Earth Observance: The Day Politics Stood Still

When he was a child, Denis Hayes, 40, the one-time wunderkind of America’s environmental movement, recalls, “Among educated people environment was the thing other than heredity that determined personality.”

Oh, perhaps one’s maiden aunt affected British walking shoes, cooked her vegetables right with Adele Davis and went on weekend hikes with some fringy outfit called the Sierra Club.

But in those days it would have been difficult to find a quorum for a lively debate on pollution, recycling or energy conservation.

Then, in June of 1970, a funny thing happened to some U.S. senators on their way to reelection. They were defeated after being targeted by a volunteer coalition whose numbers included the activists who six weeks earlier--on April 22--had staged the first Earth Day, the event that launched the environmental movement nationwide.

It was the start of the greening of America.

Earth Day, with 10 million students involved, with its mock funerals for the internal combustion engine, its attack on polluters and offshore oil drillers and those who make pesticides and non-biodegradable detergents, spurred environmental legislation, spawned watchdog agencies and made environmentalists a major political force.

Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, was the man who conceived the idea of a national environmental teach-in and dubbed it Earth Day. A decade later, in 1980, he was defeated in his bid for a fourth term (despite, not because of, his environmental leanings, he contends) but today, at 68, he carries on the environmental battle as counselor of the Washington-based Wilderness Society.

Nelson remembers well: “I was out in Santa Barbara to speak at a water conference, it was in late August of 1969, when I conceived the idea of a nationwide environmental conservation demonstration. Then I went to Berkeley to speak and there were all of these Vietnam teach-ins going on and it suddenly dawned on me--why not a nationwide teach-in on the environment?

“I checked it out in Berkeley and they thought it was a great idea so I announced it in a speech in Seattle on Sept. 9. I ran it out of my office for the first two or three months,” until Common Cause offered space. Soon, Nelson brought on board Stanford’s Denis Hayes to run the Earth Day office.

“Those large demonstrations of millions of people forced the issue into the political dialogue of the country,” he said, “and that was my sole purpose. Nobody--governors, or senators, or the President--was paying any attention to this issue.

“The public was interested; the politicians weren’t. In the 1968 campaign--Nixon, Humphrey and Wallace--not a single reference was made to the environment. Hubert was good on the issue and was the main sponsor of the Wilderness Act of 1964 but he never gave a speech on it. Why? The why was he didn’t think there was any political interest.

” . . . Earth Day got the politicians’ attention.”

But, in Nelson’s view, it did something else equally important: It led to “the development of an educated and concerned public, people of all age groups, that understood that this issue affects quality of life. Until then, you couldn’t get support for doing tough things.”

Nelson counted the victories: The Clean Air Act of 1970, massive appropriations for waste treatment plants, the attack on hazardous waste dumps, the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the banning of DDT, “which was destroying lots of things including the peregrine falcons and the bald eagle.”

Then he added quickly, “We have a long way to go on air pollution, water pollution, control of pesticides. We’ve only made a beginning in cleaning up hazardous waste dumps. A program was launched and it got growing broad public support and then suddenly we got an Administration in 1980 that didn’t believe in it, so they reversed everything. We’ll be a long time recovering.”

Enthusiasm to Dismantle

Nelson views former Interior Secretary James Watt as an unqualified “disaster,” a man who “moved with great enthusiasm to dismantle all the achievements of the previous secretaries of the Interior. And the damage he’s done will be lasting. The whole Administration--Anne Burford (since fired) in charge of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), was someone whose main purpose was to frustrate the intent of Congress, and she was very successful. They fired all kinds of top people and it’ll be several years before the EPA gets back the professional status it had before. Watt did the same over in Interior and the same thing has been going on over in the Forest Service.”

But if “the momentum has been slowed,” Nelson said, “the issue will be with us forever. We have come a long way since 1970, and we have a long way to go. The question is whether we will move rapidly enough to stop the permanent degradation of vital resources--air, water, soil, forests, minerals, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats. They’re all under very vigorous assault and the status of the human species depends upon those resources.”

And now, said Nelson, there are the new environmental threats--acid rain that is destroying freshwater lakes, soil erosion, depletion and pollution of the underground water supply, destruction of the wetlands that are home to migratory birds, the pressures placed on life in the oceans as a result of shoreline development.

