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7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.

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April 22, 2019 · Lola Jusidman

Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal

This country ought to recover the memory of the first Earth Day: a 20-million

strong grassroots demonstration that won basic environmental policy as we know

it.

The Green New Deal’s rise to the top of the political agenda has revived

debate on the original New Deal and the wartime mobilization that

closely followed it. What did it take to bring about its unmatched scale

and sweeping vision? What will it take to force its second coming while

avoiding the original’s weaknesses? With an eye toward the historical

record, commentators are proposing recipes for these outcomes, and

asking whether the climate movement is up to task.

The general prognosis seems grim. Sunrise Movement, master of

conversation-setting and politician-targeting, has put forth a plan which

aims to “reach the millions of young people who are scared about

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7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.

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climate change.” Most other organizations in the climate movement

have likewise taken up the GND as an opportunity for coalition building

and popular participation. Some democratic socialists warn that

Sunrise’s preferred strategy, though powerful, will fall short: “While

confrontations with elected elites are certainly a step in the right

direction, they won’t be sufficient to win a GND on the scale—and at

the pace—we so desperately need.” A New Deal, they claim, is outside

the realm of possibility without “a mass revolt of the working class” that

divides capital and makes “the costs of inaction so high that political

obstruction becomes cost-prohibitive.”

Eric Levitz, columnist for New York Magazine, is even less taken by

another of the climate movement’s preferred historical analogies, the

“WWII-scale economic mobilization” or “Victory Plan for the climate,”

premised on the shared status of the Axis powers and climate change as

existential threats. Victory for the Axis powers, Levitz argues,

immediately and clearly threatened the overseas investments of

American capitalists, and so taking a short-term hit to win the war was

clearly in their interests. Climate change poses a slower and more diffuse

threat, and a rapid state-led decarbonization effort would not exactly pay

off for some of the most inf luential sectors of U.S. business. If it took

repeated occupations of Nancy Pelosi’s office for a portion of

Democratic legislators to support a Green New Deal, it makes sense to

ask, as Levitz does, if anything short of a social revolution could win

“100 percent renewable social democracy atop the ruins of the fossil fuel

industry” in this country.

All of this may risk sapping the valuable motivation of activists, but the

movement can benefit from offerings of historical perspective. Here’s

another: the making of the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air

Act, and a suite of other lesser-known environmental statutes in the

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1970s is as important to understanding the work ahead as FDR-era class

politics. Not only are these laws the foundation for existing climate

policy; there are now efforts to revive guarantees for clean air and water,

which through environmental racism and agency corruption, were never

fully realized. Perhaps on the premise that these guarantees have faded,

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez centers her GND program on the

promise of clean air and water. And, like the New Deal, the

environmental policies of the seventies did not issue from the political

ether, or even from a handful of sparse protests in the coastal cities. It

took a mix of top-down coordination and bottom-up mobilizations of

record-breaking magnitude.

“The most famous little-known event in modern U.S. history”

Earth Day wasn’t always a routine observance on which the Lisa

Simpsons of the world collect green merchandise and kill the lights for

an hour, amid eye-glazing commercial tokens of environmental concern.

The first Earth Day, which fell on April 22, 1970, was and is the largest

political demonstration in U.S. history. Twenty million people—ten

percent of the U.S. population at the time—participated in grassroots-

organized teach-ins and actions at schools, colleges, streets, and outside

corporate headquarters and government buildings. Adam Rome, Earth

Day’s de facto historian, describes it as “the most famous little-known

event in modern U.S. history.” An extraordinary event in which a tenth

of this country took part has been wiped clean from its collective

memory.

Earth Day was a big-tent

phenomenon, with a level of

political inclusivity and diversity

that would seem strange today. It

demonstrated a long building

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demonstrated a long-building

popular consensus of

environmental concern in the

U.S.: Hosts and speakers hailed

from existing environmental

groups, socialist organizations,

schools, civil rights organizations, unions, churches, women’s

organizations, the household, government, but also Republican

organizations and chambers of commerce. Its breadth, though, did not

translate into greenwashing or corporatist uniformity. Instead, the

mobilization was full of debate, openness, and dissension against existing

“sham” pollution policy. There were large marches presided over by

high-profile speakers, but they shared the day with more contentious

activity. Protestors crashed a General Electric shareholder meeting, and

delivered “dead, oil-soaked ducks” to the Department of the Interior. A

paranoid President Nixon had sent the FBI’s COINTELPRO program

to spy on the college mobilizations, resulting in a ridiculous memo

which, labeling the event “very benign,” was left to report on the

participants’ style of dress.

