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Five Decades of Earth Day

By: Madeleine Dale, Lic. Associate R.E. Broker in the West Side Office

On April 22, 2017, Earth Day, the world’s largest secular holiday, will be celebrated by a billion people in 192 countries. Earth Day started as a modest seed planted by an anti-war activist that culminated in a defining event held in New York City in 1970. Since inception, Earth Day combines protest with party, pagan rites with scientific knowledge, peace with controversy, and the contradiction of celebrating the planet’s riches while mourning nature’s destruction. The message still inspires the nation and the global community, in fact, over the decades, the urgency has increased along with the controversy. In the lead-up to the events on Saturday April 22, 2017, Eco-Logic posts will cover a series of topics: Earth Day’s history, a report on the status of NYC’s decarbonization, a personal sustainability check-list, a guide to this year’s April 22nd and ways to support the cause.

FIVE DECADES OF EARTH DAY Earth Day originated in the San Francisco based “Minutes for Peace” started by John McConnell in 1960. McConnell, also ran “Meals for Millions” to feed Vietnamese refugees, an example of local activism which flourished in the decade. In the United States, environmental issues have yet to shed the scarlet brand of “subversive,” perhaps because the origination coincided with the 1960s Civil Rights and anti-war protests.

Environmental science first entered public awareness with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, named for the chapter on declining bird populations. Carson, a marine biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, connected the dots between DDT and carcinogens and the endangered American Eagle. Over the course of the decade, groups protesting oil spills, pollution, logging old forests, toxic dumps, freeways and the loss of wilderness, found common cause with the anti-establishment, back to nature culture of the anti-war movement.

In the 1969 UNESCO Conference, John McConnellproposed a day to honor the Earth and promote peace. Sanctioned in a United Nations proclamation, the first Earth Day was celebrated on March 21, 1970, to mark the beginning of spring. From inception, Earth Day went global, however March 21 was not the date that went down in history. A month later, on April 22, 1970, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson co-opted the idea and staged a second Earth Day, conceived as an environmental teach-in. The second date honors the birthday of John Muir, the 19th century wilderness conservation advocate who founded the Sierra Club. Ironically, it was not the wilderness, but New Yorkers that imprinted the event on cultural memory.

EARTH DAY NEW YORK 1970

Credit for putting April 22nd on the calendar goes to Denis Hayes, an activist hired by Senator Nelson. Hayes inspired a group of Columbia University students with a mission, they rented an office, recruited volunteers across the country and convinced Mayor Lindsay to shut down Fifth Avenue and open Central Park. The media memorialized the event’s success. According to Time Magazine, “Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic for two hours. 100,000 New Yorkers marched up and down in an eerie quiet silence.” National networks televised coverage of 1 million people dancing in Central Park. The park festivities, competing with the gravity of the silent marchers, illustrates the inherent yin and yang of the holiday – half celebration/half warning.

Earth Day NY 1970 also drew the lines of opposition between environmentalists and citizens who viewed them as part of a radical fringe. Since the April 22, 1970 coincided with Lenin’s 100thbirthday, a suspicious J. Edgar Hoover sent FBI agents to cover events (think Men-in-Black meet the flower people). An amusing entry on the Wikipedia Earth Day page quotes an irate member of Daughters of the American Revolution: “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them.”

The national effort coordinated by enthusiastic New Yorkers and the thousands of supporters who came out on April 22, 1970 launched a movement. With smog alerts and undrinkable water warnings, the time was ripe. In a rare alignment, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, executives, labor and farmers, all jumped on the environmental train. By the end of that year, the broad social consensus led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the passage of the Clean Air Act. The 1970s also brought the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and Clean Drinking Water Act of 1974. In subsequent decades, the momentum continued with regulations that tackled chlorofluorocarbons, fuel emissions, catalytic converters, chemical waste, phosphates, sewage, pesticides, and superfund sites.

Earth Day defined the concept of environmental pollution as a matter of public safety but, as things like Acid Rain, Love Canal, Ozone layer depletion and rivers on fire became distant memories, public involvement lapsed. Though Earth Day lapsed for twenty years, scientific knowledge on environmental threats was accumulating and would eventually shift the mandate from safety to survival.

