One Utility With a Better Idea : Does putting ‘environmentalist’ in charge suggest it means business about environment?

Any doubt that the environmental movement is now mainstream American and that big companies are beginning to figure that out should vanish with the case of John Bryson.

Fresh out of Yale Law School, Class of 1969, Bryson and a group of like-minded Yale lawyers created the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970. It went on to spearhead a national attack on dirty air.

Their first big victory was over a Southern power company that claimed it was contributing to clean air by building smokestacks so tall that the wind carried pollution far, far away from the neighborhood.

This year, the NRDC is still hard at work to clean up the environment, promoting, among other things, Proposition 128, California’s so-called Big Green initiative.

This week, at age 47, Bryson has taken over as chairman and chief executive officer of Southern California Edison Co.

Although nobody could be sure at the time, Bryson was handpicked in 1984 by Howard P. Allen. Allen retired as chief of Edison effective Monday after 36 years with the utility company, during which he steered it into position as the nation’s biggest.

A former Stanford law professor, Allen was an Edison lobbyist in Sacramento in his early years with the company. His understanding of politics when he left Sacramento was as considerable as his sense of humor.

Both his political instincts and his sharp wit came into play when Allen filled two vice presidencies at Edison in 1984. One job went to Bryson, who by that time had served in private law practice and as chairman of the State Public Utilities Commission as an appointee of former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

The other job went to Michael Peevey, who was at the time head of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, the creation largely of industry and construction unions. The council often provided the kind of heavy lifting that was required in the 1970s to move environmentalists out of the path of a project that was important to the industry-labor coalition.

There was humor in Allen’s mirror-image appointments, if for no other reason than that he put in play a six-year guessing game about which of his vice presidents would get his job.

There was also solid politics. Environmental awareness is now planted deep in society. Edison wanted to make certain that people understood that. Nothing says it better than putting Bryson in charge.