The Green Years, 1964-1976

When Democrats and Republicans United to Repair the Earth

Gregg Coodley, David Sarasohn

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632350
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In The Green Years, 1964â€"1976, Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn offer the first comprehensive history of the period when the US created the legislative, legal, and administrative structures for environmental protection that are still in place over fifty years later. Coodley and Sarasohn tell a dramatic story of cultural change, grassroots activism, and political leadership that led to the passage of a host of laws attacking pollution under President Johnson. At the same time, with Stewart Udall as secretary of the interior, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and other land-protection measures were passed and the department shifted its focus from western resource development to broader national conservation issues. The magnitude of what was accomplished was without precedent, even under conservation-minded presidents like the two Roosevelts. The fast-paced story the authors tell is not only about the Democratic Party; in this era there was still a vital Republican conservation tradition. In the 1960s, Republicans were chronologically as close to Teddy Roosevelt as to Donald Trump. In both the House and Senate and in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Republicans played vital roles. It was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the 1970 Clean Air Act, revisions in 1972 to the Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Under Nixon, actions were taken to protect the oceans, forests, coastal zones, and grasslands while regulating chemicals, pesticides, and garbage.The authors analyze the full range of transformations during the "Green Years, " from the creation of entirely new pollution-control industries to backpacking becoming mass recreation to how revelations about chemical exposure spurred the natural food movement. And not least, the tectonic shift in the political landscape of the United States with the western states becoming Republican bastions and centers of ongoing backlash against the federal government. The Green Years, 1964â€"1976, is the story of environmental progress in the midst of war and civil unrest, and of the lessons we can learn for our future.

chapter one

Earth Day, 1970

It was the largest organized demonstration in human history.

On April 22, 1970, an estimated twenty million Americans—one-tenth of the US population—participated in rallies, marches, teach-ins, and even some actual cleaning up of junk-polluted lands and rivers.¹ Two thousand community groups took part in the first Earth Day, with activities at two thousand colleges and ten thousand schools, and the National Education Association estimated that the festivities included ten million schoolchildren.

At Harris School in Chicago, students picked up litter along the streets and the Lincoln Park lagoon. Fourth grader Kurt Eckhardt told the Chicago Tribune, “We picked up cigarette tips, parts of old tires, empty whiskey bottles and beer cans. . . . By the time I am an adult and have to worry about these things, then it will be too late.”² A high school in Oklahoma staged a mock funeral for a gasoline engine. Similarly, Grant High School students in Portland, Oregon, “beat an automobile to death” with an ax and buried it near the school.³ Students from nearby John Adams High School scrubbed the Broadway Bridge. In Joliet, Illinois, high schoolers donned gauze masks to symbolize the pollution of the air they breathed. In Kentucky, 1,500 Louisville pupils crowded into the Atherton High School concourse to illustrate the problem of overpopulation. “Thousands of students throughout the Pacific Northwest,” reported the Oregonian, “took to the woods to clean up hiking trails and pick up trash from river banks and lake shores.”⁴

In Cape Girardeau, Missouri, local students scoured the highways picking up litter. Omaha students wore gas masks all day.⁵ Sixty students in Palos Verdes, California, observed Earth Day by riding horses to Miraleste High School.⁶ Several hundred students from five Catholic high schools in Los Angeles marched to city hall.⁷ Beverly Hills High School canceled classes for a speech by astronaut Scott Carpenter. Two hundred Gladstone High School students in Covina, California, were given the day off to pick up litter.⁸ The Des Moines Register reported, “Virtually every school in the state celebrated Earth Day with either a clean-up campaign, specially prepared lessons or some other symbolic events.”⁹ Students at McKinley Junior High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, filled the school’s trophy case with beer cans and other trash collected on the way to school.¹⁰ Newspapers across the country reported the efforts of local residents.¹¹

In New York, students at Pace College displayed three vials of water. The vial from far up the Hudson was clean, the one from the Hudson outside New York City was brown, and the vial from the East River “was a mess of filth.”¹² At Trinity College in Connecticut, junior Joel Heriston took a bag of dirt from the campus and put it into a Connecticut Bank and Trust Company safe deposit box, “to dramatize the value of the earth.”¹³ Getting into the spirit, the bank offered him the safe deposit box for free for the year.

In California, students cut up their oil company credit cards, while Iowa State students set up barricades to keep cars out.¹⁴ Appalachian students buried a trash-filled casket. Ohio University students marked cars with placards reading, this is a polluter.¹⁵ A goat in Centralia, Washington, wore a sign reading, “I eat garbage. What are you doing for your community?”¹⁶ In Tacoma, Washington, one hundred students rode down the freeway on horseback to protest auto pollution. Up the freeway at the University of Washington, “twenty-two-year-old naturalist Bob Pyle organized and directed a ‘plant-in’ at the Union Bay site of what had been a wetland biology preserve . . . until the University let it be filled as a dump.”¹⁷

Environmental historian Victor B. Scheffer noted the range of events, which might include “a convocation, songfest, dance, and smorgasbord, along with panel discussions, symposiums, and talks by environmental evangelists.”¹⁸

Congress adjourned, so that members could speak on Earth Day. At the University of Pennsylvania, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME) reminded listeners that the environmental issues connected to other issues, saying, “Those who believe that we are talking about the Grand Canyon and the Catskills, but not Harlem and Watts, are wrong.”¹⁹ Muskie added, “We are spending twenty times as much on Vietnam as we are to fight water pollution.” Former vice-president Hubert Humphrey spoke at a Bloomington, Minnesota, high school, calling for the United Nations to establish a global agency to “strengthen, enforce and monitor pollution abatement throughout the world.”²⁰ Senator Birch Bayh, speaking in Washington, DC, proposed the creation of a federal agency “to conquer pollution as we have conquered space.” Washington governor Dan Evans suggested to students at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane that Earth Day be made an annual event.²¹ Legislatures from forty-two states passed resolutions to mark the day.