Environmentalism itself was sometimes an object of interrogation. Rome

writes that in one of the Earth Day gatherings at University of Michigan,

during what was called a “scream-out,” “participants debated whether

the environment would def lect attention from the Vietnam war, the

civil-rights struggle, and the movement for woman’s liberation.” The

announcement for Earth Day had brought environmental organizing to

areas like like the South, where difficult questions began to reveal

themselves. In Birmingham, where much of the working class were

employed in the coal and steel industries, the question of pollution

control as a cost to industrial production, and therefore as a threat to

investment and employment, was confronted directly by activists and

working families These newly opened tensions attest to the fast

Earth Day celebrations in Union Square Park

included cleanup crews composed of school

children. From NYC Department of Records

and Information Services

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working families. These newly opened tensions attest to the fast

expansion of environmentalism far beyond the contexts where it was a

convenient and uncontroversial cause.

An uncontrolled explosion

Earth Day’s grassroots quality rings even stranger considering that it

came about through the initial efforts of Gaylord Nelson, an

environmentally-minded U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. Hoping to pull

off something similar to the mass teach-ins against the Vietnam War,

Nelson announced the plan for a national environmental teach-in in the

fall of 1969, rented a headquarters in D.C., assembled a staff of

volunteers, gathered up funds from unions and conservationists, and

began publicizing the event in the media. But this was about the extent

of Nelson’s control. Rome, in a radio interview, recounts:

The genius of Nelson was he rejected advice to create a top-down organization and

just said, ‘Let’s do something that everyone who wants to participate in can. They

can do whatever they want.’ He wasn’t a helicopter parent, even though he gave

birth to this (idea). That unleashed the creativity and vision and the energy of

thousands and thousands of people at the grassroots (level).

Nelson struck at a counterintuitive hybrid of leadership and

decentralization, and Earth Day got the most out of both. As Rome

wrote in an article, the planning rapidly shifted from top-down to

bottom-up.

The original idea was that the national staff would help local organizers by

providing ideas and contacts. But the flow of information quickly reversed. In

many communities, organizers already were at work before the national office

opened. With each week of publicity, more people became involved around the

country, and the national office became less a center of organizing than a

clearinghouse for the media—the quickest place to find out what people were

planning in Biloxi Dubuque Hartford San Antonio and Walla Walla

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g

This is not a call to restore Earth Day itself to its original scale and spirit.

Today, the “mainstream” or “white environmentalist” coalition it

produced is not only impossible but undesirable. Its guarantees of clean

air and water were mostly reserved for the white middle class. The

climate movement, now guided by a recognition of environmental

injustice, must take every opportunity to stand behind black, brown,

indigenous and other frontline environmentalists. But we can still learn

from Nelson’s hands-off, inclusive approach and apply it to the climate

movement as it stands today.

Contemplating the difference between local industrial pollution and

climate change in 2010, Nelson’s top organizer, Denis Hayes, reasoned

that back in 1970, “...Pollution was a visible thing that you could taste

and you could smell and was linked to rivers catching on fire…[this] was

something that you could mobilize people around much more easily

than you can an invisible gas that has no smell, has no taste. I mean

heavens—every time we breathe, we emit carbon dioxide.”

But beyond the pollutants at issue, we are working with a civil society

vastly different, even unrecognizable, from the mass politics that Earth

Day organizers harnessed. First, there is of course an experienced

countermovement with agents of obstruction and denial infesting the

federal government. Second, the U.S. environmental movement has

completely transformed over the last half-century: the “nonprofit

industrial complex” (NPIC) has reshaped in the image of the firm.

Previously radical and grassroots environmental movement has ossified

into a highly professionalized, expert-driven expanse of 501(c)3s

controlled by boards and executive directors, producing mission

statements, model legislation, and annual reports instead of manifestos

and propaganda.

Activism has entered an age of mechanical reproduction The public is

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planning in Biloxi, Dubuque, Hartford, San Antonio, and Walla Walla.

The result was a proliferation of actions unique to each community,

without the need for readymade messaging, targets, visuals, or slogans,

and with no particular policy or declaration to get behind. Images from

that day show young people basking in expressive autonomy, in the

novelty and scale of the crowd, and in the opportunity to communicate a

grave and urgent appeal. Each teach-in and action took weeks or months

of dedicated DIY organizing. The process, as Rome documented, armed

thousands of new activists with the ability and the networks to continue

environmental organizing beyond the teach-in itself. They would go on

to build layers of environmental protections, organizations, institutions,

and knowledge throughout the country. As this happened, U.S. polls

registered a twenty-five fold increase in environmental concern between

1969 and 1971, and a decade of massively transformative environmental

laws followed.

