Throughline - Force of Nature (2021)

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Rivers on fire, acid rain falling from the sky, species going extinct, oil spills, polluted air, and undrinkable water: For so long, we didn't think of our planet as a place to preserve. And then, in the 1960s and 70s, that changed. Democrats and Republicans, with overwhelming public support, came together to pass a sweeping legislative agenda around environmental protection. In today's episode, what led to Earth Day, and what Earth Day led to.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. I suppose a psychoanalyst would say that my concern for the environment is rooted in the fact that I was raised in a paper mill community. I was raised in Camas, C-A-M-A-S, Washington, which is about 12 miles away from Portland, Oregon, but on the other side of the Columbia River.

It's a small town. It was then under 5,000 people, and essentially everyone in the town was either employed by the paper mill or they were selling groceries or being doctors or lawyers or pharmacists to people who worked in the paper mill. So it was, in a very real sense, a mill town.

The only image that anybody had of Camas was the place where the stink comes from. But that was viewed by all of the families that I knew as the smell of prosperity. That's the smell of progress. The smokestack set out unfiltered sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. The hydrogen sulfide smelled like rotten eggs. The sulfur dioxide had an acrid, very, very sharp thing,

both of which, if they're mixed with rain, turn into acids. And since this was in southwest Washington, it mixed with rain virtually every day. A hazy mist that is sort of constantly there would accumulate on surfaces and corrode them. It pitted the roofs of cars, destroyed the roofs of houses, and gave everybody sore throats. People were buying cars, and within six months, a year, the finishes on the cars were destroyed,

and they were starting to mottle and rust. And the mill, rather than cleaning up the air, it installed a car wash at the exit of the parking lots, so that whenever you left the mill, your car would go through this spray that would spray off the accumulated sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. And there was a small slough near the mill, and every now and then you'd go down past the Columbia Slough and there'd be a few hundred dead fish just floating in the water.

If you haven't experienced anything else, what you're experiencing is simply normalcy. I'm Dennis Hayes. I'm president of the Bullet Foundation, an environmental philanthropy located in Seattle, and have been the chair of EarthDay.org for about as long as it has existed. Back in the 1950s, when Dennis was growing up,

there were hardly any air or water pollution controls because, well, no one was paying that much attention to the environment. You were just doing your job, collecting your paycheck, going home, and moving on with life. If you put the mill into question, you put your paycheck into question. So you didn't. And that was the story not just in Dennis's hometown, but in places across the country. We were the most prosperous country in the world and as a consequence, the most polluted. If you visit American city, you will find it very pretty. Just two things of which you must beware.

Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air. All towns had various kinds of environmental insults that they were predicting, not just towns, but cities and communities and rural areas. We didn't think of it as being anything special, and in fact it wasn't anything special. Water and breathing. All of which raise the obvious question, isn't it possible to make paper without destroying the planet? An obvious question now, but one that only occurred to Dennis years after he moved away from that mill town.

Around the same time, a lot of other people were also starting to wonder if all that pollution, all that progress, might be doing some long-term damage. What we were doing to our lungs, what we're doing to our eyes, what we're doing to our property. And I think all of that probably is where the seeds of environmentalism were planted. As the public began to ask these questions, Dennis Hayes led a team of people who were determined to start an event that they hoped would start a movement that would capture the minds of the nation and change the course of environmental action in this country forever. There was some kind of magic actually to the name Earth Day. It turns out now that it's gone international 30 years ago, Earth Day translates well into seemingly every language on the planet. And when you say it,

there's something about it that people just found very appealing to be part of that. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. Earth Day has become something a lot of us take for granted and almost ignore. One day out of the year, we're asked to remember the Earth, the thing we live on, that surrounds us, that feeds us. One day. And yet, it's really hard to describe what it is and what it's done for our society. But like so many other days, the backstory is one of idealism, challenging societal norms,

and pushing for radical change. Not just a recycling program or a day to clean up your local parks. Earth Day was supposed to be about changing things fundamentally, down to the way our entire economy functions. So on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're looking at how Earth Day was born and what came next.

