Abstract
The environmentalist Paul Hawken recently published an article in Orion Magazine in which he lauded the hundreds of thousands of organizations in the USA and countries around the globe that are working to find solutions to an array of increasingly serious environmental, economic, and social justice problems. These groups come from all parts of civil society, including business. As Hawken puts it, they include “research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations.” They are part of broad-based, grassroots movements that are working, often collaboratively, at the local as well as national and international levels, to restructure communities and economies to ameliorate poverty and avert the looming social and economic crises that will result from – or be worsened by – the great environmental problems of our times: climate change, toxic air and water pollution, and the depletion of natural resources.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Hawken, “To Remake the World,” Orion Magazine, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/265May/June2007.
- 2.
For descriptions of urban smoke problems, see David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). This kind of air pollution was a problem wherever coal was used as fuel on an industrial scale: see Frank Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain Since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
- 3.
For an overview of the Citizens’ Association’s attempts to reform machine politics in Chicago, see Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 53–63. Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Reports of the Citizens Association of Chicago (Chicago, 1876–1925) contains the record of its many initiatives in the area of environmental and civic improvement.
- 4.
Christine Meisner Rosen, “The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Modernization of the U. S. Meat Packing Industry, 1865–1880,” Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History, June 2007: 327–8.
- 5.
Chicago Department of Health, Annual Report for 1881 and 1882 (Chicago, 1882), 31–2, 34–44; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1878 (Chicago, 1878), 8; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1882 (Chicago, 1882), 6–7; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1883 (Chicago, 1883), 6–8; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1885 (Chicago, 1885), 5–6; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1885, 15; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1887 (Chicago, 1887), 13; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1888 (Chicago, 1888), 25–6; Citizens’ Association of Chicago, Annual Report for 1889 (Chicago, 1889), 8–9. Bitterly opposed by many businesses, the smoke ordinance was upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1884 in Harmon v. City of Chicago, 110 Ill. 400, 51 Am. Rep. 698.
- 6.
Christine Meisner Rosen, “Businessmen Against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Business History Review, Fall 1995: 351–97.
- 7.
Ibid., 398; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 479–80; Frank Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke, 31–3.
- 8.
For general overviews of these movements in the USA as a whole, see Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives; Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke; Robert Dale Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in America, 1880–1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Missouri, 1973); Robert D. Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in America, 1880–1917,“ in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1980), 83–103.
- 9.
Lucius H. Cannon, Smoke Abatement: A Study of the Police Power as Embodied in Laws, Ordinances and Court Decisions (St. Louis: St. Louis Public Library, 1924), 211–2, 222–3; Joel A. Tarr and Carl Zimring, “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis,” in Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis, ed. Andrew Hurley (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997), 203–4; Robert Dale Grinder, “The War Against St. Louis’s Smoke 1891–1924,” Missouri Historical Review 69 (January. 1975): 192–3.
- 10.
Tarr and Zimring, “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis,” 204; Cannon, Smoke Abatement, 213–22; Grinder, “War Against St. Louis’s Smoke,” 193–4.
- 11.
Grinder, “War Against St. Louis’s Smoke,” 194–205; Cannon, Smoke Abatement, 222–5; Mrs. Ernest R. Kroeger, “Smoke Abatement in St. Louis,” American City, June 1912, 907–8.
- 12.
Tarr and Zimring, “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis,” 205–20; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 163–76; Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke, 72, 77–82; Cannon, Smoke Abatement, 225.
- 13.
Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 52–5, 211, n. 40; Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke, 72. See the lists of “Subscribers and Donors” in the league’s annual reports for names of individuals and corporate members. For a first person description of how league members helped the city smoke inspector enforce the law, see Matthew Nelson, “Smoke Abatement in Cincinnatti,” American City 2 (January 1910): 8–10, Reprinted in H. Wayne Morgan (ed.), Industrial America: The Environment and Social Problems, 1865–1920 (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1974), 73–77.
- 14.
Angela Gugliotta, “‘Hell with the Lid Taken Off:’ A Cultural History of Air Pollution – Pittsburgh” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Notre Dame, 2004), 183–231; John O’Connor Jr, “The History of the Smoke Nuisance and of Smoke Abatement in Pittsburgh,” Industrial World March 24, 1913: 353–4; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 42–3, 207 n. 12. See also Angela Gugliotta, “Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868–1914,” Environmental History 5, no. 2 (April 2000): 165–93.
- 15.
