Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary
On the 50th Anniversary
Memories of a Road to the First Earth Day
Steven Schmidt / GreenPolicy360 Siterunner
It started on a Schwinn bike in the mid-1960s. My road to April 22, 1970, the day that would be called the first "Earth Day", began with a response by George E. Brown our newly elected local Congressman.
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr
I'd asked George, a plump fellow with a big smilel, to help me as a high school debate student arguing about the risks of nuclear war and 'nth country proliferation', the school year's debate topic. Our era was the height of the Cold War that had suddenly gotten hot with the near catastrophe of US-Russia nuclear missile launches during the Cuban Crisis. I wanted to better understand the international problems that could end in nuclear disaster. I figured a Congressman could at least point me in the right direction.
My perspective as a kid from East Los Angeles was limited but I knew enough to know that in 1962, one year before Brown was elected, came close to being that hot flash in the sky.
Schools practiced the Duck and Cover and those sirens became real. The possibility of death by nuclear weapons was not far off. I know this both viscerally and intellectually. My thought in contacting the Congressman was that I could get an advantage by knowing the details of nuclear weapons and I knew Congressman Brown was in the news talking about them. I didn't know that day that the man who was about to become a thirty year + friend, and mentor to me, was also a hard negotiator. He told me he'd help me with nuclear issues for my debating, if I would drive around on my bike in neighborhoods during his re-election campaigns and put up signs (and take down signs.) I eagerly agreed.
Rep. Brown would go on to head up the science and technology committee in the House of Representatives, become instrumental in the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act. oversee 'Big Science' initiatives of the first generation of NASA earth science missions, including LANDSAT and beginning baselines of data research of our earth systems. George, as I came to call him would draft the first National Climate Act in 1978 and shepherd its passage. He also was, at times, a controversial 'peacenik', he opposed the Vietnam War's policies. He was opposed to the nuclear weapons arms race.
That day he and I first met was at the beginning, before his decades long career and before I was fortunate enough to share many of the moments as both of our work ran on parallel paths.
But let me go back to the Schwinn and another memory.
The x-ray George showed me in his office. It left a strong imprint on my consciousness as a kid growing up in the worst years of LA smog. I had asthma as did many kids and the x-ray was of a kid's lungs, after death. The impairment, the darkness, was evident and George carried on that day, the trained engineer that he was, talking about how 'we' needed to clean the air up, to make LA a model, California a model of what could happen if the people protected the kids. I don't remember all the details of his plan, but I remember the x-ray.
The Congressman was a man of action and I have to say his words led to deeds. He made plans, I learned over the years, engineer's plan, and he pursued them with his rumpled suits and pipe smoking and his twinkling eye. He also knew politics and could persuade, as he did, politicos right and left.
So let's talk the biggest politico of the Republican Party, Richard M. Nixon from Whittier, a nearby town and a man that George Brown knew he had to work with if he was going to get his agenda accomplished.
Up top, clean air.
Nixon would be elected in 1968 on a promise to end the Vietnam War. The political world was in upheaval with assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Riots had broken out. The 68 Democratic convention in Chicago was a violent riot in itself and Nixon hoped to take advantage of the politics of the day, even as he clamped down on a strongly growing peace movement. This is where I come back into the story of the first Earth Day.
I had gone off to USC in downtown LA, had become a student activist and met Rep. Allard Lowenstein D-NY, during one of my meetings. He asked me to fly to Washington and help organize a new anti-war group called the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. I met the other organizers, Sam Brown, Dave Hawk, David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar and Congressman Lowenstein hovered in the background. I signed up.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moratorium_to_End_the_War_in_Vietnam
My world dramatically changed as I returned to USC. It was time to pivot from a simpler life. I turned down my acceptance to Berkeley and decided USC would be the epicenter in California for the Moratorium. We'd be telling Berkeley students what to do, just the thought of our historically far-right campus changing stripes and going into the Free Speech Bay area to coordinate the statewide peace movement was enough motivation for me to go full out.
We arranged to take over most of the SC Religious Center building offices to coordinate Moratorium teach-ins, strikes, organizing. Congressman Brown was of great assistance and the first state-wide protest on October 15, 1969 became a huge event. At USC, we put together a peace day in Exposition Park, a crowd of thousands. I spoke, Rev. Ralph Abernathy spoke, Paul Schrade, the union leader who was shot when Bobby Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan spoke, Harold Willens of Business Executives for Peace added the business community's voice -- marches went to City Hall, all together it was a public statement that was historic, the largest anti-war group, the Moratorium committee across the nation sent a message to President Nixon.
