America Dreaming

by Laban Carrick Hill

  Of all our natural resources water has become the most precious. By far the greater part of the earth’s surface is covered by its enveloping seas, yet in the midst of this plenty we are in want. By a strange paradox, most of the earth’s abundant water is not usable for agriculture, industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load of sea salts, and so most of the world’s population is either experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages. In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs of survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.

  The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be understood in the context, as part of the whole it belongs to—the pollution of the total environment of mankind. The pollution entering our waterways comes from many sources: radioactive wastes from reactors, laboratories, and hospitals; fallout from nuclear explosions; domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from factories. To these wastes is added a new kind of fallout—the chemical sprays applied to croplands and gardens, forests and fields. Many of these chemical agents in this alarming mélange imitate and augment the harmful effects of radiation, and within the groups of chemicals themselves there are sinister and little-understood interaction, transformations, and summations of effect.

  SAVE THE BAY

  Because Carson’s Silent Spring was a national best-seller, her message reached some surprising places. Some of the first people to realize that Carson’s message contained hard truths were hunters and fishermen. Over the years, they’d watched as their lakes and rivers became polluted with improperly treated sewage and industrial waste. They were catching fish with odd growths and mutations. They were experiencing a wildlife population crash. What was unusual about them, however, was that most of them were not traditional activists. Instead they were professionals and business owners, and they had political and community clout. They weren’t the radical youths who were burning their draft cards and dropping acid. They were part of the establishment and were used to being listened to.

  One of the earliest of these groups emerged right in the shadow of the country’s political power center, Washington, D.C. Because of its proximity, the Chesapeake Bay was a highly visible natural resource, but the impact of pollution was having a destructive toll. In 1966, a group of Baltimore businessmen who enjoyed sailing, hunting, and fishing on and around the Chesapeake Bay recognized the problem and mobilized. They met with their congressman, Rogers C. B. Morton, to express their concerns about the bay. From their perspective, the future of the bay looked grim. They could envision only more boats, more people, more houses, poor sewage treatment, and dirty industrial discharges, all of which threatened the ecological balance. If things continued as they had been moving, the environment, which had thrived with all kinds of fish, waterfowl, and flora, would become a desolate landfill.

  Morton felt his options were limited without pressure on Congress from the private sector. He suggested the group form a “private-sector organization that can represent the best interests of the Chesapeake Bay. It should build public concern, then encourage government and private citizens to deal with these problems together.” Led by Arthur Sherwood, the group chartered the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) in 1967 to advocate for the bay.

  The CBF took its cue from the Sierra Club, which had already transformed itself into an activist and reform-oriented lobbying group. The club led the way in the early sixties by redefining the country’s relationship with its natural resources. Through full-page ads in papers, letter-writing campaigns, and grassroots organizing, the Sierra Club made the wilderness a quality-of-life issue rather than a resource to harness for progress. They promoted nature as a retreat from the modern world where one could find spiritual seclusion and meditation. This strategy transformed wilderness preservation from simply a conservation issue to a moral one. The Sierra Club was central in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act and stopping the Bureau of Reclamation from building two dams on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon National Park.

  Cuyahoga River fire

  The CBF extended this approach by not simply focusing on preservation but emphasizing restoration of damaged or destroyed ecosystems. They group recruited committed conservationists, but also anyone who had an interest in the Chesapeake watershed. Beginning with a campaign of environmental education, CBF adopted “Save the Bay” as its motto and distributed thousands of blue-and-white bumper stickers. Then the foundation embarked on an ambitious lobbying campaign of resource protection that promoted control and regulation of the watershed.

  Like the Population Crisis Committee and the Environmental Defense Fund, both of which also formed around this time, the CBF emphasized the interrelation between human and environmental concerns. They crafted a message that progress could not be sustained unless we protected our resources. In this way, environmentalism shifted from a nostalgia for a past wilderness to a more scientific examination of our interdependency.

  ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS THAT SHOOK THE NATION

  In March of 1967, the Torrey Canyon oil tanker spilled 117,000 tons of crude oil into the English Channel.

  In February of 1969, off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, an oil rig spilled millions of gallons of crude oil that washed up onto the beaches of appalled and normally privileged homeowners.