Costs to Society

“When the public understands that if you pollute the underground water supply, it’s going to cost you a whale of a lot more money for water, that the cost to society of failing to maintain a clean environmental is 50, 100, maybe 1,000 times more expensive than maintaining a clean environment,” Nelson said, he believes the battle will be won.

The Wilderness Society is the only national organization that professionally addresses federal public-land issues such as national parks, wildlife refuges and national forests. Nelson is dismayed about selenium poisoning of birds in the Kesterson wildlife refuge near Fresno--”We’ve stupidly allowed a magnificent refuge to become poisoned (from an irrigation project) and nobody knows how many millions it will take to clean if up if, indeed, it can be cleaned up.”

He frets, too, about “national parks that are seriously threatened by overpressure (overuse) and the wrong kind of use. And we’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars by cutting trees down, destroying the wildlife habitats and polluting the rivers.”

The education process that began in 1970 is, Nelson believes, the key to saving the environment for future generations. “You can postpone environmental actions and the immediate impact isn’t visible,” he said, “but if 10% of the population is unemployed, that’s right now.

“I would hope that in the next quarter-century the public will have become knowledgeable and informed enough to rank environmental issues right along with their concerns about employment, the economy, world peace. The fact is, we can’t have a successful and rich economy if we destroy the resources the economy depends on, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, 57, who served 15 years in Congress, is a lawyer with Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison in Palo Alto, where his pro bono clients include a woman fighting to save her tree house from condemnation. Vowing he was “absolutely” through with politics after losing the U.S. Senate race to Pete Wilson in 1982, he now says he might be lured back.

McCloskey, a native Californian who grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s when Los Angeles had clean air and a superb rapid transit system (the big red streetcars), was, before his election to Congress in 1967, a lawyer in the Bay Area, a partner in the first environmental law firm in the United States, a “fugitive from the Southern California we had known in our youth.”

A man who by both heredity (his father and grandfather were water lawyers) and inclination was an environmentalist, the congressman was a real find for the Earth Day organizers. McCloskey recalls the political climate of spring, 1970:

“Well, the Congress then was much more inclined to be made up of 70-, 80- and 90-year-olds who had grown up at a time when development and progress was the keynote of the country. Environmentalists in those days were viewed as little old ladies in tennis shoes or nuts or cranks or kooks.” Given that, McCloskey said, “I didn’t say much about the environment.”

But when he’d been in Congress about a year, he recalled, “Because I was a Republican opposed to the war, and because I’d beaten Shirley Temple (Black), I was put on the smallest committee in the House and the least offensive, Merchant Marine and Fisheries, and I was able to help put together a coalition that quadrupled the money for clean water with this funny little bill called the National Environmental Policy Act. I’ll tell you, if the Congress had known what was in it, that bill wouldn’t have passed.”

That got the attention of Nelson, a Democrat who wanted bipartisan support for Earth Day. He asked McCloskey to be co-chairman.

Blitz of Campuses

The Earth Day committee raised $100,000 and Denis Hayes and his army of young volunteers set out to blitz the high school and college campuses with data supporting the cause.

Said McCloskey: “There were 20 or 30 kids in Washington gathering this information and sending it out. It was in the height of the Vietnam War and it attracted Atty. Gen. (John) Mitchell’s attention. They put the FBI in to surveil all of the Earth Days, thinking, my God, these guys must be anti-war. They’re playing guitars and smoking dope and throwing flowers around.”

There was about $30,000 left over, so Hayes’ crew hit on the idea of political action; on a slow news day in Washington, a day on which, McCloskey said, “the press corps will give almost anybody an audience, no matter how crazy or kooky,” they called a news conference, identified 12 elected officials with particularly abysmal environmental records, labeled them the “Dirty Dozen” and vowed to defeat them.

So it was that one early afternoon in May, as McCloskey tells it, “An elderly gentleman comes running into the Senate cloakroom waving the Washington Star and saying, ‘My God, look at this, McCloskey! This is your work.’ A few guys who’d been snoring away on the couches waiting for the next vote woke up and saw this little headline on about Page 8, ‘Environmental Group Vows Defeat of Dirty Dozen.’ ”

McCloskey remembered: “Everybody laughed and chuckled about this crazy environmental group, ha-ha-ha, ho-ho-ho, and it was all in good fun and forgotten--until the first Wednesday in June when everyone woke up, read their Washington Post and saw that the two Democrats in that Dirty Dozen had both been defeated, two very senior Democrats, in Baltimore and in Denver.

