Fifty years ago, on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day events were held across the United States, spearheaded by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Madison) and Dennis Hayes, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government graduate student who dropped out of school to help organize the event.
According to the New York Times, one-tenth of the population of the United States at the time—about 20 million people—participated in Earth Day events, prompting “unprecedented” bipartisan action by the federal government, including passage of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, several other key regulations, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by Republican President Richard M. Nixon.
In a Cap Times op-ed today, Tom Loftus, former Democratic state representative, quotes from his former colleague Gaylord Nelson’s speeches on April 21 at the New Jersey United Auto Workers convention–and at a rally in Madison that night.
Nelson’s words were deeply critical of the status quo–and they express sentiments that most elected officials today, Democrat or Republican, would not not dare utter: “The heart of the problem is the internal combustion engine, which has powered America into unparalleled affluence, but now may drive it to unprecedented environmental disaster,” and “[t]he hope of mankind is that the Red Army and the Pentagon will become obsolete,” and “money should be spent on the environment and not weapons.”
Nelson explicitly called out the Vietnam War as unjust and wrong: “The environment is all of America and its problems…perpetuated by expenditures of tens of billions of dollars a year on the Vietnam War instead of our decaying, crowded, congested, polluted urban areas that are inhumane traps for millions of people … if our cities do not work, America does not work … the environment is a hungry child in a land of affluence.”
Further, Nelson proposed actions that few elected officials would even remotely suggest today if they wanted to remain in office: “We need to elect an ecology Congress that will build bridges between man and natures’ systems instead of building more highways and dams and new weapons systems.”
Fifty years later, ideas like this are nearly unspeakable by any elected official who wants to remain in office. Instead, Nelson’s contemporaries in the U.S. Congress, like Senator Tammy Baldwin, have shamelessly supported locating F-35 war machines in Madison even while claiming to be progressive environmentalists and knowing these fighter jets will cause more toxic environmental pollution and harm people of color and low income people.
Madison’s 1970 Earth Week: Progressive, regressive, or…?
Here in Madison, “teach-ins” and other “E-Day” and “E-Week” activities were organized— most at UW-Madison, Edgewood College, and MATC. Ambitious proposals were put forth. A young Paul Soglin, at the time a city alder—later Madison’s mayor for several terms—participated with Gaylord Nelson in a TV show program called “lifestyle on trial.” He gave a presentation at Edgewood College where—perhaps inspired by Mr. Nelson—he touted his proposed ordinance to “ban the internal combustion engine from operating in the city.”
Mr. Soglin and several other alders supported an Earth Day protest/parade in Madison, but the police chief, backed up by the majority of the common council and conservative Mayor Sykes, revoked the permit issued for the event, fearing disruption and violence. One alder who supported revoking the permit opined that “the sacred right of assembly is not absolute under all circumstances.”
Some passionate, persistent paraders met at UW Library Mall anyway. Organizers advised them to go home, but they instead marched back and forth at the crosswalk on State and Murray Street, cutting off traffic. Riot-equipped police eventually cleared the street, but protestors marched on sidewalks to another intersection further up State St. where they “tramped back and forth, complaining of noxious car fumes.” One wore a gas mask. More police arrived, but creative, leapfrogging protesters—with police in pursuit—paraded to the Gilman intersection where they again tried to block traffic before marching up to the square on the sidewalk.
About thirty protesters eventually made it to the Capitol, where guards locked the doors with county law officers standing by. So protesters spread out on the Capitol grounds, picking up trash and cigarettes and putting them in a black hat, while complaining that there were no rubbish cans. One girl tried to present the trash-filled hat to a police officer—who refused it—so they ceremoniously dumped the trash in a rubbish can the officer pointed them to off the square (the city had trash cans, the capitol did not).
Would Earth Day create meaningful changes? Expectations were mixed…
Around Earth Day, a variety of local and national columns about the causes of our serious environmental problems—and proposed solutions— appeared in Madison newspapers, along with cartoons, poems, and other artistic creations.
Many commentators expressed hope that Earth Day would inspire deep societal changes, but some expressed skepticism and doubt, at times humorously. On April 21, the day before Earth Day, The Capital Times editors ran a tongue-in-cheek parable by Art Buchwald mocking man’s ignorance in smogging up the skies with burning fossil fuels, toxifying lakes with pollution, creating plastics, building automobiles and paving over nature to serve them—and splitting the atom for the bomb, in turn creating radioactive pollution and fueling an arms race.
At the end of the parable, God sent word to “his loyal servant,” Ralph Nader: “Now Ralph, the first thing I want you to do is build an ark and then…” (it trails off with no answer).
Below Buchwald’s column, The Capital Times editors posted their own opinion piece. “Dear Mr. Nelson,” it began, “we wish you well in this “Earth Day” endeavor, but we have serious doubts about its success.” The editorial pointed to existing and irreversible ecological damage here, directing some blame at the city: “Madison, like every other major city in Wisconsin, is desperately trying to find a place to hide its garbage and trash, leftovers of civilization” and “housing project developers have leveled the topsoil, filled our swamps, dammed our streams, cut down our trees, and not a soul in authority has lifted his hand to say no.”
(Sadly, Bill Evjue, the progressive founder, editor and publisher of the Capital Times, died two days later, on April 23, 1970, at age 87).
The Capital Times editors weren’t the only ones to highlight local pollution. A Wisconsin State Journal column on April 19 titled “Smoke in your eyes stinks” included responses to a questionnaire about environmental concerns; respondents mentioned heavy, foul, dense black smoke from the county burning of city tires and other trash, garbage along the Yahara River, and “asphalt making operations…making the neighborhood unfit for any outdoor activity.”
It is hard to imagine the Cap Times and Wisconsin State Journal publishing anything like this today.
Did Earth Day 1970—and the environmental laws it inspired—create meaningful changes in Madison Wisconsin?
See Part II…
