Business history has never paid much attention to the environment. Brushing aside the firm's reliance and impact on the natural world, early business historians zeroed in on the role of the entrepreneur in big business's rise. They found it easy to truncate, marginalize or altogether ignore the physical processes by which the stuff of nature"raw" materialswas carved or coaxed out of mountains, forests, and deserts, channeled into factories and squeezed and cajoled into commodities. They scarcely considered the everchanging varieties of "waste" generated by businesses and customers, which so often infiltrated, polluted, and otherwise altered the world beyond factory and office. They devoted equally little attention to the effects of resource extraction and use on plants, animals, land, air, or water, much less entire ecosystems and climate. 1
The emergence of Chandlerian institutional history perpetuated this neglect. The organizational approach encouraged business historians to focus on the dynamics of corporate management and the internal evolution of the firm. Its adherents impressed upon their colleagues the value of analyzing how corporate managers responded to market conditions beyond the firm's walls, through strategies and organizational structures. 2 Although there was nothing in this approach that would have prevented them from examining how firms organized themselves to manage natural resource utilization, pollution control, or any other aspect of the interface between the corporation and the environment, Chandler and his followers chose to concentrate on matters relating to vertical integration and the evolution of the large, diversified, multi-divisional industrial corporation. In the process of investigating these admittedly important aspects of the rise of big business, they continued to ignore the subject of big business's dependence and impact on the natural world. Their inattention persisted despite the fact that they wrote at a time of mounting public outcry over industrial pollution and increasing conflict between business and an ascendant environmental movement. 3
We hope this special issue of the Business History Review will impress upon business historians the richness, relevance, and importance of questions about business's interface with the natural environment. An environmentallyminded business history will, we contend, restore crucial materialist dimensions to the field: not just the concreteness of money and markets, but of fire, rock, dust and smoke. We also believe there are few more promising avenues for integrating business history into larger historic panoramas or for ushering the field through a cultural turn.
Business historians can profit in this regard from terms and modes of analysis that have evolved in the field of "environmental history." We also have an auspicious opportunity to help mold and deepen the environmental history enterprise. Since the founding of the American Society for Environmental History and the establishment of its journal in the mid1970s, environmental historians have evolved their own ambitious agenda. The most sweeping statements of purposesuch as that by Donald Worster on "the role and place of nature in human life" and William Cronon on "placing nature in [human] history"have helped make it one of the mostly broadly integrative historical projects around. 4 Environmental historians have developed an ever widening and more sophisticated understanding of "nature's" meanings and the variety of ways it has figured into human life and history. 5
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Oddly enough, however, despite this broad conception of their field, our colleagues in environmental history have shown almost as much reluctance to tackle business's environmental relations as business historians have. Both fields have sorely neglected the borderlands between them. Pathbreaking environmental historians have launched a harsh critique of capitalism that has entailed surprisingly little scrutiny of managers or corporations. 6 Early on, most environmental historians concentrated on the history of wilderness, agriculture, the conservation movement, or modern environmentalism, where they believed nature and its defense were most obviously found. 7 Preoccupied with setting out a distinctive field of historical endeavor in relation to frontier and Western history as well as environmentalism itself, most assumed that they knew the history of the large corporation all too wellits inner workings as well as its outwardly impacts. They envisioned a monolithic nineteenth and twentiethcentury economic system that offered little entry point or incentive for closer study of individual companies, businessmen, or even industries as a whole. A 1990 Journal of American History roundtable presenting the views and agendas of major environmental historians offered virtually no discussion of the shift to corporate capitalism that had become the central preoccupation of business history. 8
Astonishingly, even the worst ravages of industry have gone little studied by either business or environmental historians. As Joel Tarr and Jeffrey Stine pointed out last year in a Technology and Culture review, historians "have on the whole neglected not only worker safety but also the environmental consequences of industry and manufacturing." Most histories of the iron mining and iron and steel manufacturing, for example, "gloss over or totally ignore" the industry's environmental repercussions. 9 Until recently, historians of the chemical industry barely touched on its devastating mid-century environmental impacts, despite how these helped compel the stricter environmental regulations of the 1970s. 10
