Earth Days

---

Exclusive corporate funding

for American Experience

is provided by:

Major funding is

made possible by:

American Experience

is also made possible

by the Corporation

for Public Broadcasting

and:

If we do what is right

now, in 1963,

we must set aside

substantial areas of our country

for all the people

who are going to live in it

by the year 2000.

Where 180 million

Americans now live,

by the year 2000 there will be

350 million of them.

Either we stop

the poisoning in our air

or we become a nation

in gas masks,

groping our way

through these dying cities

and a wilderness of ghost towns

that the people have evacuated.

The great question

of the '70s is:

Shall we surrender

to our surroundings

or shall we make

our peace with nature

and begin to make reparations

for the damage we have done

to our air, to our land,

and to our water?

And accelerate development

of technology,

to capture energy

from the Sun and the Earth

for this and future generations.

If we fail to act soon,

we will face an economic,

social and political crisis

that will threaten

our free institutions.

We must and will be sensitive

to the delicate balance

of our ecosystems,

the preservation

of endangered species,

and the protection

of our wilderness lands.

It's been said that

we don't inherit the Earth

from our ancestors,

we borrow it

from our children.

And when our children look back

on this time and this place

they will be grateful.

If we fail to reduce the

emission of greenhouse gases,

deadly heat waves and droughts

will become more frequent,

coastal areas will flood and

economies will be disrupted.

That is going to happen,

unless we act.

And here we have

a serious problem:

America is addicted to oil.

I am 87 years old.

I was a child

during the Depression.

The Great Depression

had an enormous influence

on the lives of all of us

that experienced it.

I lived in the country;

I'm a country boy.

Small town kid.

We didn't have electricity.

We learned to live simply

and get our sustenance

from the Earth.

I didn't own a car

until I was 27.

I grew up with conservation

because it was important

for our lives.

Then after the war,

everybody thought

they ought to have a chance

to be rich.

There was an enormous

economic boom

going on after the war.

There was this

"progress is our most

important product"

feeling to the 1950s.

And I was one of many

relatively spoiled

children of that...

compared to the people who

grew up in the Depression.

When I was a kid growing up

in Rockford, Illinois,

I was reading Outdoor Life

and I took

the Conservation Pledge.

"I give my pledge as an American

to save and faithfully to defend

"from waste the natural

resources of my country--

its soil and minerals, its

forests, waters and wildlife."

That's me at age ten

or something like that.

I got rubber stamps that I put

on all of my books

that said that.

And I guess like a lot

of that generation,

I saw pieces of that childhood

destroyed in one way or another

you couldn't go back to.

Then you get that sense

of angst of,

well, how much of this process

of loss is going to go on?

I grew up in a beautiful

Midwest town.

You drove around

and it was a green,

peaceful, relatively

intact system.

I really never was confronted

with issues of scarcity,

pollution,

man's impact on the planet.

These things just

didn't come up for me.

In those days,

environmental problems

didn't really impress

themselves on you.

It wasn't clear that we had

any very serious problems.

Americans want to believe

in a future that is expansive.

That's better than the past.

When I was a kid, the year 2000

was 40 years in the future.

And the sort of thing

that the futurists

were all laying out

was almost unimaginable.

That never seemed to me to be

a particularly

interesting way to live.

I always thought

and kind of held a mental model,

that somehow we would

all find a way to live

in something more like

a New England village.

We would know our neighbors.

We would have genuine say

in decisions that were made

that would impact our lives.

This always seemed to me

a far superior future.

I voted for the

Interstate Highway program,

which I see now

as a great mistake.

I was a freshman Congressman;

you went along for the ride.

The vision we had

was super-abundance.

There was no discussion

of how much oil we had.

There was just an assumption

that it would always be there

and they would always

be finding more oil,

and oil would be cheap.

So, the automobile culture

that we adopted

began to gain strength.

Let the trains

and public transportation go.

That's what we did

in most parts of the country.

This was the future.

The individual.

The automobile.

California has been the heart

of much of the environmental

leadership in America.

Every day we see

something

that we grew up

with our youth

that we treasured

that is lost.

Southern California

was a beautiful place--

small towns, orange groves,

mustard fields, and then,

the metropolis of Los Angeles.

We had the finest transportation

system in the world--

electric trains.

You could go anywhere--

San Bernardino to Santa Monica.

My dad commuted to work

from South Pasadena

every day of his life.

We'd had steady development

since the end of World War ll

in 1945,

and by 1950,

when I was up at Stanford,

they had to close down

high school baseball games

because the air had grown

so smoggy

as a result of the automobiles

and the vanishing

of the great electric trains.

What happened to Los Angeles

in my lifetime

was that it became

one huge suburb.

Ecology means

the study of organisms

in combination

with their environments.

We take groups of organisms,

put them in an environment,

and try and understand

what's happening.

My original interest

in human population developed

when I was an undergraduate

at Penn in the '50s.

As a biologist,

the thing that I saw first was

when I was in high school,

they were doing so much building

of subdivisions

for more and more people

in New Jersey

and spraying so much DDT around

that the butterflies

I was interested in studying

were disappearing.

That tied very directly

to population,

as do almost all of our other

environmental problems.

I was born

into a papermaking family,

so my youth was surrounded

by the felling of trees

and by paper mills

that produced vast quantities

of uncontrolled sulfur dioxide

and hydrogen sulfide.

I think I probably have a bit

of diminished lung capacity

that grew out

of breathing all of that acid

for all of those years.

There's probably some

Freudian rebellion

against my father

that was part of it.

So I was intensely aware

that there were these

destructive things going on

to the land around me.

But I guess as I was growing up,

it wasn't something

that I thought of

as... as a question.

I mean, this was just progress.

There is something

Rate this script:2.6 / 9 votes