Abstract

“We are all prisoners of our perceptions” – The Institute for the Future and Monsanto Contemplate Environmentalism in the 1970s

Throughout the 1970s, the Silicon Valley consulting firm the Institute for the Future (IFF) produced reports about changing the social and regulatory climate their clients would likely face in the coming decades. For the executives at Monsanto, IFF’s most significant client, environmental regulation was a top concern. Drawing on documents from the Institute for the Future archives at Stanford University, this paper examines IFF’s work for Monsanto in the 1970s to chart changing corporate attitudes towards environmental regulation during that decade. While IFF reports on the environment from the early 1970s focused the need for corporate leaders to rethink their organizations’ relationship to the natural world, later work for Monsanto as part of Project Aware, a major IFF study, was intended to help corporate clients anticipate (and influence) changing public sentiment about the environment and mitigate the threat of environmental regulation. This shifting stance on the part of IFF and its clients, though, was fraught. For instance, a 1975 IFF report for Monsanto’s New Ventures Division (which evaluated business proposals) took the form a religious narrative. Titled “The Conservation-Minded World of 1990,” the report offers a fictional narrative about an ex-pat Jesuit priest who returns to the United States in 1990 and sees changes in attitudes towards the environment. Mirroring the concerns of executives during the 1970s, this report, (along with others that IFF created for Monsanto), reveals an ambivalence on the part of the report’s authors in trying to locate a balance between corporate social responsibility towards and environment and fending off looming environmental regulation in the name of corporate autonomy.