Politicians were not the only speakers. “Every leading environmentalist was booked to lecture long in advance,” reported Time magazine. The ecologist Barry Commoner’s schedule sent him dashing from Harvard and MIT to Rhode Island College, and finally to Brown University, with the antiwar pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and various rock stars making appearances.²² In Iowa, two educational TV stations ran hours of special Earth Day programming.

Cities competed to offer the biggest and most dramatic demonstrations. New York banned cars from Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, and a photo of the footloose crowds dominated the front page of the next day’s New York Times.²³ “Huge light-hearted throngs ambled down autoless streets,” reported the Times, “as the city heeded Earth Day for a regeneration of a polluted environment by celebrating an exuberant rite of spring. If the environment had any enemies, they did not make themselves known.”²⁴ New York mayor John Lindsay said it was the first time he had paraded down Fifth Avenue without getting booed. An estimated 250,000 people came to Union Square to listen to speeches.²⁵ “Earth Day in Los Angeles Wednesday was marked by a host of antipollution programs and a notable absence of smog,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Thousands of Southland students and their elders heaped abuse upon all forms of environmental pollution. They deplored it in speeches, exhibits, demonstrations and students on high school and college campuses.” In St. Louis, the United Auto Workers led a parade through downtown, featuring a smog-free propane-powered auto.²⁶ Earth Day in Birmingham, Alabama was part of the Right to Live Week; in Cleveland it was celebrated as part of the Crisis in the Environment Week.²⁷

Judged the Times’s Philip Shabecoff, it was “the day environmentalism in the United States began to emerge as a mass social movement.”²⁸ In sparking the American environmental movement, Earth Day 1970 was a cause. But it was also an effect. Earth Day came in the middle of the greatest period of environmental progress in the United States. The groundswell of environmental victories began six years before, in 1964, and would continue six more years, until 1976. Nothing like it had happened previously, even under the two environmentally minded presidents Roosevelt. At least thirty-two major environmental bills were enacted during this period. These included a host of land measures governing wilderness, national trails, wild rivers, urban parks, Alaska, forests, and nonforested lands, not to mention the creation of multiple national parks, wilderness areas, national seashores, and national recreational areas. Three major bills attacked air pollution, while four aimed at clean water. Four major laws were passed governing use of the oceans. Multiple acts changed the way Americans disposed of garbage, and handled toxins and pesticides. Three acts protected endangered species. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created, while the National Environmental Policy Act mandated environmental impact statements for all government actions.

The legislation was created by politicians who were not generally lionized on Earth Day, and have been rarely remembered by environmental activists since. The bills were often years in the making, but frequently passed overwhelmingly, with a bipartisan consensus rarely seen since in environmental policy (or much else). Politicians who were never denounced as tree-huggers—and who probably never heard the term—left a legacy of support, if not affection, for nature.

Lyndon Johnson’s historical reputation is shaped by Vietnam and civil rights, but his and Lady Bird Johnson’s commitment to the land drove historic achievements in environmental legislation. Together with Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior he inherited from John F. Kennedy, Johnson provided vital support for previously immobilized bills that became landmarks of environmental policy. Johnson would sign almost three hundred environmentally related bills in his five-year term.

It is harder to gauge the environmental legacy of Richard Nixon, the president who walked on the beach in wingtips but who signed some of the most important environmental legislation in history. With no particular interest in the subject, Nixon at first thought the bills were a cheap way of buying some support, then hoped they might provide a distraction from Watergate, and in his final days was simply too politically weak to stop them. But his administration included a bumper crop of environmental sympathizers, from EPA director William Ruckelshaus to White House advisor (and convicted Watergate conspirator) John Ehrlichman, with occasional surprise appearances by conservatives like Interior Secretary Wally Hickel.

In the Capitol, massive contributions were made by legislators now almost forgotten, such as the Pennsylvania Republican representative John Saylor, and by some remembered for very different things, like Henry Jackson and Howard Baker. In those years, the issue took root on both sides of the aisle, to a degree now unimaginable. Some legislators who were major forces in these achievements later saw their careers ended by the change in the issue’s political environment.

Gaylord Nelson Has an Idea

Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson is given credit for creating Earth Day. “The objective,” declared Nelson of his creation, “was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it will shake the political environment out of this lethargy and finally, force this issue on to the political agenda.”²⁹ That was the goal that in 1970 took over college campuses and took cars off major cities’ main streets.

In 1970, Nelson was a second-term senator who had been promoting the environment for much of his career. Born in Wisconsin to Progressive parents, who took him as a child to hear Senator Robert La Follette, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School. He immediately joined the army in World War II, which he spent at Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania as one of four white officers in a quartermaster company made up of two hundred black enlisted men. After returning to his hometown of Clear Lake, he ran unsuccessfully f...