Earth Day at 50

Brian Balogh:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh:
Welcome to Backstory, a show that looks at the history behind the headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers:
And I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh:
If you’re new to the podcast, each week along with our colleagues Nathan Connolly and Joanne Freeman we explore a different aspect of American history.

Ed Ayers:
And just to note, this show was recorded remotely, as per the realities of making a podcast during COVID-19. Because of that, the audio quality isn’t always the best, but we hope you’ll bear with us nevertheless. Okay, now onto the show.

Ed Ayers:
50 years ago in April 1970, millions of people in the United States took part in a day of activism that quickly spread around the world, or perhaps more appropriately around the Earth.

Speaker 3:
Earth Day demonstrations began in practically every city and town in the United States this morning: the first massive nationwide protest against the pollution of the environment. The outcry took innumerable forms. Some students went to school wearing gas masks. The automobile was banned in parts of some cities, including New York. Miami planned a dead orange parade. Skywriting planes were ordered out to inscribe the word air over Los Angeles. In Jamestown, New York, the Kiwanis Club…

Denis Hayes:
It was amazing. We had aspired to do something that was relatively modest at its beginnings.

Ed Ayers:
This is Dennis Hayes.

Denis Hayes:
I’m the founder of the Earth Day Network.

Ed Ayers:
Dennis was the national organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, and back then organizing a big event like this looked a lot different. There was no internet or social media to get the word out.

Denis Hayes:
We didn’t have the ability to reach out through Facebook and Twitter or even have email or even have computers for email.

Ed Ayers:
So Dennis and his team turned to other ways to generate some momentum.

Denis Hayes:
We did a lot of what you could call broadcast outreach. We would figure out some way to get a news twist: hold a press conference or hold an event.

Ed Ayers:
But he says the biggest and riskiest thing they did was shell out about half their money for a full page ad in the New York Times.

Denis Hayes:
Across the top of it, it says, “April 22: Earth Day,” and then in bold letters, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. It’s carrier is man.” And then bam, bam, bam, right on through the ad. So this was a pretty anti-establishment, pretty attention-getting thing to say; “This is not a picnic in the park and a tree-planting exercise, picking up litter, though there’s going to be all of those kinds of things as well for the young kids to participate. This is an effort to cause America to change direction.”

Ed Ayers:
And thankfully, all of that work paid off.

Denis Hayes:
So by the time that it came out… and it wasn’t an event like the Vietnam moratorium where you had something like six or eight cities across the country. Earth Day was observed in essentially every city, every town, every village, every crossroads in America. The estimates from the wire services of being in excess of 20 million people, who would make it probably the largest organized event in American history.

Ed Ayers:
And why do you think… given the ferment of all the other things: the civil rights struggle and the women’s struggle and the war in Vietnam… that people were receptive to this new cause? Why was their bandwidth not so crowded that they couldn’t think about something like ecology?

Denis Hayes:
One is that this wasn’t a new cause. It was a new, if you will, packaging. We had the Santa Barbara oil spill the previous year. In cities across the country, there were poor people rising up to try to stop freeways from cutting through intercity neighborhoods, rising concern about lead paint and lead in gasoline, problems with clear cutting, just thing after thing. Air pollution: people in Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana, and Los Angeles had air that was a lot like the air in Shenzhen and New Delhi today.

Denis Hayes:
All of those things were out there. Groups of people cared about each of them, and what changed was that they had not… prior to Earth Day… much thought that they had anything in common with one another. They were the anti-freeway group. They were the pro-birds group. In fact, I had a memorable interchange with a prominent conservation leader. He asked me, blustery, “What the hell does clean air have to do with birds?” That would’ve been an absurd question that would elicit a chuckle years after Earth Day. We wove all those separate threads together into this new fabric of modern environmentalism.

Ed Ayers:
In the wake of Earth Day success, Dennis’s team planned to turn the protest into policy. In the 1970 midterm election, they pushed to elect more environmentally friendly members of Congress, and once again their work paid off. A few months after Earth Day, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which was only one of many new laws on the horizon.

Denis Hayes:
The momentum that came out of the election followed by the Clean Air Act just created the context within which relatively rapidly we passed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and that somewhat anti-environmental president, Richard Nixon, in order to become a player with this new movement that was there with an executive order set up the EPA, appointed Bill Ruckelshaus to be the head of it, and didn’t intervene when Ruckelshaus banned DDT, banned lead paint, and banned lead in gasoline. It was a remarkable period where the pro-environment pendulum of American politics was pulled about as far as we could pull it for about a decade up through the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Ed Ayers:
With this remarkable efflorescence of activity and the Nixon Administration, the EPA, and so forth… and you had the good fortune to be involved in Carter Administration embracing solar energy. Tell me what that felt like as you were beginning it. My understanding is that it didn’t come to the conclusion that you hoped.

Denis Hayes:
The Carter Administration was a time of enormous hopefulness. I was the head of the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute, which is now called the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. At the time I was there, we were spending more money, employing more PhDs, getting more patents in the renewable energy field than pretty much the rest of the world put together. Carter had the goal of getting 20% of the nation’s energy from renewables by the year 2000, and the institute that I headed was charged with coming up with the program to achieve that. So we enlisted a bunch of university scientists and some other national labs and worked for two years on a detailed plan of how you would accomplish that goal, in part by making America vastly more efficient so it’s 20% of a smaller number and then meeting that with renewables. So overall, a feeling of enormous hope.

Ed Ayers:
But in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Dennis says that hope came to a screeching halt.

Denis Hayes:
On one afternoon, they came to the Solar Energy Research Institute, they fired about one third of my staff, they laid off 100% of our contractors and that was more than a thousand people who were working on renewable energy, often at elite universities, a couple of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes later in their careers, terminated me, and reduced our budget, which then was about a little over 130 million dollars, which back then was real money. That afternoon for me was the bleakest day of my life. That was worse than the death of my parents. This is when I had to address a whole bunch of people, many of whom I had spent real energy persuading to give up tenured professorships and other great jobs to come and join this Manhattan Project for a sustainable future, and suddenly they were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. It was just brutal. I spent most of the next year of my life writing letters of recommendation for wonderful people whose careers had been shattered.

Ed Ayers:
Despite the setbacks, Dennis has continued to advocate for the environment, and this week he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day alongside millions around the globe. Because of COVID-19, most of the celebrating was done virtually, but Dennis says that some environmental lessons can be learned from the public’s response to our current pandemic.

Denis Hayes:
There’s just no way to solve those things by any one nation if it wanted to act, and maybe we could learn some things from the way that we are addressing some of these human health issues and applying them more broadly to these… in some ways… very much larger environmental threats. There will be in the long run… Unless we get awfully aggressive awfully fast in ways that seem improbable, the death that will come as a consequence of climate change will make the relative harm being done by COVID-19 seem extremely small by comparison. It’s, of course, something that takes place over a longer period of time, but at the fundamental level I think global cooperation… clearly if we can do it in one field we should be able to do it in others.