Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley

Author:Douglas Brinkley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

America’s Natural Heritage

Cape Lookout, Big Bend, the Grand Canyon

American environmental activist David Brower (1912-2000) (center), executive director of the Sierra Club, leads an ultimately successful protest against the proposed construction of dams on the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 1966.

Arthur Schatz / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock

I

When Lyndon Johnson ratcheted up the Great Society’s commitment to preserve what he called “America’s natural heritage” in his special message to Congress on February 23, 1966, he didn’t need to search for a constituency; most Washington lawmakers were on his side. Point by point, the president offered specific conservation measures to fight air pollution, make cities healthy places, and save historic places, in addition to his extensive reform plan to clean the nation’s waters. David Brower, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Barry Commoner, and all those preservationists who had, as he once said, “stood up against private greed for public good,” were enthralled. In fact, Johnson began the special message by quoting the epigraph of Silent Spring, Albert Schweitzer’s warning: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”1

Americans in the twenty-first century should read the “Natural Heritage” speech to understand conservation leadership at its best. Only Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt equaled Johnson in prioritizing preservation and then driving appropriate measures into law around the power of his persuasive personality. Johnson rhapsodized about saving “uncharted forests, broad sparkling rivers, and prairies ripe for planting,” using language that could have been lifted from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Then, sounding like John Steinbeck, the president insisted that California redwood groves be spared the lumberman’s ax, for they were ambassadors from another time. Once again, he made it clear that national lakeshores needed to be established in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Underneath the picturesque imagery, though, his special message was a warning in the style of Silent Spring. He said, “We see that we can corrupt and destroy our lands, our rivers, our forests and the atmosphere itself—all in the name of progress and necessity. Such a course leads to a barren America, bereft of its beauty, and shorn of its sustenance.”2

Johnson’s preservation theme was clear: the country was grappling with an unprecedented environmental crisis. Treasured landscapes had been compromised by synthetic pesticides, industrial debris, poor planning, and pollution of every type. He vowed to bend the will of Congress to pass bills aimed at arresting the unacceptable degradation of America’s natural resources. Backed with fresh scientific data from the blockbuster report of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee report, released in November 1965, he was well prepared to win Congress over. He described in heartbreaking detail the destruction of America’s major rivers such as the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri by the discharge of treated and untreated sewage collected from a population of nearly 50 million citizens. Sounding like Bill Douglas on the loose, he lashed out at the chemical industries for poisoning rivers with by-products that wouldn’t break down benignly in the water.

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