Keith Schneider offers a poignant remembrance of earlier Earth Days and a political analysis of where the movement is going. He's a sunny optimist on the latter; more sanguine than the facts support, but it's good to see him looking for silver linings.
http://www.mlui.org/growthmanagement/fullarticle.asp?fileid=16846
Here is an excerpt from Ruin and Recovery on Michigan's Earth Day 1970:
All three major TV networks covered the events around the country. A geology student attending Albion College, Walter Pomeroy, appeared on a CBS-TV prime-time special April 22, Earth Day: A Question of Survival, hosted by Walter Cronkite. In contrast to protests on other campuses that Cronkite called sometimes “frivolous,” the Albion activities Pomeroy organized included the cleanup of a vacant lot to create a small urban park.
Albion called itself “Manufacturing City U.S.A.,” CBS reported, and not all its foundries had installed air pollution control equipment. But Pomeroy told reporter Hughes Rudd that he had arranged meetings with the local polluters to promote dialogue. “We were afraid,” he said, “that if we picketed the factories, it would actually turn the community against us.” The special showed Pomeroy’s fellow students jumping up and down on the non-aluminum cans they’d collected in the cleanup, making them easier to return to the manufacturer with a message that it should switch to recyclable materials. Michigan television stations also broadcast specials in the season of Earth Day. WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids broadcast a series, Our Poisoned World, detailing serious local air, water and noise pollution and the problem of garbage disposal.
Michigan was one of the hotbeds of Earth Day action. At a five-day teach-in on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor in March, in which an estimated 50,000 persons participated, Victor Yannacone, who in 1967 had filed the Environmental Defense Fund lawsuits to stop the spraying of DDT and dieldrin, spoke on use of the courts to halt pollution. He told students, “This land is your land. It doesn’t belong to Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler…it doesn’t belong to any soulless corporation. It belongs to you and me.” A new student group called ENACT organized the week’s events, which included an “Environmental Scream-Out,” a tour of local pollution sites, music by popular singer Gordon Lightfoot and speeches by entertainer Arthur Godfrey, scientist Barry Commoner, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and Senators Nelson and Edward Muskie of Maine.
Business Week magazine said the Ann Arbor event had attracted the greatest turnout of any teach-in to that date. Noting that President Richard Nixon and college administrators hoped environmental issues would turn students away from Vietnam War protests, the magazine fretted that it appeared “the struggle for clean air and water is producing as many radicals as the war. And if the rhetoric at Michigan is any guide, business will bear the brunt of criticism.”
Action took different forms on different campuses. Tom Bailey, a Marquette high school student, worked with students at Northern Michigan University to plan Earth Day activities. One was a “flush-in.” Students flushed fluorescent dye tablets down dorm toilets at a synchronized moment in an effort to prove that sewage was directly discharging into Lake Superior. Events like these not only attracted the attention of the press, but also gave future environmental professionals their first major public exposure. Bailey later worked for the state Department of Natural Resources, as had his father, and became executive director of the Little Traverse Conservancy. One of ENACT’s founders on the University of Michigan campus, John Turner, later became director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Doug Scott, a graduate student active in ENACT’s teach-in planning, moved on to the national staff of the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club.
Student concern and action did not stop on Earth Day. Walt Pomeroy of Albion College contacted activists on other campuses who agreed the next logical step was the formation of a student lobby for the environment. Described as “lobbyists in blue jeans” by one newspaper, the new Michigan Student Environmental Confederation received a surprisingly warm welcome from some in the Capitol.
“Soon we made friends in the legislature on both sides of the aisle,” said Pomeroy. “We learned a day at a time. And since we were in the Capitol almost every day, our network of friends and supporters expanded from just student groups to a diversity of community, environmental and sportsmen groups. Legislative priorities turned into victories…We started an environmental organization with a good cause, not much financial support and worked with the sportsmen and other environmental groups. We created the path – the opportunity – for others to also organize environmental groups and hire staff. None had existed solely to focus on state environmental legislative policies prior to the creation of MSEC. Many followed and are now part of the accepted political landscape in Lansing and throughout Michigan.”
Another typical student activist of the time was Alex Sagady. Son of a General Motors engineer interested in automobile emissions control, Sagady joined the MSEC in the early 1970s after studying at the University of Michigan. He credited his environmental concern to his father’s example and rustic camping with a “significant other.” Disdaining automobile ownership and transporting himself on a bicycle, Sagady volunteered for the Confederation and then became its head when money ran low in late 1973. An uncompromising, fierce battler, Sagady stirred anger among the legislators he attacked in the MSEC’s publication, Earth Beat. His greatest victory came in 1982 when, working for the American Lung Association of Michigan, he mobilized public opinion to enforce the state’s sulfur dioxide cleanup rule against the Detroit Edison Company’s Monroe Plant, cutting emissions by 120,000 tons per year.
The mood of grave concern in 1970 gripped some elders, too. Ralph MacMullan, the director of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, authored an article in the Michigan Natural Resources, his agency’s magazine, entitled “Ten Years to Save Mankind.” Said MacMullan: “Nature is giving clear signals that it will not continue indefinitely to accept the garbage, the filth, the fumes that are the byproduct of this drive to the supersonic life.”
At a speech on Earth Day, Governor Milliken talked of making Michigan “a model state” in the fight against pollution. Contrary to the views of a few contemporary skeptics unimpressed with his response to the mercury crisis, Milliken’s concern for the environment did not begin with its discovery or with Earth Day. In fact, he was about to become the first governor in Michigan’s history to demonstrate courageous leadership in the fight to protect the environment, fusing with the new public movement to enact landmark reforms.