ABSTRACT
Environmental management is elevated from the operational level to include a significant strategic component. It can be argued that the history of environmental management in the US spans more than a century. Multinational corporations and other organizations with significant international business interests assess their environmental impacts abroad as well as at home. A strand of the movement professed a distrust of regulatory agencies and politicians and made demands directly to corporations that they begin to consider people’s lives and the environment. By the mid-1980s in the wake of the death of thousands in Bhopal, India as a tragic result of a chemical leak from a Union Carbide Plant, industry resumed its movement toward environmental responsibility with a marked paradigm shift from pollution “control” to pollution “prevention.” By 1990, clear evidence emerged that voluntary environmental programs could not only reduce liability, but also produce economic gain.
