by Brian Tokar

About the author: Brian Tokar is a faculty member at Goddard College and Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont. He is the author of Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash.

. . . the IPUAIC was a creature of the smog, born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power. —Italo Calvino, "Smog," 1958

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, corporate managers have sought to obscure the social and environmental impacts of pollution. Like Calvino’s bedraggled editor of a fictional trade journal improbably named Purification—the organ of an industry-sponsored Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers—corporate...