The All-Consuming Nation by Mark H. Lytle

Author:Mark H. Lytle [Lytle, Mark H.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Earth Day and the Greening of America

On April 22, 1970, somewhere between 10 and 20 million Americans took to the streets for Earth Day. Since most events were local, a precise count was not possible. Earth Day was neither a protest, such as the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, nor a celebration, as followed the moon landing in 1969. In its fashion it was both protest and celebration. Some cities and college campuses protestors expressed their anger at government agencies, corporations, and polluters. More people planted trees, cleaned up parks, and in other ways committed themselves to making the earth a healthier place.

This massive teach-in on behalf of Mother Nature was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Always progressive in his politics, Nelson had long been an advocate for social justice, conservation, and cleaning up the earth. He considered issues from poverty to racial discrimination to polluted air and water as related: “We cannot,” he wrote in 1964, “let a situation continue in which millions of our fellow citizens do not have a suitable environment in which to live and raise their families.” After all, he argued on another occasion, “environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is housing not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.”7

While the spirit of Earth Day informed much of Nelson’s career as a governor and senator from Wisconsin, the specific prod came on a flight in 1969 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Out his window, Nelson had a bird’s eye view of the devastation wrought by an oil slick erupting from a Union Oil Company rig in the Santa Barbara Channel. Union Oil was no stranger to Nelson or to environmentalists. Just two years earlier, the oil supertanker Torrey Canyon, owned by a Union Oil subsidiary (and leased to British Petroleum (BP)—later notorious for the 2013 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico), struck a rock off the English coast. When efforts to free the ship failed, it broke up in heavy seas, spilling some 32 million gallons of oil. The spill, the worst in English history, spoiled coastal beaches and marine habitats from the Channel Islands to Spain. More destructive than the oil were the solvents that cleanup crews used to dissolve the oil and minimize the damage. The chemicals and oil left dead zones for years after.8

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