“Who are those guys?”
That’s the question that keeps popping up in Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid. The pair of outlaws find themselves
pursued by a posse of lawmen. Try as they might, Butch and the Kid
cannot throw them off their trail, thus the exasperated query.
Fifteen years ago, some Americans must have asked the same
question about a bunch of tax-exempt greens under the banner of the
Natural Resources
Defense Council. In 1989, “those guys” pulled off the mother of
all publicity coups, which became the model for subsequent enviro
campaigns.
If the NRDC’s coup was made into a movie, it might be called
The Great Alar Caper — Alar being the trade name of a
chemical then used by apple growers to delay ripening. Turns out,
the longer apples stay on the tree, the better chance they have of
developing a nice, shiny look, which fetches top dollar in stores.
Alar prevented apples from rotting prematurely during this natural
process.
The problem: A 1973 study suggested Alar had carcinogenic
properties. After mulling it over, in 1985, the Environmental
Protection Agency drew up plans to phase out its use. But then
additional research made the EPA think that Alar might not
contribute to cancer after all.
UNHAPPY WITH THE pace of the EPA, which was wary of acting on
brittle evidence, members of the NRDC went to work. They produced
their own study playing up the supposed dangers of Alar, entitled
“Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children’s Food,” and hired a
PR company, Fenton Communications, to spread word of the study.
Here’s where the Alar Caper starts to pick up steam. In the
words of journalist Peter Carlson, “Fenton engineered a PR campaign
that was the worst thing to happen to the apple since Eve.”
Working together, Fenton and NRDC did something unprecedented —
they saturated the media with scare-stories about Alar. A top
Fenton executive documented the campaign’s successes in a memo
written after the PR guns had fallen silent:
“Media coverage,” he boasted, “included two segments on CBS
60 Minutes, the covers of Time and
Newsweek…the Phil Donahue show, multiple appearances on
Today, Good Morning America, and CBS This
Morning, several stories on each of the network evening
newscasts, MacNeil/Lehrer, multiple stories in the
N.Y. Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times
and newspapers around the country, three stories in USA
Today, People, four women’s magazines with a combined
circulation of 17 million (Redbook, Family
Circle, Women’s Day and New Woman), and
thousands of repeat stories in local media around the nation and
world…”
It was a surprisingly good return on an investment of just
$26,000 public relations dollars over five months. Apple sales
plummeted and then dropped even further when actress Meryl Streep
became a spokeswoman for the cause of banning Alar, which set off
another round of scare stories, this time with a celebrity
angle.
The greens’ victory was total. Within weeks of Streep testifying
before Congress, Uniroyal, the company that manufactured Alar,
began the triage to save its reputation, withdrawing the chemical
from the U.S. market. In November of 1989, the EPA ordered a ban on
the sale, distribution and use. The NRDC reaped enormous publicity,
and its PR firm patted itself on the back. “We submit,” a Fenton
exec modestly wrote, “this campaign as a model for other non-profit
organizations.”
THE EXEC WAS RIGHT, of course. One observer called the “apples,
children, cancer” formula “irresistible.” The media offensive was
criticized by many toxicologists who were, and remain, unconvinced
that Alar posed a health threat. But careful science was quickly
overridden by the hysteria over the possibility that apples could
be killing children.
It’s a formula other green non-profits have been aping ever
since: Compose a study; use Madison Avenue techniques to create a
media buzz, enlist celebrity support; boil the issue down to
easy-to-understand, often misleading terms that can be repeatedly
endlessly (e.g., “apples, children, cancer”; “fishing nets, canned
tuna, dead dolphins”; “SUVs, Mid-East oil, terrorism”) and hope the
issue catches fire. If they strike a nerve, and spark a panicked
stampede by consumers, then their place in the history books is
secured.