EARTH DAY 1990 In the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lyn Margolis began work on the Gaia principle. They described how the interaction of microscopic organisms and inorganic matter forms a synergisticself-regulating, complex system to maintain the temperature and atmosphere necessary for life on Earth. The more science learned about the little things like the single-celled phytoplankton in the ocean that absorb carbon, the more they came to understand the delicate balance of Earth’s biotic systems. Still it would take decades, to appreciate the disruptive human impact on carbon cycles, nitrogen cycles, water cycles and biodiversity.

Dormant until 1990, thousands turned out for an Earth Day birthday. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator for the original 1970 Earth Day, staged a revival in the United States and coordinated events in 141 nations. Earth Day 1990 focused on recycling, but concerns had expanded beyond harmful chemicals and pollution to recognize the need to avoid ecosystem destruction. While the storm around global warming simmered just below the threshold of public awareness, the collapse of fisheries, coral reef die-offs and the near extinction of iconic species like the Panda and the American Eagle gave warning about human threats to the self-regulating systems responsible for supporting life on the planet.

EARTH DAY 2000 The correlation between atmospheric temperature and CO2 emerged before 1900, the phrase “Global Warming” first appeared in 1952 and the first scientific proof dates to the 1960s. In 1958, Charles David Keeling invented a machine to measure CO2 in the atmosphere with an accuracy in parts per million. Based on data collected at the Mauna Loa observatory, his Keeling Curve confirmed theories about the connection between fossil fuel emissions and average global temperature rise. During the 1980s, Climate Scientists studied the chain of repercussions resulting from interference with self-regulating systems and reverberations between systems to conclude that what happened in the atmosphere did not stay in the atmosphere. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen gave testimony to the Senate, "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming." In the 1990s, Al Gore’s lectures, film and book “The Inconvenient Truth” based on Hansen’s research, graphically publicized the dangers of anthropogenic sources of warming with predictions of sea level rise, extinctions, droughts and severe storms. Earth Day 2000 put global warming on the national agenda, though the international community took the lead on the road to a remedy.

EARTH DAY 2016

The long haul towards reaching international consensus on fossil fuel divestment started with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Under the auspices of the United Nations, twenty-one international conferences convened to gather data and forge agreement. By 2015, against insurmountable odds, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established a goal to limit average global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius in order to stabilize the atmospheric content of CO2 at 450 ppm. (UNFCCC co-chairs described negotiations as more difficult than nuclear arms proliferation.) The Paris Climate Agreement contains no enforcement mechanisms.

Implementation is voluntary, but the US and China, (the two countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions), rose to the challenge and issued a bi-lateral agreement targeting lower emissions. Acknowledging Earth Day as inspiration for the historic international policy, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon invited every world leader to the signing ceremony in NYC on April 22, 2016. A billion global citizens came out to support the diplomats attending events like bike-a-thons in India, 55,000 trees planted on a Carribbean island, litter clean up on China’s Great Wall and The People’s March down Central Park West.

EARTH DAY 2017 Earth Day 2017 approaches with the US threatening to pull out of the Paris Agreement, eliminate emissions regulations and slash the EPA budget by over 30%. This year, scientists have taken the lead staging a March for Science in Washington and cities around the country to broadcast the vital role of science. Now it is not only the planet that is threatened, it is accumulated knowledge about our world.

I write this from Kathmandu Nepal where I should see snowcapped Himalayas in distance but the air is so thick with smog that I breathe thru a mask. The night here rings with barking dogs and coughing humans. Growing up in Ohio in the 1960s, I remember frequently being kept indoors on summer days due to smog alerts. Though smog alerts in Ohio never came close to air quality in Kathmandu, this visit serves as a reminder that without the environmental movement, the U.S. might not have escaped the fate of less fortunate nations.

To connect with Madeleine you can contact her over email, or visit her agent website.

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Thoughts and opinions presented in this post are those of Madeleine Dale and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Halstead Property, LLC.

#Earth Day #Eco Logic #Madeleine Dale #New York City #Manhattan

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