20 million Americans turned out for the
first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.
It was a bipartisan project, supported by
President Richard Nixon, and California Governor Ronald Reagan.
There were programs at more than 2,000
college campuses, 10,000 elementary and high schools, and thousands of other places.
I was in high school at the time, but can only remember protesting the Vietnam War.
One popular Earth Day 1970 guide was:
The Environmental Handbook, compiled by
"Friends of the Earth", about the perils of
rising population and depletion of
nonrenewable resources.
People were told
that even stopping
economic growth
completely
might not be
enough to prevent
an ecological crisis !
In the Handbook,
an essay called
"The Limits
of Adaptability,"
by biologist
René Dubos,
claimed that:
"the dangers posed
by overpopulation
are more grave
and more immediate
in the U.S. than in
less industrialized
countries.
This is due in part
to the fact that each
U.S. citizen
uses more
of the world's
natural resources
than any other
human being
and destroys them
more rapidly,
thereby contributing
massively to the
pollution of his own
surroundings and
of the earth as a whole."
Handbook editor
Garrett De Bell's
essay claimed:
"If you wanted to design
a transportation system
to waste the earth's energy
reserves and pollute the air
as much as possible,
you couldn't do much better
than our present system
dominated by the automobile."
Handbook contributor
and political scientist
Robert Rienow,
and his wife,
author Leona
Train Rienow,
declared that:
"A New Yorker
on the street
took into his lungs
the equivalent
in toxic materials
of 38 cigarettes a day.
... This generation
is indeed going to
have to choose
between humans
and the automobile.
Perhaps most families
have too many of both."
Stanford biologist
Paul Ehrlich predicted
devastating famines
that would kill tens
of millions of people
in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America
by the end
of the 1970s,
and smog disasters
in Los Angeles and
New York would kill
200,000 Americans
in 1973.
"Most of the people
who are going to die
in the greatest cataclysm
in the history of man
have already been born."
He added that by 1975,
"some experts feel that
food shortages will have
escalated the present level
of world hunger and starvation
into famines of unbelievable
proportions. Other experts,
more optimistic, think the
ultimate food-population
collision will not occur
until the decade
of the 1980s."
In January 1970,
Life magazine warned:
"In a decade, urban dwellers
will have to wear gas masks
to survive air pollution."
But the New Republic
columnist James Ridgeway
wrote shortly after
the First Earth day:
“Ecology offered liberal-minded
people what they had longed for,
a safe, rational and above all
peaceful way of remaking society
. . . [and] developing a
more coherent central state. . .”
Unfortunately,
that has not changed.