Measuring Impact of Earth Day : Environment: Observers of America’s behavioral blips agree that consciousness-raiser recharged movement to save the planet.

Monday was the Morning After.

On Sunday, it had been fanfare, glamour and celebration as the world marked Earth Day, 1990, with an unprecedented global binge of parades, rallies, concerts, festivals, teach-ins, nature hikes and tree plantings.

The glitzy event culminated an intense, six-month marketing campaign to stage history’s largest consciousness-raiser to acknowledge the environmental crisis threatening the planet’s future.

On Monday, the serious assessment began. The key question: After the videotapes stopped rolling, would green still be the preferred color? Had Earth Day met its stated goal of saving the planet?

The answer seemed to be “yes” and “maybe.”

The poll-takers, trend-watchers, political commentators, social scientists and attitudinal analysts who monitor America’s collective behavioral blips were mixed in their conclusions. But most agreed that something is stirring, in contrast to the ecological inertia of the 1980s.

“It’s not just eco-freaks and no-growthers concerned about the environment today,” said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist. “It’s a new world, a new era.”

That’s what the Earth Day Coalition had grandly promised, when, last fall, it launched its campaign and pledged, as chairman Denis Hayes said, that its effort would be “a social crusade driven as much by the fax and modem as by the typewriter and the telephone.”

Earth Day leaders outlined an ambitious two-part goal:

* This was to be a celebration with staying power, said Earth Day director Christina Desser: “We don’t want a day that dries up and blows away. We want to build a grass-roots movement to launch an environmental decade.”

* This was to be a celebration of global transformation, said chairman Hayes: “We want to change the world.”

On Monday, Desser was optimistic, noting, “I think we gave the environmental movement a charge. It wasn’t just the numbers, even though we were truly amazed at that. And we won’t know for a year, or two years, what the long-range effect will be. But I think our timing was right. The issues were reaching a critical point.”

Early reviews gave Earth Day good marks for its media work. Despite grumbles of overkill and media hype, the six months of Earth Day drum-beating focused an energy and concern that had been vaguely articulated by people who “wanted to do something.” Action packages were distributed by the thousands, suggesting Americans could recycle, ride-share, plant trees, conserve water and conduct energy-saving home and business inventories.

Gradually, Earth Day took on the trappings of a major moment, spawning its own slang (“Guppie: A green Yuppie”); its own jokes (David Letterman: “Today they found an Alaskan king crab in the Hudson River--they figure since the big oil spill they’re getting really great mileage now”); its own T-shirt, earrings, quizzes, rock groups and coloring books. There were so many “green” products on market shelves that a task force of attorneys general launched an investigation of environmental labeling.

Those long involved in the environmental movement find the groundswell heartening.

John Schaeffer has owned and run the Real Goods Trading Co., a Ukiah, Calif., mail-order business specializing in alternative energy products, since 1978. He says orders for solar panels and energy-saving light bulbs have skyrocketed.

“We had no idea the response would be so great,” said Schaeffer, who believes the response indicates a permanent change in lifestyle for his 150,000 customers. “We’ve found historically that once people start buying the low-energy and recycled stuff they stick to it.”

That was the larger question on Monday. Although an estimated 200 million turned out for worldwide Earth Day events, how much of what they heard would stick? What would it take for a throwaway society to reform?

“Most of the easy things have been done to protect the environment,” noted Robert Fri, president of Resources for the Future. “From here on, it gets harder, and the hardest part is the prospect of giving up some of the amenities. . . .”

The Roper Organization poll reveals ironies--if not contradictions--in American attitudes on environmental problems: Although their concerns have risen dramatically, their behavior has not changed much. Says Roper’s Tom Miller: “Fundamentally, the public would like to see ‘technical fixes’ to environmental problems--solutions that would spare individuals the need to make major lifestyle changes. And these technical fixes can only come from business or governmental regulation.”

Business and government actions loom large in the future of environmental reform, observers agreed. Individuals won’t reduce, reuse and recycle if they don’t see business and industry change practices that have led to acid rain and fears of global warming and ozone depletion.

USC psychologist Chaytor Mason, whose specialties include group behavior, sees the environment, with its emphasis on selflessness, as the perfect media fad (“like Mother and apple pie”), with the built-in danger of it fading as fast as the Hands Across America goodwill movement did in 1986.

This will happen faster still if the American public keeps getting conflicting, confusing information from scientists and the government about such environmental phenomena as the greenhouse effect. “We need solid scientific evidence as to what good we are doing,” he said. “If we save water, parch our lawns, put bricks in toilets, then find out in two or three months that it didn’t make any difference, we aren’t going to keep doing it.”

But Gregory Schmid, a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., had higher hopes for Earth Day and its aim of changing the way Americans live: “It doesn’t compare to one-shot days like Hands Across America. Earth Day represents more than a single day--it is a symbolic milestone of the growth and maturing of the environmental movement.”

His group’s tracking of the environmental movement since Earth Day, 1970, “shows a continually and growing concern of the American middle class on quality of life,” he says, adding that he believes Americans are ready to change their behavior, with help from institutions.

Historically, big national behavior changes--beginning with World War II gasoline and sugar rationing and including the 1970s energy crisis and periodic water emergencies--have been accomplished with mass publicity and persuasive forces, such as long lines at gas stations. “But voluntary change doesn’t last, unless there is some structure for it,” Schmid said, adding, “We have to institutionalize changed behavior, and I think the local community is the best place . . . “

Keep America Beautiful Inc., the group that oversees litter and solid-waste programs in more than 450 cities nationwide, had high hopes for Monday, when it issued a reminder that the environmental movement has caught on: “When Earth Day is over,” the group said, “we’ll still be here.”