| This dissertation describes how affected industries responded to the new environmentalism that emerged as a potent political and cultural force in late-twentieth-century America. Through a series of case studies, it traces how large corporations linked to pollution or toxics problems sought to contain the broad environmental agenda embodied in the landmark environmental laws of the 1970s. These companies and trade associations used public relations and advertising campaigns to shape popular perceptions of industrial environmental impacts. They also employed a variety of tactics to strategically manage scientific information on alleged harms, to inject cost and feasibility considerations into federal environmental laws and the regulatory process, and to challenge the policies used by federal regulators to estimate environmental risks.; Drawing on internal corporate documents, records of public relations and advertising campaigns, as well as more traditional sources, this dissertation argues that affected industries were a driving force in moving the discourse of environmental politics toward an increasingly narrow, more technical language of cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, and risk-benefit balancing. By portraying environmental regulation as an expensive endeavor fraught with heavy economic costs, affected industries helped recast environmental discourse in terms of "costs" and "benefits" that must always be carefully balanced. And by pressing for ever higher standards of proof in the scientific domain while deriding more precautionary approaches to environmental regulation as impractical quests for "zero risk", affected industries helped move discussions of environmental hazards into the highly technical arena of risk assessment where regulatory action could often be delayed for years.; This project offers a revision to the standard narrative of the environmental movement that has portrayed business as caught off guard by environmentalism and hence placed on the political defensive until the late 1970s. It shows that, even as the environmental movement obtained victories in the legislative arena, affected industries were already on the offensive on a variety of fronts by the early 1970s, working to fundamentally recast the methodologies and discourse of environmental politics in ways that would severely restrain the ambitious goals of the environmental laws of the 1970s. |
