By Tom Debley, Director, Heritage Resources
Last week, Breathe California honored Kaiser Permanente with its leadership award “for its commitment to environmental sustainability through the promotion of healthy communities, green buildings, and green buying practices in the Kaiser medical network, serving as a model for the health care industry.”
Earth Day seems an appropriate moment to talk about the history behind such an honor. The values behind Kaiser Permanente’s commitment to the environment are, so to speak, part of our DNA.
1938 Grand Coulee Dam hospital featured repurposed air conditioning equipment from Dr. Sidney Garfield's very first hospital in 1933.
Back in 1938, for example, our founding physician, Sidney R. Garfield, retrofitted a hospital for Henry J. Kaiser’s workers at the construction site of Grand Coulee Dam in the eastern Washington desert. Never one to let anything go to waste if it could be recycled, Garfield ordered that the air conditioning system from a small, abandoned hospital he had built in Southern California’s Mojave Desert be shipped to Washington state and reassembled for his Grand Coulee hospital.
Garfield’s partner in medical care operations, Henry Kaiser, was no less committed to sustainability and environmental sensitivity in his vast industrial operations. In 1942, Kaiser built his steel mill in Fontana, Calif., to produce steel plate for ship construction during World War II. The first steel mill west of the Rocky Mountains, Kaiser insisted that his engineers make it the cleanest in the United States. As one of his biographers, Albert P. (Al) Heiner, recalled, “…His engineers and operators knew they would always have Kaiser’s backing in their efforts to be leaders in the field of air pollution control.”
And indeed they were leaders.
When Henry J. Kaiser built the first American steel mill west of the Rockies, seen here in the 1940s, he ordered his engineers to make it the cleanest in the U.S.
“When smog became a serious hazard in the mid-1950s, rapidly expanding operations at Fontana came under rigorous scrutiny,” wrote historian Mark S. Foster in his book “Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West.” ”Kaiser Steel installed the most sophisticated smokestack and furnace emission screening devices available.”
As the Christian Science Monitor reported in 1959, Kaiser’s engineers didn’t just install that advanced air pollution control equipment; they also built a laboratory to study the effects of air contaminants on plant life in three greenhouses constructed in the path of downwind smoke.
Consider, too, that in the months before there was an Earth Day, Kaiser Steel published a report to the community celebrating this history. “…We feel Kaiser Steel is a fully-responsible industrial citizen in our community. We’re pioneers in air pollution control research… We want clean air just as much as anyone else…maybe more.”
One of the people who probably had a hand in that was Al Heiner, who was Kaiser Steel’s vice president for public relations. But before you conclude that this was merely PR spin, consider that Al Heiner was a co-founder of the 53-year-old League to Save Lake Tahoe and co-author of the slogan used to this day by the conservation organization: “Keep Tahoe Blue.”
Such an activity from a Kaiser executive was the rule, not the exception, under Henry Kaiser’s leadership. As Heiner once recalled, “With his encouragement, Kaiser personnel at all levels played leading roles in nearly every worthwhile community activity…”
It comes as no historical surprise, then, that Kaiser Permanente also was in the forefront of environmental issues in the 1960s.
When some critics derided Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring as “patently unsound” and filled with “oversimplifications and downright errors,” Kaiser Permanente invited her to deliver the keynote address at a 1963 symposium for 1,500 physicians, scientists, and journalists to explore issues related to pesticides, radiation, cigarettes, and drugs.
Acknowledging that “such viewpoints promote controversy,” Clifford H. Keene, MD, vice president and general manager of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, opened the program saying the purpose was “to examine the propensity and the ability of man to harm man on a grand scale.”
“This endeavor,” Keene added, “is part of our continuing program of education integral to the professional climate of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. …Those of us who are devoted to the physical and mental well-being of man look to scientists in every field for assistance and guidance in our task.”
On Earth Day 2010, dozens of activities are taking place across the country involving Kaiser Permanente facilities and employees and physicians. Now, you may understand why. It’s in our DNA.
