This essay originally published in the Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
The opening paragraph of a Fortune article from 1970 could easily be a mission statement for this week’s Fortune Impact Initiative 2024, a gathering of business executives focused on centering “people, planet, and purpose” in Atlanta:
“No other group of Americans finds itself in quite as much of a quandary over the environment question as the men who head the nation’s largest corporations,” wrote Robert S. Diamond in February 1970. “The decisions they make, and the financial resources they commit, will be crucial to success of the cleanup effort. They are under great public pressure to act responsibly, but on the other hand, they also have obligations to stockholders, employees, indeed to an economic system that thrives on ever increasing production and profits.”
The article, published a month after President Richard Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law and two months before the first Earth Day, laid out the results of a survey by the legendary public opinion pollster Daniel Yankelovich of 270 chief executives in that year’s Fortune 500. Those men (and they were all men) were personally interviewed “at length” about their views of “the environment problem, as it affects them both as citizens and as leaders of business.”
And they had plenty of concerns, as Diamond explains: “A Pittsburgh executive complained about the putrid smell of sulphur from a nearby plant that wafts over his house each morning. A steelman is irritated by the noxious exhaust fumes that engulf his car as he sits idly in congested traffic every evening on the way home from work. An Ohio executive is distressed by the black ash that settles on his picturesque white frame house, keeping it in a perpetual state of untidiness. Reflecting the view of many others, a San Francisco executive said, grimly, ‘I’m aware of the condition of the environment daily and hourly.’”
More than half—57%—told Yankelovich’s team that they wanted the federal government to step up regulation of pollution and the environment, while another 29% wanted current regulations maintained. Only 8% wanted those regulations cut back. “Business, which has led the U.S. into unrivaled prosperity, wants in this case to be led,” Diamond concluded, quoting one executive who told the surveyors: “I never thought I’d get to the point where I’d want the government to come in…but I don’t think there’s any other way.”
Those executives got their wish in December of that year, when the U.S. House and Senate approved Nixon’s proposal to form the Environmental Protection Agency.
The CEOs weren’t for indiscriminate or draconian regulation, of course. But in a time when the EPA has become something of a political football, it’s striking to see that Big Business in 1970 largely stood behind government-enforced collective action on the environment. For those leaders, it was partly about sharing the burden and creating a level playing field, as one CEO explained:
“’If I correct my plant problems, but my competitor doesn’t, that company has a competitive advantage. I have committed huge sums; they haven’t. In fairness to my stockholders, therefore, I can’t make that first move.’ The executive added emphatically: ‘I see no hope except for legislation.’”