Yo, this is Leah from Santa Fe, Mexico. And I'm on a hike with my dog. And I really like your show. And you're listening to Through Life from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

If you're constantly asking, what's good to eat around here? The Seattle Eats podcast is for you. Food and drink writer Tan Vin here, from the best pizza in the Puget Sound to the best wine to buy at Costco. I'll be your host and guide across our vibrant local food scene. Listen to Seattle Eats from KUOW, The Seattle Times, and the NPR Network, wherever you get podcasts. Part 1. The Rot. Here we are. You should be able to see the mountains. You should be able to see our beautiful city, but you can't see anything. The scientists were saying that if you were breathing in Los Angeles, it was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

The sun was a color I had never seen it because there was so much particulate matter in the air, so much smog. We were driving with the windows down. I remember looking at the car next to me and it was a guy in a suit, really very nicely dressed in a really nice sports car with the top down.

And then when he turned to look at me, he had a complete gas mask on, which scared me. I felt like I had arrived at an alien planet. To see that people who lived there were having to revert to using gas masks as a way to, you know, stay alive was a complete shock to me. It's difficult for an 18-year-old to comprehend that nobody would be outraged by the fact that if you're walking down a street, you can't see 150 feet in front of you because the air pollution is so thick. All this pollution really started during World War II, when there was a huge industrial boom in the U.S. When you are facing an existential threat like Hitler, you don't stop and worry about air pollution or water pollution.

And we created this mentality that we were going to be driving aggressively ahead. And the champions of industry became sort of American heroes. And there definitely wasn't any kind of environmental movement yet. In fact, it was kind of the opposite. We were one of the most polluted countries in the world, and we actually took some level of national pride in that. There was a long-standing conservation movement, but that was more focused on land preservation, land which was often stolen from indigenous people. But addressing things like bad air or poisoned water weren't part of those early conservation efforts.

By the 1960s, the devastating impact of pollution was becoming hard to ignore. And in 1962, conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson sounded the alarm in her groundbreaking work, Silent Spring. We have to remember that children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth, perhaps even before birth. Now, what is going to happen to them in adult life as a result of that exposure?

And the real tipping point, when the American public began to agree that something had to be done about this pollution, came towards the end of the 1960s. So the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Actually, the Cuyahoga caught on fire several times, and you had this juxtaposition, a river burning. The Cuyahoga River, as it reaches Lake Erie after a 100-mile twisting and turning journey from its headwaters, is an exhausted stream, abused and misused by man and his machines. Big river, burn on. Burn on, big river, burn on. To be honest, I think of Rivers is Burning as like an apocalyptic image.

Yes, and it is an apocalyptic image. And you can watch the flames sweeping toward a bridge as the fire spreads down the river. California's offshore oil slick washed up onto the beaches today, blackening the sands and blemishing hundreds of boats. Oil is still bubbling up. And similarly, in Santa Barbara, there was this unexpected juxtaposition where Santa Barbara was an elitist community. It's a privileged enclave. And suddenly this place with its pure white sand beaches

was being coated with thick layers of oil from this oil platform spill. And it was coating birds. And then there was this public rush to the beach to work with detergents to try to get the oil off of the birds quickly. It was just sort of heartbreaking. I just believe in peace and dying peace. Kathy, what can you do for these birds out here? The only way to stop the oil platforms and we'll soon destroy ourselves.

So you had those two things, one, the concept of a river burning, the concept of a rich community suffering a major environmental insult that caused the media to say, hey, that's news. You'd had something like that going on day after day, week after week, month's news. You'd had something like that going on day after day, week after week, month after month. I'm curious, during all of this, where were you? I was the first person in

my family to go to college. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. And I became enormously depressed, almost a level of existential despair after about my sophomore year. I had not thought too much about big issues. I took a lot of things about my country, its politics, my religion, sort of on faith. And college did exactly what it's supposed to do. It kind of shredded all of the assumptions that I had and caused me to question everything. So I took off and went hitchhiking around the world for three years, which, trust me, is a whole lot more romantic to look back upon than it is to actually experience it. He went all over the world.