What we didn't know but would find out later was how close the nation and world came to commencing a nuclear conflict in 1969. Let's pause here -- it is more than important to slow down here and talk about another nuclear weapons close call. The reporting on this came from the National Security Council years later. Mort Halperin, Roger Morris, Dan Ellsberg would write about it.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had a plan to end the war in Vietnam by escalating and going even beyond B-29 bombings with greater magnitude than the bombing tonnage of WWII. The nuclear war plans were drawn and ready to go -- what stopped it?
Here, take a look at this passage from Dan Ellsberg's book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner from our GreenPolicy360 associate --
• https://www.strategicdemands.com/doomsday-machine/
• https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-Planner-ebook/dp/B074HZMN71/
• https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-Planner ebook/dp/B074HZMN71/#reader_B074HZMN71
I should now, in the interest of full disclosure add that in 1969-70 I had become a friend of Dan Ellsberg as he went through his now well known preparations and release of the "Pentagon Papers". As a leader of the anti-war efforts, I listened to Dan's revelations that found their way into my speeches, work, travels. The lies of the leaders of the country became top of mind when the facts of the war were revealed. That the president was close to dropping nuclear weapons to further escalate was not known to me at that time, but certainly the strategy of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee was to demonstrate to the President and country that mainstream American opposed the carnage and the failed policy of inserting the US into a civil war between North and South Vietnam.
Nixon almost took Vietnam war nuclear in November 1969
"There was pressure to make the war larger" and "nuclear targets were picked" by the Nixon administration, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower revealed.
The first Earth Day began on the East Coast and rolled East to West following the time zones. Huge demonstrations in DC, Philadelphia, New York City and many cities, schools, college campuses had their 'teach ins' and then the Midwest, Chicago was pretty amazing with Alinsky, and across the Mountain states to the Coast. Coast to Coast, a popular movement came to be.
An astonishing success, the first Earth Day in 1970 was celebrated by some 20 million Americans on 2,000 college campuses, at 10,000 primary and secondary schools, and in hundreds of communities. More than 40 years later, its commemoration attracts hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.
- * * *
Even as the first Earth Day Teach In saw great numbers and pressured President Nixon and Congress, the President Nixon known for his hard politics and maneuvering before his ultimate impeachment, chose to invaded Cambodia setting off student protest across the country in mid-1970. At Kent State students were shot and the war came home. For many, as a result, the memories today are still hot when the Vietnam war is talked about.
What isn't talked about but would be a profound disastrous legacy, for certain, are the consequences of a US choice to launched nuclear weapons. The fallout would have been generational. Subsequent nuclear proliferation inevitable. No nuclear arms treaties that history records and draw down of the 'superpowers' nuclear weapons that happened in the 1980s and 90s.
We can now look back and see that the environmental movement that sprang from the anti-war/peace movement carried on an anti-nuclear agenda in the 80s and 90s, and became an international movement.
The environmental movement that sprang from the global realization passed on to us by the NASA Apollo missions were shaping a new generation and modern environmental movement. Global consciousness was moving into the mainstream and the memorable, first-ever full-color images of Planet Earth, now described as the most viewed photos of all time, were ripples and waves of a new green politics across the world.
In turn, the new vision went beyond the destruction of war to construct an environmental foundation that lasts to this day, even as the current president attempts to roll back and destroy decades of progress.
How did the Environmental Teach-ins that Turned into Earth Day spring up?
Here's how open-source Wikipedia describes the early days of organizing.
In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be celebrated on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise was later sanctioned in a proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a United States Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed the idea to hold a nationwide environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. He hired a young activist, Denis Hayes, to be the National Coordinator. Nelson and Hayes renamed the event “Earth Day.” Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom award in recognition of his work.[6] The first Earth Day was focused on the United States. In 1990, Denis Hayes, the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international and organized events in 141 nations.
A side note here how Senator Nelson was inspired by our Moratorium work to "hold a nationwide environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. This is when we, USC students first heard from him about our Moratorium work. The first talks led to our strategizing, sharing with Congressman Brown and Senator Nelson how we wanted to go "mainstream", off the college campuses to build momentum, "a broad-based movement to put pressure on Congress". George Brown completely understood and agreed. He was an engineer who I was learning from, we had to have a strategy, a plan, and then we needed to make the plan real. Ours was a practical politics of goal and objectives. George was seeing an opportunity to create an umbrella federal environmental agency and was pushing for it. He knew, we knew, that Nixon had to be pressured politically.
