Earth Days Page #6

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I began Earth Day

with a sunrise ceremony

in Washington D.C.

Then I flew up to New York.

Mayor Lindsay

had shut down 5th Avenue,

and we basically filled it

all up.

The fact that we managed

to have our largest event

in what was then the center

of all media coverage

was advantageous.

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.

In Washington, there was

an awesome Earth Day warning

from a government scientist.

Dr. J. Murray Mitchell said

pollution and over-pollution,

unless checked,

could so warm the Earth

in 200 years

as to create

a greenhouse effect,

melting the arctic ice cap

and flooding vast areas

of the world.

Nationally, Earth Day was

the largest demonstration ever

in American history.

Some events had

half a million people in them.

And we had an estimated

20 million across the country.

Some quarters

saw more than coincidence

in the fact that Earth Day

occurred

on the 100th anniversary

of the birth of Lenin,

the father of Soviet communism.

The Comptroller General

of Georgia, James Bentley,

sent out some $1,600 worth

of telegrams

warning that Earth Day

might be a communist plot.

There were certainly people

who had their pet causes.

Some pounded vehicles apart

with sledgehammers

as a protest against

the internal combustion engine.

Others wore gas masks

to protest air pollution.

But also, there was

an almost celebratory thing,

as though suddenly,

we were awakening

to a new set of opportunities.

They are talking about

emission control devices on automobiles

while we are talking

about bans on automobiles.

We are challenging the ethics

of a society,

that with only six percent

of the world's population,

accounts for more than half

of its utilization of resources.

Our country is stealing from the

poorer countries of the world

and from generations

as yet unborn.

To me, Earth Day

was life changing.

There were, around the country,

millions of people

engaging in some act

of caring for the Earth.

Paper.

I realized that there was

a massive group of people

who cared very deeply

about the Earth,

and, if organized, could be

a viable political movement.

At that point, I ceased

to be an anti-war activist

and became an environmentalist.

Save our Earth! Save our Earth!

Save our Earth!

Save our Earth!

Save our Earth! Save our Earth!

I've-I've been at three

of these gatherings today,

and let me say this to you.

That you can't stand

in front of a group like this

without feeling the power

which can flow from it.

And so what we must do

is to make every day

Earth Day.

It was from Washington

that 25-year-old Denis Hayes

started to organize

this nationwide thing,

and it is here

he has returned tonight

to say that this thing

is now a movement,

and, like Vietnam,

an anti-establishment movement.

We are systematically

destroying our land,

our streams and our seas.

We foul our air...

It was a huge,

high-adrenaline effort

that, in the end,

genuinely changed things.

Before there were people

that opposed freeways,

there were people

that opposed clear-cutting,

or people worried

about pesticides.

They didn't think of themselves

as having anything in common.

After Earth Day,

they were all part

of an environmental movement.

Some people have

a deep, abiding respect

for the natural beauty

that was once this country...

...and some people don't.

People start pollution.

People can stop it.

Immediately after Earth Day,

we chose to get involved

in something

that we really hadn't

paid any attention to

before Earth Day-- organized

formal politics, elections.

We came up with a campaign

called The Dirty Dozen

that targeted 12 members

of Congress

with terrible

environmental records.

The Dirty Dozen are:

E. Ross Adair of Indiana,

William Ayres of Ohio,

William Cowger of Kentucky,

David Dennis of Indiana,

George Fallon of Maryland,

John Kyl of Iowa,

Earl Landgrebe of Indiana,

Odin Langden of Minnesota,

Byron Rogers of Colorado,

Henry Schadeberg of Wisconsin,

Lawrence Winn of Kansas

and Roger Zion of Indiana.

We beat seven of the 12 members

of The Dirty Dozen,

including the Chairman

of the Public Works Committee,

a guy named George Fallon

out of Baltimore,

who was funding all kinds

of environmental monsters.

People were saying,

"You took out George Fallon?!"

I mean, he was clearly

one of the three or four

most powerful members

of Congress.

And when Congress

reconvened in January,

everybody said,

"I'm now an environmentalist."

I mean,

there was a force out there

that had taken out

seven incumbents.

We propose the establishment

of a joint House-Senate

committee on the environment

to expand

the congressional capacity

to deal with environmental...

And the frightening variety

of hazards

and environmental offenses

over which we have had little,

up to this time...

little in the way of control.

President Nixon sent this report

to Congress today,

an assessment of the nation's

environmental problems

and ideas on how to solve them.

He sounded the familiar warning

of ecological disaster,

but counseled against

panic or hysteria.

In the next four years,

'71 through '74,

we-we passed Clean Water,

Clean Air, Endangered Species,

Estuarine Protection,

Coastal Zone Protection,

Marine Mammal Protection,

and a lot of that went through

my little subcommittee.

I think President Nixon

was looking forward

to the next election.

Well, was he going to veto this

Clean Air, Clean Water bill?

No!

He signed it with a flourish.

And then proposed the creation

of what is now,

still, the Environmental

Protection Agency,

to enforce these pollution laws.

We got environmental

impact statements.

You had to look at the downside,

as well as the upside,

of any technological project.

That was revolutionary,

because it gave people the power

to challenge unlimited

technological growth.

Nixon deserves credit

for what he did.

And I'm not sure

he fully understood it,

but he got behind it.

In the '70s,

in the United States,

we did clean up

quite a few lakes,

and we did reduce

the air pollution

in quite a few cities,

but there was essentially

no progress

on the global problems.

Things like climate change,

the depletion

of the marine fisheries,

the ocean fisheries,

population growth, and so forth.

There has always been the notion

that we will be able to sustain

our current trajectory

in living standards and material

consumption and so forth.

And moreover,

that all of the poor people

of the world

are going to be able

to catch up with us.

The entire discipline

of economics,

macroeconomics,

is based on the assumption

that output is going

to continue to grow,

living standards are going

to continue to grow,

and so forth.

The economy can't keep

growing forever.

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