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Earth Day at 50: Reflections of One of the Organizers
by Stephen E. Cotton
This year’s observance of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary has been forced, by the coronavirus, to go virtual. There will be no in-person events, no crowds. The media coverage will be sparser. But the first Earth Day was largely virtual, too, and its effects were profound. That makes me optimistic about the progress we can make. Just as in 1970, older generations have failed to grapple adequately some of the most profound environmental problems, like climate change. And just as in 1970, high schoolers seem to have the most urgent appreciation of what needs to be done. Unlike 1970, high schoolers today don’t need broadcast networks or print media to connect, communicate, educate, plan, organize, or act. And they need only to glance back at Earth Day 1970 to see how much can be accomplished in a short period.
Reflections by one of the student organizers and Andover Resident, Steve Cotton
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was part festival of spring, part deadly serious protest - an eclectic outpouring of schoolkids, business executives, campus militants, suburbanites, politicians, and the entire population of Woodstock Nation.
No one had ever seen anything quite like it. Six months earlier, only a handful of scientists were bemoaning “environmental” perils - or were even familiar with the word. By April 22, 1970 - the first Earth Day - it was on everyone’s lips.
There were demonstrations, teach-ins, rallies, celebrations, litter drives, school assemblies. So many senators and representatives were out delivering environmental speeches - New Jersey Sen. Clifford Case set a record of sorts with seven - that both houses of Congress recessed for the day.
New York Mayor John Lindsay closed 45 blocks of Fifth Avenue to automobiles between noon and 2 p.m. and turned 14th Street over to environmental activities for 12 solid hours. It was a made-for-TV spectacle in the nation’s media capital, with 250,000 people strolling Manhattan’s only car-free thoroughfares on a sunwashed Wednesday. A rally in Philadelphia drew 40,000 people, a concert-cum-speeches in Washington 10,000, and a downtown Chicago rally another 6,000.
Almost everywhere, it seemed, something happened - a “die-in” at Boston’s Logan airport, a “Dead Orange Parade” in Miami, a march by Chicano residents of Albuquerque – led by a mariachi band - to a foul-smelling sewage plant in the middle of their community, a demonstration outside a GE stockholders meeting in Minneapolis, car burials on campuses (including Lagrange College, in Georgia). And trash pick-ups by the hundreds. Although the number is probably high, it is frequently said that 20,000,000 people participated.
Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, had seven months earlier called for a nationwide “environmental teach-in,” centered on college campuses, to mobilize some of the same youthful energy that had made the anti-war movement so potent. He invited California Republican Congressman Paul “Pete” McCloskey to co-chair the event. They turned the job of organizing the “teach-in” over to an independent-minded group of twentysomethings who set up shop in a suite of dingy offices over a fast-food restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.
The staff was headed by Denis Hayes, a former Stanford student body president then enrolled in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nelson and McCloskey hired him to direct the Teach-In. Two Kennedy School classmates joined Denis in dropping out of school to organize the event. Andrew Garling, an anti-war activist who was jointly enrolled at Harvard Medical School, recruited the rest of the staff and served as “Northeast coordinator”, while I became the national “press director.”
Earth Day marked an astonishing change in America’s environmental consciousness. Almost overnight, an awareness of environmental problems emerged that simply had not been on the nation’s collective mind just a few months earlier.
One measure of that change is what Pete McCloskey recently called “a decade of bi-partisan environmental cooperation” during which, beginning in 1970, President Nixon (characterized by McCloskey as “no environmentalist but sensitive, as always, to public opinion’) created the Environmental Protection Agency. In the next ten years, Congress enacted no fewer than 23 landmark laws protecting air, water, endangered species, forests, rangelands, marine mammals, seacoasts, and wilderness, and regulating mining, toxic substances, and threats to drinking water. In the same decade, Congress also set aside millions of acres for parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges.
That’s not all. Similar actions were taken at the state and local level. Colleges and universities exponentially increased their course offerings and majors in environmental studies, a field which had barely existed before. Foundations embarked in programs to support environmental research and advocacy. New career paths opened up. To take the profession with which I am most familiar, when I returned to law school after Earth Day, environmental law as a specialty was virtually non-existent. Within a few years, environmental law was taught in many if not most law schools, and the field had become a vocation.
Most of the accounts of Earth Day have centered on the sheer number of events and the size of the larger crowds, and have attributed the change in our environmental awareness to the physical participation of so many people.