The Congressman was working his Congressional allies, including Senator Nelson about possibilities on two fronts -- ending the war and building a flourishing environmental era. Senator Nelson and George Brown were leaders on both front, in the House and Senate. Senator Nelson was one of few early opponents of the Vietnam war, and in the 60s was a key voice for conservation policies and growing environmental politics. He was known for talking economics and ecology. He saw the big picture and I found him easy to talk with with about the environmental movement writ large.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around. -- Senator Gaylord Nelson
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism
David Brower, whom I was fortunate to worked alongside years later with the Green Education Fund, also lit a fire under Senator Nelson during the early days of the movement, but my main takeaway is that he saw the war Moratorium and peace teach-ins we organized as a 'model'. He talked about what could be done and should be done.
Senator Nelson later described how he came to put forward the idea of an teach-in for environmentalism. He spoke of the mass movement of the 1969/70 Vietnam Moratorium and how our strategy was a *series of actions over months focusing on pressuring Congress. He was also struck, he said, after a trip to California to see the huge oil spill on California’s coast in 1969 and reading media headlines of the work of Moratorium activists.
The University of California was one of most active Moratorium campuses and months of oil spill and public outrage .
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
A simple version of how Senator Nelson came to the idea of an Earth Day is a short version.
"Senator Nelson read an article about college students organizing teach-ins to raise awareness on campuses about the Vietnam War. He thought that he could organize a teach-in for conservation issues. After a great deal of work, Nelson and numerous associates designated 22 April 1970 as the first Earth Day teach-in."
There is so much more...
Let's remember the student teach-ins, the means we used to spread the word and we did. The Vietnam Moratorium Committee became the largest peace group and and when we talked to Senator Nelson and George Brown about doing environmental teach-ins that would also be the first of a series, annual peace events, they got it and put their combined weight behind the effort. It came to be, Earthrise, Moratorium, Earth Day … NEPA, EPA, a foundation of legislative accomplishments.
On Earth Day 1970 the Senator was busy, he had over 500 invitations to speak. He began the day on the East coast and swung west. His last stop was at our university, USC. We appreciated the coast to coast and the full circle, from planning to realization.
What legislative accomplishments did the first Earth Day movement push forward and enable?
Here's how we at GreenPolicy360 describe the first-generation environmental foundation of environmental protections that the Earth Day movement and pressure helped to build --
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Env_policy_laws_US_%27the_beginning%27_of_env_era.jpg
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png
Today, how does the first Earth Day Teach-in coordinator Denis Hayes describe the positive impacts of the first Earth Day --
• https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/in-2020-earth-day-will-be-nov-3/
One month after the 1970 election, the Clean Air Act of 1970 passed the Senate unanimously and the House with just one dissenting vote.
In short order, Congress also passed the:
- • Clean Water Act
- • Occupational Health and Safety Act
- • Marine Mammal Protection Act
- • Endangered Species Act
- • Safe Drinking Water Act
- • Set Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards for cars
- • Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act
- • Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
- • Toxic Substances Control Act
- • National Forest Management Act
In the 10 years following Earth Day, bold new laws changed the direction of the United States economy more profoundly than any other period in history, except perhaps the New Deal.
On the day before Christmas, December 24, 1968 the famous Earthrise picture was taken. The astronauts on Apollo 8 said it was a surprise, an unplanned magical moment when the Earth suddenly appeared through a window of orbiting spaceship. They scrambled to find a camera, put color film in it, since the living colors of the Earth were so vivid against the complete lifeless darkness of space. The moment humanity saw our planet suddenly arising from beyond the moon was life changing.
- Earthrise
- Apollo 8, December 24, 1968
Amid the turmoil of the times, some good news came in the form of the first vision of our planet Earth from astronauts preparing for a moon mission landing.
The Earthrise image, in many ways, became a starting point, a cosmic shift and beginning of a modern environmental movement as humanity could see ourselves on a common mission as 'planet citizens'.
Our job? To care for our planet, our blue-green living home rising against a dark, vast expanse of space.
Yes, we are on a planet citizen voyage, we are all planet citizens. Welcome onboard !
Memories of the first Earth Day, April 22, 2020, go on and on and we keep on keeping on...
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