Things have started to change, however, both in business history and environmental history. First, as "organizational" lines of scholarship have matured and the limits of the Chandlerian model have become apparent, younger business historians have cast about for fresh lines of inquiry that can carry the field into new realms. The recent Hagley conference on the future of business history featured a variety of efforts to define new research agendas and analytical models, via newer and less functionalist sociological thinking about organizations, the economics of imperfect information, structurationist theory, and post-structuralist cultural analysis. Among these proposals was an appeal by one of us to make "industrial ecology" the starting point for a more environmental business history. 11
Second, changing attitudes in the business and regulatory worlds and in the fields of engineering and economics have bolstered the relevance of environmental issues to business history. The new generation of managers now taking the helm of corporations includes many men and women who grew up with the environmental movement and arguably share its goalswho seek ways to reduce business's harmful environmental impacts while maintaining or enhancing their firms's competitive advantage. "Green" packaging, ecotourism, organic foods, and other environmentally friendly forms of consumption have acquired a significant presence in the market place. 12 EPA regulators now hope to expand markets for pollution or emissions credits and to step up programs encouraging voluntary pollution reductions, beyond what is required by law. 13 Industrial engineers have pioneered the concept of industrial ecology and, following its precepts, have joined with managers at some corporations to begin developing programs in pollution source reduction, design for environment, industrial waste exchanges, product remanufacturing and other innovative technologies and strategies for reducing industry's environmental impacts. 14 Economists interested in bridging the gaps between their field and natural ecology have joined together to inaugurate an "ecological" economics and have extended analytic approaches developed to assess the value of natural resources to measure, instead, the value of entire ecosystems like forests and wetlands. 15
Related developments in environmental history and the environmental movement have encouraged environmental historians to move in similar directions. During the Clinton years, the environmental community has evolved in ways that mirror the changes taking place in business. Environmentalists have become increasingly intrigued with marketoriented ways of thinking and regulating. Whether this revival of the market signals a conservative turn in environmentalism or a frustration with legally mandated and administered controls, it has prompted growing numbers of environmental historians as well as environmentalists to start rethinking the relationships between business, markets, and environmental change. 16 Just as importantly, an "environmental justice" movement among working class and ethnic minorities has launched a powerful and influential critique of inequities in the distribution of what are predominantly corporate environmental impacts. 17
Like business historians, environmental historians are also reexamining their field's existing paradigms, seeking to recast the boundaries of their discipline. Growing frustrated with environmental history's longstanding focus on farms, forests and wilderness and fortified by a dawning recognition of the much wider scope of the "natural," many environmental historians have begun to gravitate away from the study of pristine environments toward those more thoroughly and unmistakably shaped by human hands. Environmental historians, especially younger ones, have explored a wide variety of subjects beyond the field's original purviewincluding the environmental dimensions of industrial development. 18
In short, at the start of the new millenium, both business and environmental historians have arrived at the same juncture: they've discovered the need for careful and exacting scrutiny of the firm's environmental relations. The first group stands poised to inject nature into business history, while the second is ready to inject business into environmental history. An unprecedented opportunity for collaboration now presents itself. After decades of separation, business historians can join with environmental historians in considering the role and place of nature in business development. We find this possibility extremely exciting and important. Because we are writing for the Business History Review, this essay primarily addresses this opportunity from the perspective of business historians. But we also hope that environmental historians will hear our message about the need for and value of collaboration.
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Inside <i>BHR</i>: More on Business and the Environment
The four articles in the special "Business and the Environment" issue of Business History Review, all focused on managers and the more harmful environmental dimensions of their operations, "put to rest any assumption that it is possible to confine business's historical role and place to a traditional focus on the internal organization of the firm," write Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers in their introduction.
"Like the smoke that finds its way outdoors," they continue, "like the lead that becomes coloring material for wall paint, like the oil brines that seep through the ground, each of these stories draws attention to the connections between what managers do with regard to production, marketing, and other internal business functions and people, events, and material and biological conditions in the world beyond."
Articles in the special issue include:
Hugh Gorham of Michigan Technological University on the petroleum industry's management of a form of water pollution known as oil field brines. Their efforts, writes Gorham, illustrate the initial success and ultimate failure of "pollution control by selfregulation."
