Where Were You Earth Day 1970?

GUEST EDITORIAL

Earth Day 1970 (Photo – University of Michigan).

Where were you on April 22, 1970? Working in the Oval office, having a baby, fighting in Vietnam, participating in Earth Day, or perhaps you weren’t even born yet.

By Barbara Hodgson

It was not unlike any other significant day that brands a memorable event, be it tragic or joyful that marked Earth Day—the launch of the modern environmental movement. Twenty million people, according to reports from the Associated Press, showed up at Earth Day events across the country from Washington D.C., New York, to Chicago. They stood up to be counted as responsible environmental citizens and raised the consciousness of people concerning the well being of the planet forever.

Where was Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, that day? “It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion,” Nelson explained. “The people cared and Earth Day became the first opportunity they ever had to join in a nationwide demonstration to send a big message to the politicians—a message to tell them to wake up and do something.”

Where was Mark Gold on the first Earth Day? (Former President of Heal the Bay and current Director for Environment and Sustainability/UCLA), “I was probably playing handball at Clover Elementary School in West L.A. I was seven.”

Where was Andy Lipkis on that day? (President of Los Angeles-based TreePeople), “I was in high school and in the months that followed I actually started the work of TreePeople because o the spirit of Earth Day. It was at an Earth Day event that I found out that the smog was killing the forests so we began planting smog resistant trees that researchers had identified—native trees that just weren’t dying so quickly.”

Where was Denis Hayes on the first Earth Day? (The National Coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970, and current president and CEO of The Bullitt Foundation), “Well as I remember it…it was a whirlwind stay starting with a sunrise ceremony in Washington D.C., then I flew up to the largest rally in the county which was in New York’s Central Park—certainly the largest crowd I had ever addressed up to that time. Then off to Chicago and back to Washington D.C. for the end of the mall event and some television shows. So I burned more than my share of the world’s precious fossil fuel on Earth Day 1970.”

The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 was not born out of a vacuum, but as Denis Hayes described, “It was not that something changed in the real world, but that a series of strands that existed as individual strands got woven together into a coherent fabric that year. There was an overall shift of consciousness achieved. Earth Day provided a new method of thinking, a fresh point of view, a new way of seeing the world, and a new-sprung lexicon of terms such as biosphere and eco systems were written.”

Where was John D. Ehrlichman on the first Earth Day? Several years ago, Denis Hayes had dinner with John Ehrilichman, the domestic policy advisor to Richard Nixon, and some truth telling went on. Hayes described Ehrlichman’s rendition of how the Environmental Protection Action (EPA) came into existence. Ehrlichman was meeting with the President in the Oval office a day or two after Earth Day, and Nixon—the consummate politician and one of the two most anti-environmental presidents—was concerned that he may be running against Senator Ed Musky in 1972.

Earth Day, 1970. Andover, Massachusetts. Photograph by Biology instructor Tom Cone (Photo – Phillips Academy Archives and Special Collections).

Ehrlichman pulled out the Ash Commission Report on governmental re-organization. “We could get into the scheme pretty easily with one of the things that Roy Ash was suggesting,” said Ehrlichman. “We take some radiation stuff out of the Atomic Energy Commission, remove pesticide from the Department of Agriculture, clean water comes out of the Department of Interior, and clean air transfers out of Health, Education, and Welfare. You sort of package them all together. It doesn’t cost any money since you already have budgets for all of these programs, and you call it the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, you as the President suggest and recommend it to Congress, and suddenly we’re players in the environmental movement.”

There were measurable results from the first Earth Day, for instance, in just two years in the early 90s, recycling went from a few people returning materials to recycling centers to a commonplace phenomenon that stretched to thousands of communities across the country—curbside recycling. And at the same time, there were 20 million little “green gorillas” that went home and started telling their parents to recycle and behave responsibly. Earth Day had a formidable overall impact on every living being on the planet.

Where was Scott Pruitt on April 22, 1970?

Barbara Hodgson, a Communications Specialist, has been influential in the City of Los Angeles, and the California Tobacco Education program. She built corporate campaigns for Kellogg’s and Honda, implemented a public relations campaign for Helen Keller International, and is a published author and speaker.