  On June 22, 1969, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire. Pollutants also fueled fires on a river into the Baltimore Harbor, on the Buffalo River in upstate New York, and on the Rouge River in Michigan. Despite the fact that the Cuyahoga wasn’t the only body of water to catch fire that year, it was this fire that seemed emblematic and spurred the government to enact the Clean Water Act. Congressman Louis Stokes commented, “The Cuyahoga will live in infamy as the only river that was ever declared a fire hazard.”

  In 1969, Lake Erie was declared endangered by chemical and sewage pollution.

  the movement had become my enemy

  BACK TO THE LAND

  Good morning, Henry Thoreau, good morning me, good morning you. Good morning, good morning, good morning. In my dim recall of yesterday, the beaver pond rose till we stood apart and alone on the planet. Silent’s boat shoved off on the waters and we wondered who among all those millions would make it with us to dawn. Mark has been making a creakity wooden sign saying “Total Loss Farm” so they’ll know the place when they get here. My arms and legs and kidneys and heart are yet moving. I am yet carrying myself outside to look to the east and sign to the sun. Good morning, good morning, good morning.

  Between 1967 and 1969, more than 137 environment-related bills were introduced before Congress.

  For Raymond Mungo, author of Total Loss Farm, it was a new morning. Like his peers, he was worn out from the violent demonstrations in cities and on college campuses. For nearly a million other youths, the notion of returning to something simple and more authentic than atomic bombs and modern industrialization was a real draw. Total Loss Farm tracked a year on a Vermont commune. First published in the Atlantic Monthly, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The book recounts Mungo’s and his friends’ attempt to create a utopian community that would be sustainable. These new homesteaders believed that a return to nature would lead them to their true selves. The memoir marked a coming of age for an idea that had been gaining momentum since the mid-’60s, the Back-to-the-Land Movement.

  Inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision and Henry David Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond, the Back-to-the-Land Movement sprang up as a counter to everything its proponents despised. Disillusioned by their lack of ability to change American culture, these youths decided to retreat to communities of their own making. The Movement’s main purpose was to resurrect an agrarian way of life and to live within a self-imposed set of guidelines that rejected mainstream American culture. The proponents’ lives were meant to challenge consumerism, violence, greed, and exploitation of the environment.

  In their effort to begin anew, these groups tu
rned away from an ownership society and created a communal one. Property ownership, child care, food production, and decision-making were all done together. No one person was supposed to be in charge. Mungo describes this idyllic world and the dreams he felt were possible:

  “They do not yet realize that their heirs will refuse to inhabit their hollow cities…”

  It was the farm that had allowed me the luxury of this vision, for the farm had given me insulation from America which the peace movement promised but cruelly denied. When we lived in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington… we dreamed of a New Age born of violent insurrection. We danced on the graves of war dead in Vietnam, every corpse was ammunition for Our Side; we set up a counter government down there in Washington, had marches, rallies and meetings; tried to fight fire with fire. Then Johnson resigned, yes, and the universities began to fall, the best and oldest ones first, and by God every 13-year-old in the suburbs was smoking dope and our numbers multiplied into the millions. But I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, “This is not what I had in mind,” because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age.

  The New Age we were looking for proved to be very old indeed, and I’ve often wondered aloud at my luck for being 23 years old in a time and place in which only the past offers hope and inspiration; the future offers only artifice and blight. I travel now in a society of friends who heat their homes with hand-cut wood and eliminate in outhouses, who cut pine shingles with draw-knives and haul maple sugar sap on sleds, who weed potatoes with their university-trained hands, pushing long hair out of their way and thus marking their foreheads with beautiful penitent dust. We till the soil to atone for our fathers’ destruction of it. We smell. We live far from the marketplaces in America by our own volition, and the powerful men left behind are happy to have us out of their way. They do not yet realize that their heirs will refuse to inhabit their hollow cities, will find them poisonous and lethal, will run back to the Stone Age if necessary for survival and peace.

  The commune was another image that defined this era. Long-haired, long-skirted hippies living together in seeming harmony—sharing food production, child-rearing, creating egalitarian communities. The hard work, not to mention the very real compromise that it took to sustain these communities, may not have lasted, but many of the practices begun in those small utopias remain popular today. Organic farming, food cooperatives, holistic medicine and lifestyles, herbal medicines, recycling—all these ideas have long outlasted their alternative beginnings.

