Earth Day - 1970 and 2021

 On Friday 17 April 1970, I had finished my finals as a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. Commencement was 9 days away. I was at home in Reading for the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970. I attended the celebration in Reading with several of my friends from high school and college. I do not remember much about the program. One thing is certain, it did not include anything that related to climate change. People urged each other to do something positive for the environment. I remember deciding not to use leaded gasoline, figuring out that lead was highly toxic and it was wise not to dispose of it into the air, soil, and water. A small step.

The 1960s were an interesting time. My generation, the Baby Boomers, was just coming of age and we were determined to do better in the world than our parents had done. We had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and were knowledgeable about the horrors of DDT. We had seen the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio catch fire because it was so polluted. The famous photograph of Earthrise taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 told more dramatically than any words how tiny and fragile our spaceship Earth is. The Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 was a wake-up call to the dangers of fossil fuels to wildlife, although the widespread recognition of the dangers from their release of prehistoric carbon was several decades in the future. The Vietnam War in the 1960s saw widespread use of Agent Orange as a defoliant, creating an ecologic and health disaster. A busy decade.

On that first Earth Day in 1970, the largest single day protest in human history occurred with 20 million Americans taking to the streets across the nation to hear speeches and seek changes in human behavior (I gave up leaded gas) but more importantly policy changes that would address problems better than individual actions alone could. The cartoonist Walt Kelly came up with a poster of his character Pogo picking up trash with the quote of the day that has echoed in the 51 years since: “We have met the enemy and they is us.”

Photo by Thad Zajdowicz

And the first Earth Day worked. It had bipartisan support, support from labor and industry, support from rich and poor, and from farmers and urbanites. Over the next two years, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and others moved public policy toward making all of us better stewards of the Earth. Tetraethyl lead in gasoline was finally phased out completely in 1996. 

Over the years the focus of Earth Day has changed with greater emphasis on climate change and its deleterious effects on the environment. Once solidly bipartisan, the Republican Party is now staunchly against regulations that would, in their view, harm business. By business, I mean Big Business. Thankfully, many corporations are coming to realize that if they want to stay in operation into the future, they can’t ignore the effects their factories and products have on Planet Earth. Republicans need to be reminded that it was the Nixon administration that created the EPA and OSHA. Politics is eternal. 

I am now retired and can look back on all this with a wider, and perhaps wiser, perspective. What began mostly with Baby Boomers has now passed to the younger generations. What we did not see in 1970 was how rapidly the clock was ticking. The Earth’s population, 3.7 billion Homo sapiens, now stands at 7.8 billion -- more than doubled and rising. All of them deserve clean air and water, good nutrition, and healthcare. That photo of Earthrise shows us something that billionaires such as Elon Musk fail to see: for the people of Earth, Earth is realistically the only spaceship they will ever have. Shannon Stirone has it correct: humans going to Mars is a folly. There is really only one true home for us, she writes -- and we’re already here. Better for Musk to use his money to make this spaceship a better place for all of humanity.