East Asia to Eastern Europe, through the Middle East, down the west coast of Africa, up the east coast. And one night, while in Namibia, he had a revelation of sorts. I remembered back a course that I had taken in ecology, where you were learning how everything in the world interacts with one another, and that energy is the currency of life,

and that nature becomes incredibly efficient because it doesn't have any spare energy to be sloppy with. And I began thinking about how that set of principles could apply to humans. And in that moment, he didn't exactly know how, but he knew he was committed to protecting the environment. That was what I wanted to devote my life to, trying.s and and was there was there already a movement did you plug into it there was no environmental movement though there were all of these threads that later became the environmental movement but i i was much more involved in the anti-war movement when I came back. And we had a rising counterculture, the rise of hippies and Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. And all of that turmoil on various fronts just sort of loosened the rules and caused people to step back and evaluate everything. What joy is there in life? Life should be, life is, should is, and should be

ecstasy. Being alive should be a joy, and it's a drag. Those of us dealing with the environment, we're thinking of this as an opportunity for a fundamental, long-lasting change in the nature of the American economy and American society. We're breaking away from the standard American syndrome of use up as much as you possibly can. It's a very Tolstoyan kind of thing of what does a man need, you know, not very much, really. As we began to talk about resource scarcity and about the accumulation of trash, it quite naturally raised the question, well, isn't it kind of stupid to pull minerals from mines, spend an enormous amount of money and energy to refine them,

use them once, perhaps briefly, and send them to a dump. What we ought to be doing is creating what we would now call a circular society and begin to have these things used and reused and reused and even designed to be reused. But my real introduction to movement environmentalism began in the fall of 1969. Senator Gaylord Nelson. Wisconsin's great conservation senator, Gaylord Nelson. Gaylord was an ardent environmentalist.

He cared deeply about conservation issues as well as urban environmental issues. Thanks to Senator Nelson, the beautiful St. Croix River in northwestern Wisconsin with towering bluffs and clear, cool water is going to be saved from the pollution and commercialization which have spoiled most of America's great rivers. Came from a state, Wisconsin, at that campuses, which he thought might be sort of a starter engine, trying to build a base of public support that would make environmental legislation possible, despite the opposition of some vested interests that would try to oppose it. By this point, Dennis had finished college and enrolled in a graduate program at Harvard. So I flew down to Washington, D.C. and got a 15-minute interview with Senator Nelson, hoping to get the charter to go back and organize Harvard.

And the 15-minute interview turned into a couple of hours. And it became pretty clear, pretty swiftly, that there wasn't anything there except the germ of an idea and a guy that had given a whole bunch of speeches saying this really ought to happen. And what did he want to call it? Oh, the National Environmental Teach-In. Oh, that's a mouthful. Yes. In fact, that's what he did keep calling it all the way through April 22nd. After that meeting, Dennis flew back to campus. And began making lists of people that I had a contact around Boston,

at MIT, at Boston University, Tufts, all of the other schools. But a couple of days later, he got a call. Completely unexpected. From Senator Nelson's chief of staff. Saying, would you consider dropping out and coming down to organize the United States? Certainly the most rapid promotion of my life. So I dropped out, went down, then it exploded to become pretty much the rest of my life. In the span of a few days, Dennis flew to D.C., met with a senator, flew back to Boston, dropped out of grad school and moved to D.C. to begin organizing the United States, planning what was still being called the National Environmental Teach-In.

Oh, and he had like four months to assemble a team and pull it all off. The meeting was in December of 1969. So you then had Christmas and New Year's coming up where you wouldn't be able to get very much done. And then you're starting in January for an event in the middle of April. It was really, really tight. When we come back, Dennis and a team of organizers

take Senator Nelson's idea and turn it into Earth Day. Hi, this is Barbara from Ocoee, Florida. You are listening to Blue Line on NPR. Great podcast. popular NPR shows, like weekend edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the world they live in. More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Part 2. Made for TV. I have a very strong living relationship with the landscape here in New Mexico. It helped raise me when I was a youth

and I spent almost all my free time in an open space that was owned by a neighboring pueblo, the reservation, they had a reservation and they had lots of land and they kept it undeveloped. I talk about it as my tierra sagrada, my sacred place, my sacred earth, because it was so important and vital in raising me and made me a child of the earth. This is Arturo Sandoval. I'm the founding director of a small nonprofit based in New Mexico that works with indigenous and Mexicano-Chicano communities to create healthy environments on multiple fronts. And I am a longtime Chicano civil rights activist, and I've been at this work for about 55 years now. Arturo first got involved in Chicano activism, a movement dedicated to the

civil rights of Mexican-Americans, back in the 1960s when he was a student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He was also becoming involved in the anti-war movement, speaking out against the Vietnam War and staging protests. He was starting to get a reputation as a real trailblazer. Then, one day... Out of the blue, I got this call from the Earth Day staff, Dennis and his people. We said this is going to be a really big thing. This is going to be like the march to Selma or the march on the Pentagon. Yeah, they said, you know, this is going to be like those anti-war teach-ins. To try to create a groundswell of support for things around these values.

