Pro-environmental announcements from global giants like General Electric and JP Morgan Chase have spotlighted corporate social responsibility. Yet, there's no mandate to promote such issues in the U.S., where some companies are clearly more proactive than others. Meanwhile, Europeans have brought "green" issues to the forefront.
Between 1917 and 1925, Henry Ford oversaw creation of the gigantic Rouge River plant in Dearborn, Mich. A marvel of engineering at the time, it was the birthplace of millions of Model As and Model Ts; its "vertical integration" approach, novel for the era, allowed all the raw materials for the cars to be assembled at one place. At its peak in the mid-1930s, it employed a virtual city of 100,000 shift workers.
But Ford's smoke-belching wonder carried a heavy environmental cost. By 1986, The Detroit Free Press called the Rouge River a "sewer for a metropolis, discharge drain for industry, dumping ground for junk and garbage" and went on to declare that "the Rouge River has become so polluted that a cleanup seems unthinkable."
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