Earth Day 1970 Part 2: Gaylord Nelson's Speech (CEarth Day 1970 Part 2: Gaylord Nelson's Speech (C……

A second coming?

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Activism has entered an age of mechanical reproduction. The public is

invited to “plug in,” in narrow, impersonal, and repetitive ways while

getting little say in the direction of most organizations. Our inboxes pile

up with calls-to-action on one hand and brands selling products on the

other, but the two are often hard to tell apart. Both the mass

organization and brand promotion offer a catchline and a list of selling

points, with a level of hyperbole just sensational enough to desensitize.

Both link to a Squarespace page where you can click one of three

buttons and dispense with some of your money, or else “plug in” to the

next big thing in an endless cycle of next big things. Our eagerness to

provide streamlined services that facilitate civic participation risks

actively repelling the mass enthusiasm and creativity commanded by

Nelson’s hands-off approach.

What comes closest today to his permissive style of leadership might be

that of Greta Thunberg. Her approach turned out 1.5 million students

worldwide, more than any climate organization in recent memory. But

she is the exception. Today’s national and international climate

movement is a diverse set of discrete, mostly top-down campaigns, each

with its own entrepreneurial policy vision and strategic formula. These

groups vie to individuate themselves and demonstrate their success in

contrast to the alternatives. The ability to create new organizations, or to

have a say in the existing movement, is out of reach for the vast majority

of people.

For various structural and cultural reasons, the temptation for vertical

control–“helicopter parenting,” as Rome calls it–has come to dominate

climate organizing. Even campaigns powered by unpaid volunteers and

small-donation crowdfunding make maximal use of centrally-directed

marketing efforts. This produces actions and initiatives that look and feel

unmistakably uniform, but it also risks draining mobilizations of

bottom-up and grassroots vitality. Such tendencies affect most climate

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groups, from 350.org to Sunrise to Extinction Rebellion.

Aesthetic nostalgia aside, the more basic problem for the climate

movement is one of interorganizational competition. Almost every week,

a different campaign is leading a national day of action. I suspect this

produces fatigue among the general public. With these staggered, short-

cycle and under-coordinated efforts, we won’t reach the rate of protest

participation that was key to winning radical national policy in 1970. If

the first Earth Day is any guide, we need a long buildup to a single

event. We need an open invitation for all to participate in planning,

whoever and wherever they are.

Protest size is not the only measure of a movement’s success and

strength, and it isn’t the only consideration informing the decisions of

climate organizers. They are working in a challenging environment and

playing a longer game. They should be proud of their breakthroughs,

from f lipping seats to court victories to hegemonic change, which–

considered together– bring the possibility of radical policy closer with

each passing day. But if we all agree that scale matters, and if our

movement as a whole intends, as it often claims, to mobilize millions or

tens of millions at once, we need to make adjustments.

In a sense, the stars are aligning for an echo of the massive 1970

mobilization. The invisibility of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse

effect are giving way to the glaring and ever-present signs of ecosystem

collapse, extreme weather events, and infrastructural breakdown. There

exists rapidly broadening demand for environmental policy that has not

been satisfied through federal action.

This was not so just a few years ago. In 2014, the People’s Climate

March, organized by the Climate Justice Alliance as well as big greens

and labor unions, drew half a million participants worldwide, the largest-

ever climate mobilization up to that point It was more choreographed

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ever climate mobilization up to that point. It was more choreographed

than Earth Day in 1970, involving a single march per city or town

instead of a wild aggregation of teach-ins and actions. But it also lacked

the tireless support of high-profile politicians or heavy coverage from the

press that led up to Earth Day in 1970. Today, the movement’s

newfound allies in public office and increased press attention could

combine with an adoption of Nelson’s strategy and produce something

orders of magnitude bigger. Our Senator Nelson might be found in

Ocasio-Cortez or her Green New Deal co-author Sen. Ed Markey, if like

him, they work not to control but to announce.

Scaling up a mobilization is no science, and Earth Day’s organizers were

surprised by the numbers they drew in 1970. But we can’t really know

the limits to popular participation until we unite and give their strategy a

try. I invite experienced climate organizers to look back at Earth Day

1970 and consider how we can use existing movement infrastructure—

today’s constraints and obstacles in mind—to attempt a mobilization of

millions. With history as my guide, I suggest that as a movement we aim

for coordination without hierarchy, that we agree on a single day far in

advance, and that we throw out the tools of narrow control and self-

marketing. We must find ways to redistribute ownership of our

movement to all people. Only thus will we win the Green New Deal and

save our life-sustaining climate from perdition.

Lola Jusidman Shoshana is a politics grad student at NYU and a longtime

student activist for divestment, climate justice and decarbonization.

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