An Earth Day Scrapbook
It’s been 45 years since April 22, 1970. Memories are fuzzy and artifacts scarce.
By Debbie Galant
I don’t remember the first Earth Day —April 22, 1970 — even though seven years later, I went to work for Environmental Action, the group that organized it.
Either does my fellow EA alum Debby Baldwin, who was then a student at U. Penn, a major center of Earth Day activities. “I was right there on campus, and totally oblivious,” she says.
It was a Wednesday (a fact I don’t remember but have looked up) and I was a freshman at W. T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va. — too young to have gone to the national mall in D.C. to join the festivities, but not to be moved to action. Before my high school career was over, I would go on to start an environmental club, organize newspaper recycling drives in the high school parking lot and sue a local asphalt company for polluting a stream under the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act.
Yet my memories of the first Earth Day are non-existent.
Anne Polansky, who lived on the other side of the Beltway — the Maryland side — was even younger. She also missed the experience of going to the mall, but the event is imprinted itself on her memory because of a 6th grade teacher who assigned her to make a scrapbook of the event.
Good for that teacher — and for Anne, who not only kept the book, but fights for the environment to this day. Anne’s book of Earth Day press clippings, which she shared with The Daily Kos in 2010, is one of the most tangible records of April 22, 1970 I could find. Collective memory, it turns out, is as precarious as shoreline; a surprising amount of artifact can erode in 45 years.
I’d expected hundreds of pictures of the first Earth Day to show up on the internet, but so few do that Anne’s scrapbook stood out. I wrote to her to get permission to use her images, and to ask for a little perspective.
“My consciousness of pollution in general, and human mistreatment of our natural environment was well underway by then,” she wrote. “So the first Earth Day in 1970 didn’t do much to persuade me to be more aware, or care more, but I remember taking note that it felt good to know I wasn’t the only one who was already worried.” She added:
“It’s been more of a lifetime movement for me than any particular seminal event, but, in retrospect there are two events I really wish I had not missed, on account of being too young — Woodstock — and seeing Pete Seeger sing on the National Mall.”
My connection to Environmental Action did yield one terrific artifact. Last week in the mail, in a padded manila envelope, came a recording of the Environmental Action’s 20th anniversary celebration — which included a 7-minute description of the first Earth Day in a speech by staffer Phil Michael. The recording was sent to me by Peter Harnik, who was EA’s coordinator for most of the 1970's, and is made even more poignant by the fact that Phil died just last month.
It’s a charming, aw shucks account of a bunch of hapless and disorganized 20-somethings trying to put on a big show. “About the day before the rally,” Phil recalled, “This guy sort of wandered in the office, this really typical hippie type. Hair down to his shoulders, scraggly beard, tie-dyed t-shirt, saying that he was really into what we were doing. So we made him stage manager.”
There were a few things we left out in terms of our planning. We had no marshals. We had no stage hands. We didn’t have an MC. What we did however have was about 35,000 people who showed up on the mall, who didn’t really seem to mind that we didn’t know what we were doing in putting this thing on.
Phil went on to talk about how said stage manager had to hop in his “tie-dyed VW van” to rush out for a new amplifier when one of their featured acts, The Chambers Brothers, disapproved of the amp the organizers had supplied and refused to go on. And then — the ultimate snag — the group’s park permit ran out at 9:30 pm and the Park Service came and turned off all the power.
“And Pete Seeger and his group had still not gone on. But CBS was there with their big television lights and they kept them on and we ended the concert with Pete Seeger singing into a bullhorn that I was holding.”
The incident was fondly remembered in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post after Seeger’s death last year. And you can barely hear the folksinger in the background as correspondent Daniel Schorr, under those same CBS lights, wrapped up his coverage of that first Earth Day in the nation’s capital.
In that same report, you can also hear 25-year-old Denis Hayes — who gets credit as the day’s chief organizer — issue this stark warning: “Tens of thousands of people will soon die in Los Angeles in a thermal inversion that is probably now inevitable.”
In retrospect, it sounds hysterical —there was no major apocalyptic wipe-out — but according to this L.A. Times article from November, thermal inversion has been taking its toll in L.A. in slow motion: one asthma death and heart attack at a time.
Happy Earth Day. Maybe in another 45 years, we’ll have convinced the Republicans that climate change does exist, and was caused by humans.
And for those of you in the vanguard of new movements — social justice, marriage equality, marijuana legalization — save your artifacts. Your posters, your recordings, your political buttons, your photographs. In 2060, some blogger may just want to remember some of this.
Some more Earth Day memories have come in from EA staffers. From Jan Schaeffer:
I was there in EA offices on the first Earth Day. Sam Love and I became co-editors of the newsletter shortly afterward (I’d been receptionist during the run-up to April 22). I worked with Phil, the master pagemaker and droll observer of life. My only clear memory of that day is standing on the roof of our Dupont Circle office building with some others declaring solidarity as we fingered the nuclear power industry as the greatest threat to the earth. Not sure we were on target. I don’t remember going down to the mall that night, but I heard Phil tell that story at the 2010 reunion. It was wonderful today to hear it again.
From Tom Chalkley:
The first Earth Day in 1970, I had just turned 15, and my notions of “the environment” were passionate but mystical and romantic. At the same time, I was skeptical of efforts by grownups and The Establishment to do anything right. I believe we did some token pick-up-trash exercise at Kensington Junior High School, which served to enhance my cynicism. I hadn’t a political bone in my body — while my older brother was, at that very moment, writing to the Selective Service and explaining why he refused to register for the draft.
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