I said, oh, I'm familiar with those. We've done some here at the university. Renamed the thing from environmental teach-in, called it Earth Day. What is Earth Day? What are you trying to achieve? We're going to fundamentally change how capitalism operates. Capitalism is just destroying the planet and we can't just let it continue. Eventually, if wildly successful, be able to hang a legislative agenda and a regulatory agenda that would

profoundly change the way that America does business. They talked for hours and it became clear to Arturo that they shared a lot of the same values and saw connections between the physical environment and the political socioeconomic environment that nationalized minorities had to survive in or live in. So I never saw a disconnect between being an environmental activist and being a civil rights activist. To me, it's the same thing. So he agreed to join the Earth Day team as the Western Regional Coordinator. He hopped on a plane and flew to D.C. Arturo arrived at the office in DuPont Circle, where the team was based.

It was a poor neighborhood, high crime rate. Dennis and some of the others deliberately said, let's go to an area where we're not going to be mistaken for anybody else. And that's when he realized. I was the only person of color on the organizing team. Like what went through your mind? Well, I said, I wonder what I got myself into here. But I had had these long conversations. I'd had at least several hour-plus conversations with them before I agreed to sign up. So I had confidence in their core values. And that was enough of a confidence booster for me to say,

these are people I do want to hang out with. Exactly how we run out Earth Day, we'll figure that out as we go along. And I'll have a voice in exactly what that's going to be. The team got to work and started reaching out to community organizations. Easiest way to do that is to find some group, the Audubon Society to the Boy Scouts to what have you, that ought to be interested in this and have a conversation and try to explain what we're trying to accomplish and see if they can see a way to fit it into their agenda. Let's save the hawks we've got. People in the Ottoman society worried about the fates of birds. Help them preserve the nature of things. Along with people who were fighting to

stop freeways from cutting through their vibrant inner cities. Since World War II, state highway departments have built 163,000 miles of new roads. At the same time, we had people worried about lead paint peeling off of men eaten by young infants who then suffered permanent nerve damage. A child who has eaten paint

can die, can become blind for life. And then these very vivid pictures of harpoons harpooning whales out in the middle of the ocean. All of that stuff was viewed as the whale issue, the lead paint issue, the birds issue. It wasn't viewed as having anything in common with one another. And what Earth Day did was talk to them all. I mean, it was just really this collection of reaching out to interest after interest after interest to say, you know, you're part of the same fabric.

If you can pull all of these things together and you become a movement, it's addressing all of them so that the birds people will help you on the highways issues and the highway people will help you on the lead paint issues, then suddenly you've got something that was capable of having real impact on society. This was a radical idea. The thinking was Earth Day should be a reflection of each group, each city's priorities, and they should be in charge of what it looked like. In other words, this was going to be essentially everywhere, unless top-down control.

We're not going to give them a model. We're going to tell them, get your shit together on your own, and here's the other eight groups in your city that are interested. You organize yourselves, and we'll do what we can to send you materials. And call us if you get stuck. So we didn't organize the events. We turned it back on people and just, we were networkers. At the height of it, the three weeks leading up or a month before,

we were probably sending out maybe 10,000 pieces of mail a day. We were sending out thousands of pieces. You know, I spent 18 hours a day just taking calls, returning calls, making calls. Because our only organizing tools were the dial phone and mail. They had more luck getting a response from white people, especially women, than from communities of color. Communities of color were really underrepresented, especially African Americans. We talked about this a lot. And it wasn't for want of trying.

I mean, I flew down and met with the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the members of CORE and NAACP. And they were all warm, cordial, welcoming, saying, you know, these are important things, we're really glad you're doing it. But they would be saying, our communities are kind of wracked by poverty. They're wracked by crime, wracked by racism and marginalization, all the other things that come from being a nationalized minority. This environmental stuff will become a priority for us after we've solved some of these other issues. There was a lot of criticism of us early on that we were trying to take away the focus that, you know, this is just a distraction.