Gugliotta, “Hell with the Lid Taken Off,” 232–8; Robert Dale Grinder, “From Insurgency to Efficiency: The Smoke Abatement Campaign in Pittsburgh Before World War I,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 61 (July 1978): 189–90.
- 16.
Gugliotta, “Hell with the Lid Taken Off,” 238–44.
- 17.
Grinder, “From Insurgency to Efficiency,” 190–9; Gugliotta, “Hell with the Lid Taken Off,” 247–313; O’Connor Jr, “History of the Smoke Nuisance and of Smoke Abatement in Pittsburgh,” 354.
- 18.
Gugliotta, “Hell with the Lid Taken Off,” 313–7; O’Connor Jr, “History of the Smoke Nuisance and of Smoke Abatement in Pittsburgh,” 354–5.
- 19.
Gugliotta, “Hell with the Lid Taken Off,” 368–450.
- 20.
Ibid., 476–614; Sherie R. Mershon and Joel A. Tarr, “Strategies for Clean Air: The Pittsburgh and Allegheny County Smoke Control Movements, 1940–1960,” in Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region, ed. Joel A. Tarr (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 145–73.
- 21.
http://www.ceres.org/page.aspx?pid=705; http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/index.html; http://www.pewclimate.org/business;http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/energy-environment/our-program; http://www.wbcsd.org/templates/TemplateWBCSD5/layout.asp?MenuID=1. For a general overview, see Andres R. Edwards, The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005), 49–112.
- 22.
- 23.
http://www.incr.com/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=198&srcid=-2; The Carbon Disclo-sure Project is a similar London-based international NGO.http://www.cdproject.net/; http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/
- 24.
http://www.sustainablebiz.org/; http://www.bayareaalliance.org/business-diff-sustainable.html. For links to a set of similar organizations in other states, see http://www.livingeconomies.org/networks.
- 25.
Several semiconductor trade organizations have programs in this area. See, for example, http://www.sia-online.org/backgrounders_wsc_eshtf.cfm and http://wps2a.semi.org/wps/portal/_pagr/113/_pa.113/798. For activity at a local level in Silicon Valley, see http://svlg.net/campaigns/cleanandgreen/index.php. See also http://www.piba.org/sponsored_events.html (these events change over time).
- 26.
Harold L. Platt, “Invisible Gases: Smoke, Gender, and the Redefinition of Environmental Policy in Chicago, 1900–1920,” Planning Perspectives 10 (January 1995): 67–97; Platt, Shock Cities, 468–941; Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air”; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives. For critiques of this interpretation and more positive assessments of business’s role, see: Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke, 20–42; Frank Uekoetter, “Divergent Responses to Identical Problems: Businessmen and the Smoke Nuisance in Germany and the United States, 1880–1917,” Business History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 641–76; Christine Meisner Rosen, “Business Leadership in the Movement to Regulate Industrial Air Pollution in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America,” Economic History Yearbook (2009 forthcoming). See also Rosen, “Businessmen Against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago.” These works focus on smoke reform during the Progressive Era. Mershon and Tarr, “Devastation and Renewal,” 169–73, discuss the limits of the business–government collaboration that guided enforcement of smoke regulation in the 1950s and 1960s.
- 27.
Platt, Shock Cities, 468–73; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 119–20.
- 28.
Platt, Shock Cities, 469–70, 485–6; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 120.
- 29.
Platt, Shock Cities, 485–7. See also David Stradling and Joel A. Tarr, “Environmental Activism, Locomotive Smoke, and the Corporate Response: The Case of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Chicago Smoke Control,” Business History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 690–1.
- 30.
Platt, Shock Cities, 486–8; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 125–7.
- 31.
Platt, Shock Cities, 487–9; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 115–8, 120–1, 123–6.
- 32.
Platt, Shock Cities, 486–7; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 126.
- 33.
Platt, Shock Cities, 486–9; Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 126–30; Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry. Committee of Investigation on Smoke Abatement and Electrification of Railway Terminals, Smoke Abatement and Electrification of Railway Terminals in Chicago (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1915). For an in-depth analysis of this episode from the perspective of the management of the Pennsylvania Railroad, see Stradling and Tarr, “Environmental Activism, Locomotive Smoke, and the Corporate Response,” 689–702.
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Rosen, C.M. (2010). The Role of Business Leaders in Community Sustainability Coalitions: A Historical Perspective. In: Clark, W. (eds) Sustainable Communities. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0219-1_2
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