Looking back, I think that’s only part of the story. At the time, I was at the very center of the media vortex that surrounded Earth Day. I maintained a file of the 300 reporters who contacted us. Radio commentators called to tape interviews. TV crews trundled in from Washington, New York, Boston, and several foreign countries. I went home each night after 15 hours on the phone with reporters, leaving 20 or 30 urgent messages from other reporters stacked unanswered on my desk.
In the weeks before Earth Day, various members of our staff put in appearances on the Sunday TV talk shows. There were stories in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Review, not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor. Countless local newspapers called, or they carried round-ups sent out by the Associated Press and U.P.I. For an event that hadn’t happened, it at times seemed a little over the top. But even where crowds did not measure up to expectations, few reporters took note. A reporter in Raleigh, N.C., wrote on Earth Day that it had arrived “suffering slightly from over-exposure.”
The media coverage on Earth Day - indeed, for the entire week - was massive. In that pre-cable era, there were just three commercial broadcast networks and NET (the precursor to PBS). NBC’s phenomenally popular two-hour Today show was devoted to the environment for the whole week. ABC’s Sunday talk show focused on the environment for the two episodes leading up to Earth Day. On Earth Day, the networks combined to offer an unheard-of 9½ hours of live coverage, not counting the evening news shows. In addition to Today, NBC went live for two hours beginning at noon. CBS offered a late-evening hour-long special hosted by Walter Cronkite. ABC had a half-hour evening special. And NET aired 6½ hours of live Earth Day programming - its entire broadcast day at the time. To top it off, Earth Day was front-page news in almost every paper across the land.
But more important, I think, than the coverage devoted to Earth Day events was the unprecedented attention the media gave to the problems and concerns which prompted those events. Even as press director, I didn’t grasp the significance of that coverage at the time, even though my fellow staffers and I played a hand in providing some of the content.
Almost all of the TV specials, many of the articles leading up to Earth Day, and the vast majority of interviews delved into the environmental problems which animated the organizers - smog, water pollution, litter, toxic waste, and many others. Before Earth Day, many Americans accepted dirty air and polluted rivers as inevitable accompaniments of a healthy economy, unalterable unpleasantries that barely registered. Then Earth Day came along. Walter Cronkite and his colleagues, together with scores of magazine and newspaper writers around the country, explained the causes and effects of pollution, and interviewed experts and advocates who offered new perspectives and solutions. There had never been such a concentrated, extended, intensive, nationwide informational experience about a single subject. It was a teachable moment on steroids. Tens of millions of people - anyone who read the lead story in a newspaper or magazine, or turned on the TV - “participated” in what amounted to a virtual event exponentially larger than the plethora of local gatherings. More so than he could have ever expected, Senator Nelson got what he called for: a national teach-in on a colossal scale.
There was another underappreciated aspect of Earth Day. By far the largest contingent of on-the-ground participants was not the college students at whom the event was originally aimed, nor older folks whom many organizers tried to bring in. Rather, most Earth Day participants were school kids, K-12. The National Education Association and its state and local affiliates had encouraged members to take the lead in planning activities. Most elementary school participants simply attended an Earth Day-themed class or assembly. In many high schools, however students - usually aided by teachers and administrators – staged events outside their school building, like a clean-up project. The number of kids who participated in some type of Earth Day-related activity may have been in the millions.
What made those events special? For many students, Earth Day marked the first occasion - or, at least, the most prominent, given all the media coverage - on which they did something that connected them so immediately and immutably to an idealistic pursuit spanning communities, generations, the entire country. A trash pick-up wasn’t just a trash pick-up. It was part of Earth Day. It has never ceased to amaze me that kids who took part in such events on Earth Day remembered them 20 years later - when, as parents, they encouraged their own kids to pick up an Earth Day banner. Fifty years later, they still remember. And an astounding number are able to look back on careers they were inspired to enter in the wake of that first Earth Day.
This year’s observance of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary has been forced, by the coronavirus, to go virtual. There will be no in-person events, no crowds. The media coverage will be sparser. But the first Earth Day was largely virtual, too, and its effects were profound. That makes me optimistic about the progress we can make. Just as in 1970, older generations have failed to grapple adequately some of the most profound environmental problems, like climate change. And just as in 1970, high schoolers seem to have the most urgent appreciation of what needs to be done. Unlike 1970, high schoolers today don’t need broadcast networks or print media to connect, communicate, educate, plan, organize, or act. And they need only to glance back at Earth Day 1970 to see how much can be accomplished in a short period.