You know, they told me, you know, we get it, but, you know, we're so busy just with art. Our focus is so needed right now on art-particular issues that we're not against what you're doing, but we just can't drop what we're doing to add this to our agenda. Did it feel weird at all that like these are majority, you know, white folks, you being the exception in this poor neighborhood and also organizing and not being able to reach those very people that you were kind of like living next to, right? I just wonder if that was something that like, that occurred to you and to the group at the time. Oh, yeah.

The irony of it, you know, the irony that we were in a Black poor neighborhood, but our message was not resonating with them. We're very, very aware. As the big day neared, the team braced themselves. They had no idea exactly how many people would turn out, which kind of worked in their favor because most politicians,

Republican and Democrat, kind of just thought it was going to be a day of a bunch of hippies hugging trees. You know, candidly, nobody took us seriously enough to oppose it. Nobody really knew where it was going and what its ultimate impact would be. Still, Dennis and his team were media savvy. They understood that the success of this event hinged on whether people were watching it. And they learned from other movements of the 60s how to create a made-for-TV moment. We were the brokers for the media, so we connected the media to the hottest events that they thought would be good for visuals.

The major news networks were ready. April 22, 1970, would be a day unlike anything anyone had seen before. ABC News presents Earth Day. An SOS for survival. This is a CBS News special, Earth Day. 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. Got up before dawn and walked down to the mall in Washington, D.C. for the sunrise ceremony with the Native American chiefs. It was from Washington that 25-year-old Dennis Hayes

started to organize this nationwide thing. We are systematically destroying our land, our streams, and our seas. And then basically the day just exploded with a series of speeches and interviews. The trash, the carbon monoxide, the junk. Who suffers most from it if it is not the poor? It makes one think that the whole world would be better off if man hadn't been invented.

This has got to come to a halt. We'll require a long sustained political, moral, ethical, and financial commitment far beyond any commitment ever made by any society in the history of man. Are we able? Yes. Are we willing? That's the unanswered question. Demonstrators were predominantly young, predominantly white, predominantly anti-Nixon. I was back in Albuquerque. They gathered here in an atmosphere of fiesta, many of them dressed in native folk costumes and listening to a strolling mariachi band. Mariachis on horses, and I had a mariachi band, and very Mexican. I had the Mexican flag going. I had the U.S. flag going.

I had a lot of kids. I had families. And they were all Mexicans and Chicanos. And I just thought it was very visual because that's what TV likes. And we marched right through Barelas, right along the irrigation canal and right through the poorest houses in the barrio. The kind of things that come from air pollution, water pollution are the same kinds of things that cause racism. I said, we're going to show people that the same people who are polluting our rivers and the same people are destroying our earth. They're the same people. It caused poverty, it caused hunger in this country.

And I felt good that I was able to get that particular message and include Chicanos. Viva la raza! Viva! And we stood out like a sore thumb, but I was very happy. And that was a conscious political, strategic choice that the entire team made. In cities and towns, they would choose something that would exemplify in ways ideally that could be photographed and put on the evening news that called attention to the issue that they were most concerned about. If you were worried about air pollution that came from automobiles, there were a couple of different places where they had to pay 50 cents to get one swing with

a sledgehammer, but they bought a couple of old junkers and just literally beat these automobiles into piles of rubble. Earth Day in Boston was not altogether tranquil, as demonstrators focused on Logan Airport. And at the University of St. Louis, students gave up their noon hour to a litter pickup march. Now some young people in Miami are sounding a warning. And New York was just this profoundly moving experience for me. Looking out over a crowd and not being able to see the edge of it. It's like spread out like the ocean farther than the eye can see. An estimated 20 million people participated in that first Earth Day.

There were 12,000 different events in cities across the country, the largest planned demonstration in American history. I mean, literally in the end, it was every city, every town, every village, virtually every crossroads in America was doing something on Earth Day. And that wasn't being directed out of Washington, D.C. That was something that we merely got them committed to, and then they pulled it off. The future looked bright. Clearly, Americans cared about the environment.

