PR Giant Edelman Cuts Ties With Oil Industry

This, I believe, is how societal change occurs. Even big changes happen a little bit at a time, unseen, below the surface, until suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a big movement makes news.

The biggest influencers in our society are business, government, and the media. The movement towards increased transparency, facilitated by the media and the tremendous growth of the Internet, has forced business and government to become more responsive to prevailing opinion.

Sitting at the intersection of all these factors are the public relations firms. Founded after the second world war by Edwin Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the fledgling science of PR was based on the discovery that men and women, when making  decisions, are generally influenced more by “unconscious fears and desires” than they are by facts. The exploitation of this discovery and the subsequent growth of the advertising industry has been a key driver of the American economy as consumers were led down a road that took them from buying what they need to buying what they want.

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RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post.