Celebration Hatched by Former US Senator
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
In 1993 American Heritage magazine called Earth Day "one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy." Twenty million people participated. And as we approach this anniversary on Thursday, April 22, 2010, we thought you might want to find out exactly how Earth Day was born.
The person who hatched the idea was Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. At the time, he was a U.S. Senator. Here’s his account, from a 1998 speech: It had been troubling to me that the critical matter of the state of our environment was simply a non-issue politically The challenge was to think up some dramatic event that would focus national attention on this subject.
In 1962, I suggested that President Kennedy go on a nationwide conservation tour, spelling out in dramatic language the deteriorating condition of our environment, and proposing an agenda to begin addressing the problem. The president began his tour in the fall of 1963. Senators Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Joe Clark, and I accompanied him on the first leg of the trip. For many reasons, including a breaking story on a nuclear missile treaty, the tour failed to make the environment a national political issue.
Six years would pass before the idea for Earth Day occurred to me. It was the summer of 1969, and I was on a conservation speaking tour out West. [One stop was in Santa Barbara, where Nelson was stunned by the damage done by the offshore blowout that became the largest oil spill up to that time. It lasted 11 days and blackened beaches.
There was a great deal of turmoil on the college campuses over the Vietnam War, and many colleges held anti-war teach-ins. On a flight to the University of California-Berkeley, I read an article on the teach-ins, and it suddenly occurred to me: Why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment? In a speech given at Seattle in
September, I formally announced that there would be a national environmental teach- in sometime in the spring of 1970. The story ran nationwide. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in.
Soon Nelson needed to open an office to serve as a clearinghouse for the growing number of people who wanted to participate in the teach-in. He hired Denis Hayes, then a graduate student at Harvard's Kennedy School, to help coordinate the many volunteer organizers who did the hard work of making Earth Day happen.
The Wilderness Society takes a special interest in Earth Day because when Nelson left the Senate in 1981, he joined their staff. He was their counselor for a quarter century, until his death in July 2005.
It is such a shame that, after 40 years of Earth Day, we are still in the dilemma that we were in then when Gaylord Nelson came up with the idea and in fact things are probably worse now then they were then. Forty years of wasted opportunity simply because greed of the few won over need of he Planet.
© 2010