The question was, okay, that is a great accomplishment, but now have we succeeded in weaving all of these different strands into this fabric of modern environmentalism? Can we have some political clout that's growing out of it? And is there a chance that we have really launched a brand new movement that will be capable of reshaping the society in profound ways? Immediately after Earth Day, when I finally got 12 or 15 hours of sleep and woke up and read through some of the collected newspapers, I began to think that this really was going to be coming together. And then when President Nixon invaded Cambodia, literally, it was just like a sucker punch. This is Julian Barber from Washington, D.C.,

reporting on President Nixon's Cambodian decision, which has been a subject of controversy in this country and abroad. A week after Earth Day, Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia, and a few days after that, the National Guard shot students at Kent State. When you do have a situation of a crowd throwing rocks, and the National Guard is called in, there is always the chance that it will escalate into the kind of a tragedy that happened at Kent State.

And the whole nation kind of forgot the environment for a bit. So we then had to figure out, okay, what are we going to do to resuscitate this? When we come back, a plan to get Earth Day back in the spotlight and take it to the halls of Congress. Oh my God, Archer. I'm sorry. Part 3. Inch by Inch. That first Earth Day in 1970 not only signified a historic event, but the birth of a new movement, the modern environmental movement,

one that distinguished itself from the conservation and preservationist movements that came before. The long game was legislation, political change. Which fueled an even bigger issue Dennis and Arturo were dealing with. The establishment still thought of it as basically a day in the park. People picking up litter and planting trees and business all just very nice. Nothing that they would feel was a huge threat to them. So they needed a new strategy, a new campaign. The political change, the sea change in politics actually happened that fall with something called the Dirty Dozen campaign.

Byron Rogers, Democrat, Colorado. Lawrence Wynn, Republican, Kansas. Roger Zion. These 12 congressmen, 10 of them Republican, were called out for their bad records on the environment. William Calgar, Republican, Kentucky. Congress may not have paid much attention to the 20 million people who came out in April, but they paid a lot of attention to the 12 people who came out on a list that following November. Odin Langen, Republican, Minnesota. And in each of the instances where we won,

and we won 7 out of 12, people who had voted on the basis of environment were more than the margin of victory. That was when Congress really perked up and smelled the coffee on this issue. That was when this wasn't a bunch of people picking tulips in the park. Suddenly, politicians saw what was at stake. They may have seen those millions of people who showed up that day as activists or tree huggers, but now they saw them as voters who determined whether or not they had a job. That, as much as anything, is what made the Clean Air Act essentially a unanimous vote in both chambers of Congress. The Clean Air Act of 1970,

the first major piece of legislation to come after Earth Day. Which kind of profoundly changed the way that we made automobiles and allowed power plants and factories to operate. It was a sweeping bill. Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality. And a bunch of other bills followed. Thus, this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality. And a bunch of other bills followed. The Clean Water Act.

The Safe Drinking Water Act. The Protection of Wildlife. The Endangered Species Act. The Wise Use of Our Land. The Marine Mammal Protection Act. Parks for All to Enjoy. The National Forest Management Act. The Resource and Conservation Recovery Act. These are part of the birthright of every American.

Let's remember, most of this happened under Richard Nixon. He wasn't much of an environmentalist, though, but he was a politician. He did recognize what happened on Earth Day, and he did, with an executive order, create the Environmental Protection Agency, which was really bold and has been enormously important over time. The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. Certainly Earth Day contributed to the environment in which we passed a truly sweeping legislative package.

Things that arguably changed American society more than any other thing in American history except perhaps the New Deal. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And then we went into the Jimmy Carter years, which were sort of pro-environment. By acting now, we can control our future

instead of letting the future control us. There was a period for seven or eight years where that motive, environmental desire to build a healthy, sustainable society was almost an unstoppable force. Governor Reagan says that this is not a good achievement, and he blames restraints on coal production on regulations, regulations that protect the purity of our air and the quality of our water and our land. He wants to put all our eggs in one basket and give that basket to the major oil companies.

Governor Reagan, that is a misstatement, of course, of my position. I just happen to believe that free enterprise can do a better job of producing the things that people need than government can. What happened that really crystallized an anti-environmental sentiment, built an industrial base for it, and aligned the Republican Party with it, was the Reagan administration. With our modern technology, yes, we can burn our coal within the limits of the Clean Air Act. I think as technology improves, we'll be able to do even better with that. We brought in a guy named James Watts to be the Secretary of Interior. I think we ought to be tough. I like the concept you liberals like to accuse me of wanting hanging judges. I do.