©Stephen E. Cotton
This year’s observance of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary has been forced, by the coronavirus, to go virtual. There will be no in-person events, no crowds. The media coverage will be sparser. But the first Earth Day was largely virtual, too, and its effects were profound. That makes me optimistic about the progress we can make. Just as in 1970, older generations have failed to grapple adequately some of the most profound environmental problems, like climate change. And just as in 1970, high schoolers seem to have the most urgent appreciation of what needs to be done. Unlike 1970, high schoolers today don’t need broadcast networks or print media to connect, communicate, educate, plan, organize, or act. And they need only to glance back at Earth Day 1970 to see how much can be accomplished in a short period.
Reflections by one of the student organizers and Andover Resident, Steve Cotton
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was part festival of spring, part deadly serious protest - an eclectic outpouring of schoolkids, business executives, campus militants, suburbanites, politicians, and the entire population of Woodstock Nation.
No one had ever seen anything quite like it. Six months earlier, only a handful of scientists were bemoaning “environmental” perils - or were even familiar with the word. By April 22, 1970 - the first Earth Day - it was on everyone’s lips.
There were demonstrations, teach-ins, rallies, celebrations, litter drives, school assemblies. So many senators and representatives were out delivering environmental speeches - New Jersey Sen. Clifford Case set a record of sorts with seven - that both houses of Congress recessed for the day.
New York Mayor John Lindsay closed 45 blocks of Fifth Avenue to automobiles between noon and 2 p.m. and turned 14th Street over to environmental activities for 12 solid hours. It was a made-for-TV spectacle in the nation’s media capital, with 250,000 people strolling Manhattan’s only car-free thoroughfares on a sunwashed Wednesday. A rally in Philadelphia drew 40,000 people, a concert-cum-speeches in Washington 10,000, and a downtown Chicago rally another 6,000.
Almost everywhere, it seemed, something happened - a “die-in” at Boston’s Logan airport, a “Dead Orange Parade” in Miami, a march by Chicano residents of Albuquerque – led by a mariachi band - to a foul-smelling sewage plant in the middle of their community, a demonstration outside a GE stockholders meeting in Minneapolis, car burials on campuses (including Lagrange College, in Georgia). And trash pick-ups by the hundreds. Although the number is probably high, it is frequently said that 20,000,000 people participated.
Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, had seven months earlier called for a nationwide “environmental teach-in,” centered on college campuses, to mobilize some of the same youthful energy that had made the anti-war movement so potent. He invited California Republican Congressman Paul “Pete” McCloskey to co-chair the event. They turned the job of organizing the “teach-in” over to an independent-minded group of twentysomethings who set up shop in a suite of dingy offices over a fast-food restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.
The staff was headed by Denis Hayes, a former Stanford student body president then enrolled in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nelson and McCloskey hired him to direct the Teach-In. Two Kennedy School classmates joined Denis in dropping out of school to organize the event. Andrew Garling, an anti-war activist who was jointly enrolled at Harvard Medical School, recruited the rest of the staff and served as “Northeast coordinator”, while I became the national “press director.”
Earth Day marked an astonishing change in America’s environmental consciousness. Almost overnight, an awareness of environmental problems emerged that simply had not been on the nation’s collective mind just a few months earlier.
One measure of that change is what Pete McCloskey recently called “a decade of bi-partisan environmental cooperation” during which, beginning in 1970, President Nixon (characterized by McCloskey as “no environmentalist but sensitive, as always, to public opinion’) created the Environmental Protection Agency. In the next ten years, Congress enacted no fewer than 23 landmark laws protecting air, water, endangered species, forests, rangelands, marine mammals, seacoasts, and wilderness, and regulating mining, toxic substances, and threats to drinking water. In the same decade, Congress also set aside millions of acres for parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges.
That’s not all. Similar actions were taken at the state and local level. Colleges and universities exponentially increased their course offerings and majors in environmental studies, a field which had barely existed before. Foundations embarked in programs to support environmental research and advocacy. New career paths opened up. To take the profession with which I am most familiar, when I returned to law school after Earth Day, environmental law as a specialty was virtually non-existent. Within a few years, environmental law was taught in many if not most law schools, and the field had become a vocation.
Most of the accounts of Earth Day have centered on the sheer number of events and the size of the larger crowds, and have attributed the change in our environmental awareness to the physical participation of so many people.