Frank Uekoetter of the University of Beilefeld, Germany on the different responses of German and American industrialists to air pollution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how distinctive national cultures and political institutions affect the way business, government and society in general approach the problem of pollution and its possible solutions.
David Stradling of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University and Joel Tarr of CarnegieMellon University on the Pennsylvania Railroad's organizational and strategic response to public protest and attempted government regulation aimed at reducing smoke pollution in Chicago in the early 1900s.
Social historian Christine Warren on the U.S. government's failure, during the Progressive Era, to regulate the use of lead in paint, and its consequences for workers in lead paint factories, for consumers and for the paint industry's technology of production, product design, and industry structure.
Footnotes
1. Much of this early work gave no attention to environmental problems even though it was highly critical of the industrialists who created big business. For example, Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York, 1934), one of the early classics in American history, bitterly critiques the architects of American big business without specifically addressing their business's many harmful environmental impacts. This failure is particularly clear in books dealing with John D. Rockefeller and the development of the environmentally degrading oil industry. See for example, Ida M. Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company (New York, 1925) and Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (New York, 1953). See also Peter D. A. Jones, ed., The Robber Barons Revisited (Boston, 1968).
2. For evidence of Chandler's immediate impact, see Louis Gambols, "The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in American History," Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279-290 and Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1910 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1973). An excellent review article detailing Chandler's longer term impact is Richard R. John, "Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, The Visible Hand after Twenty Years," Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 151-200. Chandler's most important contributions to the field include Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
3. An exception is Joseph A. Pratt, "Growth of a Clean Environment? Responses to Petroleum-Related Pollution in the Gulf Coast Refining Region," Business History Review 52 (Spring 1978): 1-29. By the mid-1980s business historians were awakening to the importance of addressing environmental issues. See, for example, Richard S. Tedlow and Richard R. John, Jr., eds., Managing Big Business: Essays from the Business History Review (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), which included a section on "The Corporation, Technology, and the Environment." But this section only reprinted Pratt's article alongside two others that confined their environmental attentions to energy issues a telling indication of how little research of this sort had as yet been done. In this collection, see also Albro Martin, "James J. Hill and the First Energy Revolution: A Study in Entrepreneurship, 1865-1878," 88-106 (first appeared in Business History Review 50 [Summer 1976]: 179-197); and Richard H. K. Vietor, "The Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program: Energy Politics in the Truman Era," 299-328 (first appeared in Business History Review 54 [Spring 1980]: 1-34).
4. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," and William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1089, 1122 (quotes).
5. Reviews of this historiography include: Richard White, "Historiographic Essay; American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review (1985): 297-335; Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in idem., ed., The Ends of the Earth (New York, 1988); Alfred Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1177-89; J. Donald Hughes, "Whither Environmental History," American Society for Environmental History News 8 (Autumn, 1997):1-3.
6. The many works offering critiques of capitalism include, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930's (New York, 1979) and Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Richard White, Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Nebr., 1983); and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions; Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).
7. Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959; edition used, New York, 1975); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (third edition; New Haven, 1982); Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917-1978 (Madison, Wisc., 1983); Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, Wisc., 1984); Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston, 1981); on agriculture, see most works cited in footnote 5.
8. See Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Stephen J. Pyne, "A Roundtable: Environmental History," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087-1147.
9. Jeffrey Stine and Joel Tarr, "At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment," Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 601-641, see especially 621-225. Quotes are from pp. 621 and 623.
10. Stine and Tarr, 622-623. A big exception is the recent book by Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA (Austin, Tex., 1996) on the management of hazardous waste by the chemical industry. Far more typical is David Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy; Du Pont R&D 1902-1980 (Cambridge, U.K., 1988), which squeezes fine research into that firm's industrial toxicology into a tiny and anomalous corner of its narrative. Histories centered on a single firm deal with environmental questions in a similar vein, see Sheldon Hochheiser, Rohm and Haas: History of A Chemical Company (Philadelphia, 1986); Andrew J. Butrica, Out of Thin Air: A History of Air Products and Chemicals. Inc., 1940-1990 (New York, 1990); and David Dyer and David B. Sicilia, Labors of a Modern Hercules: Evolution of a Chemical Company (Boston, 1990); though see also Fred Aftalion, A History of the International Chemical Industry, trans. Otto Theodor Fenfey (Philadelphia, 1991). Jeffrey Meikle's Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996) carves out a more central place in its story for environmental anxieties about plastic, mostly in connection with cancer and biodegradability.