I want tough laws. Ann Gorsuch, the mother of our recent Supreme Court Justice, to be the head of the EPA. They were both anti-environmental zealots. And it really polarized the country around environmental issues. So it sounds like that was when the glow, right? There's like an afterglow after Earth Day where a lot of this legislation is passed. It sounds like around the time Reagan comes in,

that glow begins to wane. Yes, if anything, it's really quite an understatement. The glow started to wane. It was a very solid repudiation of it. I wouldn't go so far as to say they embraced environmental devastation, but they were kind of indifferent to it. The Republican Party became extremely anti-regulatory and any kind of regulation of anything. Rolling back environmental protections was an important part of Reagan's larger agenda to privatize and deregulate the country.

There was a growing concern among American industries that all these regulations were going to hurt their bottom line and threaten American progress. And for better or worse, environmental issues were associated with progressive values and with regulatory mechanisms. So they just, they came after it. Plus, environmentalism was beginning to be seen more and more as an issue of poor communities and communities of color, improving the quality of cities, especially for Black and brown people. And as the memory of rivers on fire and smog-filled cities faded, the environment became as polarizing a topic as any.

That first Earth Day was the seed of the modern environmental movement as we know it. But as the movement has grown, it's come under more scrutiny for being classist, not inclusive of different races, and even a bit out of touch with reality. The problem for the environmental movement that emerged after Earth Day and the environmental organizations was that it became a very East Coast, West Coast oriented movement. And it also became very middle class and upper middle class white movement. in the decade of the 70s, they didn't see the need to actually reach out to Black activists or to Black communities or to working whites. You know, that huge swath of middle-class people working in Detroit at the time or farmers in the Midwest, and certainly not communities of color.

We now hopefully have enough cognizance to make sure that however we address this climate change, it comes out in a way that leaves everybody advantaged by it. And if you look at groups that have been pushing on this very hard, from the Sunrise Project and the Green New Deal and what have you, they are enormously diverse, often dominated by people of color. If the national environmental organizations still have a fairly white hue, the grassroots environmental organizations, including ones that have taken very strong, very successful efforts to bring about clean energy legislation at the city and state level are often dominated by communities of color. All of that is a really hopeful sign for the future and one that is the kind of adjustment

that was needed. It's clear to me after all these many, many years of doing everything wrong and making every mistake known to a community organizer and trying to learn from those mistakes. I believe that there's a desperate need to rein in the unfettered capitalism that has taken over the world that is still, I believe, destroying the planet and the people on the planet. And that's the part that we didn't talk about much in Earth Day,

and I don't think that's enough of the conversation in the mainstream environmental movement, is that we have to look with a very critical eye at our existing economic system and understand that it's actually doing us in. Still, Arturo and Dennis are both deeply proud of their role in an event that launched a movement

and has gone international. Today, over a billion people celebrate Earth Day each year around the world. I guess the hopes that we had at that time was that this was going to be really transformational for the whole nation. And we would become not just the industrial leader of the world, but one that would show the world how to build a circular economy that is healthy and prosperous and run off of renewable energy.

And to do that all in a super efficient way. We certainly fell very far short of that goal, but we at least inched our way there. And, you know, progress comes, individual laws, individual regulations, and you sort of hope that the sum total of them will add up to something important. And in this case, I think the sum total really did fundamentally transform the nation. If you were walking down the streets of most cities in 1950, and then you were transported to 2021, you just wouldn't recognize the place that you were in. It would be better. It would be healthier.

Still imperfect, but we've made some spectacular progress. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randhamd El-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLight from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Jamie York. Lawrence Wu.

Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibeez. Parth Shah. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thank you to Yolanda Sangwini and Anya Grunman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi.

Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. If you have an idea or like something you've heard on this show, email us at throughline at npr.org. Or hit us up on Twitter at Through at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLineNPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Organic Valley, a farmer-owned dairy cooperative of small organic family farms dedicated to protecting where food comes from. Learn more at ov.coop. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial. When your celebration of life is prepaid today,

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