparently modeled on Hill & Knowlton’s previous work with trade associations, including the Manufacturing Chemists Association, where Harrison had worked. “Balance” meant considering economic and environmental impact plus energy as equally necessary to the American standard of living. Companies threatened by restrictive legislation or regulation joined the National Environmental Development Association, a coalition of industries and labor and agricultural groups coordinated by Harrison & Associates. Evidence demonstrates the willingness of PR practitioners, agencies, trade associations, and trade press to accept and perpetuate the narrative of balance.
Next, industry turned to strategies of “the public interest” and “sustainable development.” During the 1960s public interest groups like Public Citizen Inc. and Common Cause defined public interest as the opposite of self-interest, using publicity to challenge corporate narratives. Corporate PR specialists noted their success with concern, and their solution was to reposition industry as a committed partner working in the public interest. Companies began to connect government relations with public relations strategies and tactics, rebranded as public affairs. Conducting grass roots campaigns included taking their case directly to the people through advertorials and public service announcements. Becoming partners working with other groups in the public interest allowed industry to more or less capture environmental activism as business pursued compromise and balance at every turn. Reviewing this history, including the continuing influence of E. Bruce Harrison, reveals the reframing of sustainable development as both voluntary norms and regulation that managed instead of controlled environmental impact.
The authors also assess advocacy communication by environmental activists. Adopting formal public relations means accepting many of the assumptions and values, they note, of an industry that grew as a direct result of corporate efforts to oppose activism. Academic theory and professional practice preach segmentation of the audience, for example, or searching for compromise and consensus, whereas in actuality a unified audience and open debate might better serve client Earth. In fact, turning the climate into a “client,” the authors assert, obscures the fundamentally human causes of climate change. The professional focus on legitimacy similarly creates boundaries around what constitutes good PR. The authors suggest that the future bodes only more of the same. Information mediated by computers and systems presented as secure and trustworthy will increasingly structure the environmental information people receive. The authors’ analysis of Data for Climate Action demonstrates that such campaigns operate more to promote data collection and analysis than as a real intervention in the climate crisis.
In sum, the authors conclude, public relations exists largely to control the way people come together to recognize issues as legitimate problems, “to mediate publics and problems so that they can appear or disappear in political contexts of importance” (p. 215). The environment is not an issue of politics or publicity, they state, but it has been defined in those ways and therefore addressed in those ways. They offer a devastating portrait of U.S. public relations as an industry reacting to activism in ways that virtually always served the conservative, capitalist status quo: even when corporate PR appeared to take responsible steps toward protecting the environment or working with advocacy groups, its underlying purpose was to minimize public interference in management decision-making and company profit margins.
Aronczyk and Espinoza’s A Strategic Nature is a required reading for anyone interested in public relations history, climate change and environmental activism, or the social, political, and cultural roles of PR more broadly. This is not a complete history, with entire decades skimmed over and more attention to organizations than to grassroots activity. Nevertheless, it offers a compelling look at a fundamental problem. The authors break new ground in some cases, and in other ways, particularly by linking pivotal moments together, they provide a big picture that has been missing from public relations scholarship. Additionally, the connection between the growth of corporate public relations as a response to environmental activism has never been made so clear. Their evidence shows that the public relations industry has not merely been complicit, but has indeed often led the global charge in undermining environmental responsibility.