It had been done by turning out voters in districts where incumbents had been so long entrenched that historically few people bothered to vote.

Said McCloskey: “Within 24 hours seven of the 10 Republicans on that list came to me or called me and said: ‘Pete, can we get your speeches on air and water pollution?’ In November, four of the 10 were defeated. The tremors of fear went out all over Washington.”

When the next Congress convened, in January of 1971, McCloskey said: “You couldn’t find people who didn’t swear to their eternal fathers that they were advocates of the environment. And in the next two years we passed nearly all of the cornerstone environmental acts--the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.”

Coming to Fruition

The environmental movement, which started among the young in the late ‘60s, had suddenly come to fruition, McCloskey said, because of “the translation of good intentions into effective political action.” Timing was also on the side of the environmentalists; by 1973, energy shortages had taken public precedence and the “golden era” of environmentalism was over.

Today, McCloskey continues to be involved, as a volunteer, in half a dozen Bay Area conservation groups, including the Committee for Green Foothills and the Trust for the Preservation of Public Lands.

“An awful lot of California has not yet gone under the developers’ asphalt,” he said, and while former ranch lands sprout motels and small factories, others are being saved through purchase by wealthy doctors or lawyers for whom they are both a retreat from city life, gentlemen’s vineyards perhaps, and a good tax write-off.

As McCloskey drives through the hills near Palo Alto, he tries to think of some way to both solve the financial dilemma of the farmers and preserve those acres for the enjoyment of all Sunday drivers. He wonders: “How do we pay that guy for maintaining that farm? He can’t make money selling artichokes anymore. I’m always trying to devise a means by which we can say OK, that farmer is the caretaker of a park for us. Shouldn’t we give that guy maybe $10,000 a year to keep this farm instead of turning it into a trailer park?”

In McCloskey’s view, the great unresolved environmental issues are toxic wastes, landfills and land use. “We’ve been fumbling around for 10 years now trying to figure out what to do with toxic wastes,” he said. “Nobody wants them in a landfill, nobody wants to burn them. Nobody wants to ship them out to sea. So we’re rapidly approaching a gridlock.”

Ultimately, he believes, the waste-creating industries are going to have to participate in finding a legislative solution “because you don’t want all the lawyers in the world to get rich out of lawsuits and you don’t want every business to say they can’t do business in California anymore. There’s absolute liability forever for anybody, right, wrong or indifferent, if some toxic waste that they’ve ever handled ever hurts anybody. We really need some sort of ceiling on liability as we have with worker’s compensation.”

Major Battles Won

The major environmental battles, with the exception of land-use restrictions, have been won, McCloskey believes, and what’s needed now is “carefully crafted legislation that allows things to go forward. We’re down now to tinkering on the detail.”

He does not view Reagan Administration policies as a disaster. Said McCloskey: “The environmental movement, like everything else, is capable of excess and it’s capable of unreasoning demand. And it’s healthy, I think, to have a guy like Watt come in and challenge everything and force people to examine the merits of the issues rather than just sort of riding along on instinct that something must be right.”

And the legislators, McCloskey said, will continue to be “as strong on the environment as we can organize people to make them be strong--and knock them out in the next election if they aren’t.”

Will he again run for public office?

McCloskey rattled off a list of his favorite things, all of them found right here in California--Yosemite, fly-fishing streams of the High Sierra, backpacking in the Redwoods. And he pointed to, as symbolic of his financial fortunes, his ’72 Volkswagen parked outside between the Mercedes and the Jaguar (owned by his pre-Congress junior partners).

Then, nodding toward an autographed picture of Vice President George Bush, McCloskey said, “If that man became President and said I would like you to be assistant secretary of state or attorney general. . . .

“Or if the Republican tycoons in Southern California woke up tomorrow or next July and said, ‘hey, wait a minute, we haven’t got anybody to beat (Alan) Cranston (in 1986). We better ask McCloskey. . . .’ ”