In 1969, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.) witnessed the effects of a major oil spill that happened off Santa Barbara, California in January and February of that year. He had long been trying to spark interest in environmental issues. He also noticed the teach-ins offered on college campuses to protest the Vietnam War. Could some kind of environmental teach-in work just as well? With that, he conceived the idea for what became Earth Day in 1970.

Nelson announced his plan to the Annual Symposium of the Washington Environmental Council (Seattle, September 1969). He may or may not have known that students from some large universities had discussed a similar idea at the University of Wisconsin in July 1969. He invited Congressman Paul McCloskey (R-Calif.) to serve as co-chair of a national committee.

Nelson ignored advice to maintain strict personal control over the teach-in. Instead, he set up a separate entity, Environmental Teach-In, Inc. He hired a Harvard Law School student named Dennis Hayes to plan the details. Hayes recruited other student activists with experience in the civil rights and anti-war movements. It was they, not Nelson, who coined the term Earth Day.

Lest any of my readers who are younger than 30 look with disapproval on baby boomers, baby boomers represented an outsized segment of the leadership, and why not? They were the first generation of people who had unnatural substances such as DDT and man-made radioactive isotopes in their bones and fat. The oldest member of Hayes’ coordinating committee was 28.

One slogan of the time was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” It seems that younger generations too often dismiss the efforts of their elders. Know of a certainty, then, that your children and grandchildren will look at you the same way you look at your elders!

Preparation for Earth Day

Hayes assumed that his team would provide ideas for local organizers, but he quickly learned that Nelson’s announcement had already inspired local groups to start plans. Environmental Teach-Ins, therefore, became a clearinghouse for information and a central location for informing news media of the various plans all over the country.

The local coordinators came from a variety of backgrounds. At universities, they were usually, but not always, students: graduate student coordinators tended to major in one of the sciences while undergraduate coordinators tended to be leaders of student government. At public schools, teachers and students worked together to organize events. Other coordinators included local politicians, young professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.), and a lot of housewives, a group that already had a long history of environmental activism.

Some local groups worked through one of the four established environmental organizations (Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Izaak Walton League, National Wildlife Federation). Others organized around local issues.

Because Senator Nelson had announced what became Earth Day six months in advance, he gave the media plenty of time to prepare. Only a few newspapers and magazines regularly covered environmental issues before 1970. Television news did not mention Earth Day until April. During April 1970, many news publications devoted special sections to environmental issues. No news outlet ever went back to neglecting them once the events had passed.

Participation in Earth Day events

Earth Day was nominally April 22, but activities were hardly limited to that day. In many places, teach-ins took place over an entire week. The University of Michigan hosted a major event on March 11.

The event succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Although inspired by mass protests for civil rights, anti-war, and feminist causes, Earth Day dwarfed them all both in terms of the variety of activities and the sheer numbers of people involved. Hayes later estimated that Earth Day was five times larger than any anti-war rally and twenty times larger than any civil rights rally (including those organized simultaneously in multiple locations). Probably more than 35,000 people spoke at the various events. At least that many probably helped organize and coordinate events. Surely, millions of people listened to the speeches.

Speakers included politicians, union and business leaders, scientists, entertainers, and authors of best-selling books.

Participants represented the broadest spectrum of the American public: Democrats and Republicans, business and union leaders, various levels of educational background from very little to doctoral degrees, celebrities—not to mention people living in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Everyone had concerns and eagerly took the chance to express them.

Opponents likewise came from both ends of the political spectrum. President Richard Nixon had no personal interest in environmental issues, but when their popularity became evident, he took leadership. For that reason, Students for a Democratic Society came out against Earth Day, claiming it distracted from protesting the Vietnam War. Daughters of the American Revolution, noting that April 22 was Lenin’s birthday, considered the environmental movement among subversive attempts to undermine American values.

Some accomplishments of Earth Day

Earth Day united and mobilized the public around eliminating pollution to make the nation cleaner and safer. For at least the next decade, politicians found that supporting environmental legislation was a safe issue.

At least two dozen important federal laws were enacted or amended during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. These include the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972, amended 1977), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), and an act with a very long name generally known as Superfund (1980).

Congress passed the act that created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. It is now difficult to remember that, under the direction of William Ruckleshaus, it was a very popular agency. Alas, its popularity could not continue. It had to balance environmental values with individual and corporate property values, for example, and decide how to interpret scientific findings to make regulations that had to satisfy conflicting interests.