Looking back, I think that’s only part of the story. At the time, I was at the very center of the media vortex that surrounded Earth Day. I maintained a file of the 300 reporters who contacted us. Radio commentators called to tape interviews. TV crews trundled in from Washington, New York, Boston, and several foreign countries. I went home each night after 15 hours on the phone with reporters, leaving 20 or 30 urgent messages from other reporters stacked unanswered on my desk.
In the weeks before Earth Day, various members of our staff put in appearances on the Sunday TV talk shows. There were stories in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Review, not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor. Countless local newspapers called, or they carried round-ups sent out by the Associated Press and U.P.I. For an event that hadn’t happened, it at times seemed a little over the top. But even where crowds did not measure up to expectations, few reporters took note. A reporter in Raleigh, N.C., wrote on Earth Day that it had arrived “suffering slightly from over-exposure.”
The media coverage on Earth Day - indeed, for the entire week - was massive. In that pre-cable era, there were just three commercial broadcast networks and NET (the precursor to PBS). NBC’s phenomenally popular two-hour Today show was devoted to the environment for the whole week. ABC’s Sunday talk show focused on the environment for the two episodes leading up to Earth Day. On Earth Day, the networks combined to offer an unheard-of 9½ hours of live coverage, not counting the evening news shows. In addition to Today, NBC went live for two hours beginning at noon. CBS offered a late-evening hour-long special hosted by Walter Cronkite. ABC had a half-hour evening special. And NET aired 6½ hours of live Earth Day programming - its entire broadcast day at the time. To top it off, Earth Day was front-page news in almost every paper across the land.
But more important, I think, than the coverage devoted to Earth Day events was the unprecedented attention the media gave to the problems and concerns which prompted those events. Even as press director, I didn’t grasp the significance of that coverage at the time, even though my fellow staffers and I played a hand in providing some of the content.
Almost all of the TV specials, many of the articles leading up to Earth Day, and the vast majority of interviews delved into the environmental problems which animated the organizers - smog, water pollution, litter, toxic waste, and many others. Before Earth Day, many Americans accepted dirty air and polluted rivers as inevitable accompaniments of a healthy economy, unalterable unpleasantries that barely registered. Then Earth Day came along. Walter Cronkite and his colleagues, together with scores of magazine and newspaper writers around the country, explained the causes and effects of pollution, and interviewed experts and advocates who offered new perspectives and solutions. There had never been such a concentrated, extended, intensive, nationwide informational experience about a single subject. It was a teachable moment on steroids. Tens of millions of people - anyone who read the lead story in a newspaper or magazine, or turned on the TV - “participated” in what amounted to a virtual event exponentially larger than the plethora of local gatherings. More so than he could have ever expected, Senator Nelson got what he called for: a national teach-in on a colossal scale.
There was another underappreciated aspect of Earth Day. By far the largest contingent of on-the-ground participants was not the college students at whom the event was originally aimed, nor older folks whom many organizers tried to bring in. Rather, most Earth Day participants were school kids, K-12. The National Education Association and its state and local affiliates had encouraged members to take the lead in planning activities. Most elementary school participants simply attended an Earth Day-themed class or assembly. In many high schools, however students - usually aided by teachers and administrators – staged events outside their school building, like a clean-up project. The number of kids who participated in some type of Earth Day-related activity may have been in the millions.
What made those events special? For many students, Earth Day marked the first occasion - or, at least, the most prominent, given all the media coverage - on which they did something that connected them so immediately and immutably to an idealistic pursuit spanning communities, generations, the entire country. A trash pick-up wasn’t just a trash pick-up. It was part of Earth Day. It has never ceased to amaze me that kids who took part in such events on Earth Day remembered them 20 years later - when, as parents, they encouraged their own kids to pick up an Earth Day banner. Fifty years later, they still remember. And an astounding number are able to look back on careers they were inspired to enter in the wake of that first Earth Day.
This year’s observance of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary has been forced, by the coronavirus, to go virtual. There will be no in-person events, no crowds. The media coverage will be sparser. But the first Earth Day was largely virtual, too, and its effects were profound. That makes me optimistic about the progress we can make. Just as in 1970, older generations have failed to grapple adequately some of the most profound environmental problems, like climate change. And just as in 1970, high schoolers seem to have the most urgent appreciation of what needs to be done. Unlike 1970, high schoolers today don’t need broadcast networks or print media to connect, communicate, educate, plan, organize, or act. And they need only to glance back at Earth Day 1970 to see how much can be accomplished in a short period.
©Stephen E. Cotton
