To understand the evolution of corporate strategies for defeating environmentalism, it helps to look at the career of E. Bruce Harrison, known today as the inventor of "environmental public relations." Harrison's career began when he helped the pesticide industry attack Rachel Carson and her classic 1962 environmental book, Silent Spring. By the 1970s, however, Harrison realized that attacking environmentalists had its downside, and he began advising his clients in the art of corporate camouflage--a strategy that environmental groups have labeled "greenwashing."

The greenwashing strategy emerged at the same time that the environmental movement was undergoing an internal transformation. What began as a popular grassroots movement began to institutionalize itself. A handful of giant organizations emerged as "leaders" within the movement, paying six-figure salaries to their executives and raising hundreds of millions of dollars per year from direct mail campaigns, foundations and corporate donors.

"The activist movement that began in the early 1960s ... succumbed to success over ... the last 15 years," Harrison proclaimed in his 1993 book, Going Green. He observed that although the big environmental groups are formally incorporated as nonprofit organizations, their size and inertia have transformed them into business ventures themselves. Fundraising, he observed, had become their real primary mission. As he put it, the environmental movement's most pressing need was "not to green, but to ensure the wherewithal that enable it to green." The need for money and a "respectable" public image, he said, provided the motivation for green bureaucrats to sit down and cut deals with industry.

In the eight years since Harrison wrote Going Green, his advice has become gospel not just in the corporate suites of his clients, but in the offices of the large, Washington-based environmental groups he wrote about. Corporate partnerships have come to be viewed not just as a source of funding but even as a source of legitimation, as a sign of "success" and accomplishment. An environmental group that forms a partnership with McDonald's or International Paper usually gets some kind of concession from the company, however trivial, which the organization can tout as proof of its ability to tame the corporate beast.

This issue of PR Watch examines some of the dubious fruits of these corporate-environmental partnerships. It is not a pretty story. The very groups that say they care about the environment are lending their good names to help corporations maintain the status quo. Companies may sell eco-happy trinkets or surrender to environmentalist demands on small issues, but overall these deals are helping companies use their financial and political clout to divide and conquer the environmental movement.