Some environmental problems have been successfully addressed since 1970:

• The air is much cleaner, if not clean enough. Smog and acid rain are less of a problem. Smokestack scrubbers and catalytic converters have reduced particulate matter in the air.
• Water pollution is greatly reduced with clean water legislation and regulations. For example, much of Lake Erie had been declared dead by 1970. Removal of phosphates from laundry detergent is but one change that has helped bring it back to life.
• Drinking water is safer. Before, local water systems had unsafe levels of heavy metals and fecal bacteria. Few plants were regularly inspected. Most plant operators lacked adequate training in the chemistry of water treatment.
• Removal of lead from gasoline, paints, plumbing fixtures, etc. has nearly eliminated childhood lead poisoning.
• Pesticide poisoning, the subject of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, has been reduced both by new pesticide formulas and the development of non-chemical pest-control practices.

Many people probably participated in Earth Day events with enthusiasm and then, as the news cycle shifted to other issues, lost interest. On the other hand, it became a life-changing event for a larger number of people. Earth Day prompted some people to change career plans and make drastic lifestyle changes. Probably most people affected by Earth Day took less dramatic interest, but Earth Day influenced their opinions and choices for the rest of their lives.

Excesses and mistakes

Reputable scientists, such as Barry Commoner, provided important leadership. Unfortunately, two of the most influential voices, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and Garret Hardin, were demonstrably wrong about nearly everything they wrote.

Mistakes about population

To begin with, they were both Malthusians who issued dire warnings about overpopulation and famine. Malthus was wrong in 1798 and remained wrong in 1970.

Ehrlich and Hardin proclaimed, for example, that it would be impossible for India ever to be self-sufficient in food. At the very same time, Norman Borlaug was earning the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for making India self-sufficient in food. Hardin, at least, seems to have been aware of his work and mocked it.

Republicans provided much of the political leadership behind environmental legislation, but the people most active in writing about environmental issues represented the left wing of the political spectrum. Ehrlich and others proposed abortion as the answer to what he called “people pollution.” No push for abortion was complete without scorn for religion and traditional morality. (Hardin, by the way, was a white supremacist, but left wingers still cite his theories with approval.)

The fact of the matter is that the world is producing enough food to feed a world population that is more than double what it was in 1970 (about 3.7 billion). There are fewer people starving to death in absolute numbers than there used to be. Famine and starvation result in part from failures in food distribution and the fact that nearly 30% of the food farmers produce is wasted before anyone can eat it. Meanwhile, China’s efforts to achieve zero population growth with its one-child policy has turned into an unmitigated demographic disaster.

A massive climate blunder

Ehrlich and others made an additional blunder by warning of a coming ice age as a result of environmental conditions as they existed. Climate had cooled in recent years, apparently as a result of a major volcanic eruption.

How much of the skepticism over global warming has resulted from cynics who remember the handwringing over such bad science?

Real scientists of the time noted the potential for warming from excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but they didn’t write best-selling books or publish their findings in mass-market magazines.

A huge blind spot of the entire leadership

Apart from bad science, the leaders of the environmental movement in the 1970s had other blind spots. They were quick to propose legislation and condemn corporate greed. They failed to provide anything for the general public to do about the environment beyond attending demonstrations and writing letters to legislators.

Recycling infrastructure, for example, did not exist at the time, and the issue of recycling got very little attention.

It is excessive consumption, not excessive population, that drove the environmental problems of the 1970s as it does today. Commoner made the connection. Hardly anyone else did.

No one seemed to object that houses and lots were growing larger as families got smaller. Compared to today’s low flow plumbing fixtures, those houses wasted a lot of water and that is only one problem. In general, waste by households got a pass. It was so much easier to criticize government and industry.

Nowadays, environmentalists commonly name consumption and excess production as the root of environmental problems. Meanwhile, houses and lots have gotten even bigger. Even so, people accumulate so much stuff that they must rent storage space for the overflow, if they don’t send it to landfills. We are addicted to convenience. As Walt Kelly’s Earth Day Pogo cartoon notes, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Source

Before and after the first Earth Day, 1970 / David M. Guion – available both in Kindle and paperback editions. Please use this affiliate link.