11. Philip Scranton and Roger Horowitz, eds., "The Future of Business History," Business and Economic History 26 (1997): 1-281; Christine Meisner Rosen, "Industrial Ecology and the Greening of Business History," Business and Economic History 26 (1997): 123-137.
12. For references on recent trends in green packaging, ecotourism, and organic food industry, see N.H. Lampkin and S. Padel, eds., The Economics of Organic Farming: An International Perspective (Oxon, 1994).
13. Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reducing Toxics: A New Approach to Policy and Industrial Decision Making (Washington D.C., 1995). An excellent source of information on developments in environmental regulation in the U.S. and Europe is Business and the Environment published by Cutter Information Corp. beginning in 1990.
14. Braden R. Allenby and Deanna J. Richards, eds., The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems (Washington D.C., 1994); Robert Ayres, Industrial Ecology: Towards Closing the Materials Cycle (Cheltenham, UK, 1996); John R. Ehrenfeld, "Industrial Ecology: A Strategic Framework for Product Policy and Other Sustainable Practices," The Second International Conference and Workshop on Product-Oriented Policy, Stockholm (1994); T.E. Gradel and B.R. Allenby, Industrial Ecology (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1995), T.E. Gradel and B.R. Allenby, Design for Environment (Upper Saddle River, N.J, 1996); Tim Jackson, Material Concerns, Pollution Profit and the Quality of Life (London, 1996); E.A. Lowe, J.L. Warren, and S.R. Moran, Discovering Industrial Ecology: An Executive Briefing and Source Book (Columbus, 1997); Robert Sokolow, Industrial Ecology and Global Change (Cambridge,U.K., 1994); Ronald Smith, Profit Centers in Industrial Ecology: The Business Executive's Approach to the Environment (Westport, Conn., 1998); see also the Journal of Industrial Ecology, which began in 1997 out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. A useful but already somewhat outdated reference book on this topic is Peter Groenewegen, The Greening of Industry Resource Guide and Bibliography (Washington D.C., 1996). See also Business and the Environment.
15. Robert Costanza, An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Boca Raton, Fla., 1997); Malte Michael Faber, Ecological Economics: Concepts and Methods (Cheltenham, U.K., 1996); A.M. Jansen, ed., Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability (Washington, D.C., 1994); Robert Costanza, ed., Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability (New York, 1991); Thomas Prugh et. al., Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (Solomons, Md., 1995); Herman Daly, "On Economics as a Life Science," Journal of Political Economy 76 (1968): 392-406. These approaches mostly extend the resource economics developed by Harold Hoteling ("The Economics of Exhaustible Resources," Journal of Political Economy 39 [1939]: 137ff.) and others to a growing range of natural, heretofore unpriced entities defined by ecologists and other natural scientists. Economists interested in this endeavor founded the International Society for Ecological Economics in the early 1990s.
1. Michael Kraft and Norman Vig, "Environmental Policy from the 1970's to the 1990's," in Kraft and Vid, eds., Environmental Policy in the 1990's (Washington, D.C, 1994); Harnessing Market Forces to Protect Our Environment: Initiatives for the New President, A Public Policy Study Sponsored by Senator Timothy E. Wirth, Colorado, and Senator John Heinz, Pennsylvania (Washington, D.C., 1988); see also the critical commentary by Samuel Hays in "The Future of Environmental Regulation," in Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1998), 109-114.
17. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C., 1993); Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson, 1996); Eileen Maura McGurty, "From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement," Environmental History 2 (1997): 301-23; Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women's Grassroots Movements in the U.S. and South Africa (New York, 1996).
18. William Cronon's award winning Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991) marked the emergence of this new attitude. For evidence of its spread and growing influence, see Char Miller and Hal Rothman, eds., Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1997) and William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995).