  EARTH DAY

  That big blue marble, our Earth, which suddenly appeared on the nation’s television screen on July 20, 1969, seemed to be floating alone in the darkness of space. For the first time, it was as if the entire world were looking in a mirror at itself. In reality, the image came from a camera pointed at the Earth by the astronauts of the Apollo XI moon mission 252,000 miles away. Suddenly, the entire nation was united in awe at the miracle of Earth.

  Nine months later, on April 22, 1970, that wonder translated into one of the most notable events in our nation’s history: Earth Day. The biggest symbol of the rise in awareness and power of the environmental movement was the establishment of Earth Day on April 22, 1970. American Heritage Magazine called the event “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy…20 million people demonstrated their support…American politics and public policy would never be the same again.”

  The idea for Earth Day began more than seven years earlier when Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin came to the decision to find a way to put environmental issues into the forefront of everyone’s mind. Initially, he convinced President Kennedy to go on a five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963, but the presidential bully pulpit did not succeed in putting the environment on the national agenda. For Nelson, how -ever, this was only a beginning.

  “I continued to speak on environment issues to a variety of audiences in some twenty-five states,” wrote Nelson. “All across the nation, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed but the political establishment.” Nelson knew that he had time on his side. The environment was only going to get worse. He just needed to continue the pressure. Years later, Nelson described the process of how Earth Day evolved:

  Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At that time, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me—why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

  I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force the issue onto the political agenda….

  At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story coast to coast. The response was electric…. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express their concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air—and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office….

  Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

  Ten million children participated in planting thousands of trees in commemoration of the event. Schools organized special Earth Day fairs and assemblies. More than 100,000 people demonstrated at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. All across the country, at various landmarks, speakers described the destruction of the environment by reckless industries and expressed hope that we as members of the human race could work together to preserve the earth’s continued health.

  Earth Day created an overwhelming momentum in Washington, D.C. Republicans and Democrats were united on this issue. The result was the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. A host of new regulations, cleanup programs, and technological solutions were suddenly proposed. Clearly, ecology was an issue on which all of America could unite. It contained none of the divisive issues such as poverty, race, and war. It transcended race riots, assassinations, and generational conflicts. With extensive support, the government could enact a wide range of legislation to limit corporate pollution and manage the country’s natural resources. By 1972, even DDT was outlawed by Congress.

  “To me all the problems began in the Sixties.”

  —retired Texas Republican Congressman and House Majority Leader Dick Armey

  “Whatever the future holds, and as satisfactory as my life is today, I miss the Sixties and always will.”

  —former Democratic State Senator in California, former SDS activist and Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden

  MAKING A RAINBOW

  A LEGACY OF PROGRESS *

  A more equitable nation or the rise of a welfare state?

  When it comes to the ’60s, everyone seems to disagree. Armey and Hayden are not unique in their completely opposite assessments of the era. No two people seem to be able to agree on the legacy of the ’60s. Some saw a more equitable and humane nation, open to all its citizens. Others decried the rise of the we
lfare state, where the government intervened to take away personal responsibility.

  Passionate reactions confirm just how important and influential the era was. Whether or not you believe this decade had a positive influence on contemporary culture, it has affected us all—even those who were born a decade or more later. Every aspect of the nation changed, from the highest levels of government and corporate culture to how we dispose of our garbage.

  Just a quick glance around your neighborhood will provide real evidence.

  In almost every village, town, and city in the country, people set aside their used plastic, glass jars, aluminum, metal, and newspapers. Then, once a week, these items are either set curbside in blue containers to be collected or dropped off at waste management centers for recycling. As well, a significant portion of the American populace compost kitchen and yard wastes in their backyards. Before the ’60s all of that trash would have been buried in the town dump in such a way that it would not decompose for a millennium or more. That town and city dumps are now called waste management centers tells us a lot about how our thinking has changed about the environment.

  On the streets today, many of the cars are hybrids that contain engines running on a combination of batteries and gasoline. These cars emit significantly less pollution than traditional gasoline-fueled vehicles and have become the fastest-growing segment in the automotive industry. But the passage of the clean air and water acts in Congress are still threatened by companies opting out of the compliance and by developers drilling in protected areas.