The Origins of Environmentalism

Hello. My name is Patrick al it.

I'm a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the United States,

this course is about the environment,

the environmental movement and the question of natural resources.

In the late 19, from the late 19 sixties to the early 19 eighties,

it was in the 19 sixties that environmentalism became a mass movement.

The word environmentalism was first used in The Washington Post in a story of 1966.

Before that, many people have been interested in questions of pollution,

overpopulation,

recreation, resource management.

But now all of those things were brought

together in this new phenomenon called environmentalism.

The late 19 sixties was a period of citizen activism in the United States,

in which many movements

copied the example of the civil rights movement,

which since the late 19 fifties had been protesting in

the streets for a transformation of America's racial situation.

Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955

the civil rights movement had made rapid strides,

and major legislation of the early 19 sixties had led to the

passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

As the Vietnam War became more unpopular.

In the late 19 sixties,

demonstrators turned out into the streets in

huge numbers to protest against America's policy.

The new women's movement was also mounting demonstrations,

and each of these organisations,

in turn found that it was a very good way of drawing attention to

its cause and a very good way of prompting politicians to take action.

So the environmental movement became one more group

which understood the possibilities of the publicity,

which comes from public demonstration.

There was growing concern in the 19 sixties

over the indiscriminate use of herbicides and pesticides,

and this was brought together by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring,

which was published in 1962.

Rachel Carson was a trained scientist,

but she had a talent for writing about

complicated scientific matters in a straightforward language,

and her book, which was serialised in The New Yorker and then published as a book,

became a surprise best seller.

Normally,

books which have chemical equations in them are

destined for a small readership and obscurity.

But Carson had hit a public nerve, she said.

We're using pesticides and we're using herbicides indiscriminately.

Sometimes they're being sprayed from the air

It's certainly true that they kill the bugs,

but they often kill other animals as well.

Sometimes even people's pets.

We need to be far, far more attentive to the way in which we use these things.

And we also need to remember that if we use a pesticide to intensively,

although we kill 90% of the insect which is targeted,

the 10% which have some kind of natural immunity will survive to reproduce with the

result that the next generation will actually

have a resistance to the pesticide itself.

So she argued for a much more cautious use of industrial chemicals,

particularly one called D d T.

Another great problem in the 19 sixties, which was causing growing dismay,

was air pollution.

Ever since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution,

smoke in the atmosphere had been part of

the price Americans paid for their prosperity.

But it was getting steadily worse, particularly in areas which were heavily um,

in which there are heavy concentrations of motor vehicles.

In Los Angeles, California, for example,

100 days out of every 365 the air quality was

so bad that Children were warned to stay inside and

it became difficult to have sporting activities in a place

which had once been a paradise for outdoor activities.

The police there sometimes wore gas masks because the pollution was so bad.

The river that flows through Cleveland, Ohio, is the Cuyahoga River.

Oil slicks on the surface of the river,

and chemical wastes which were floating there were so

severe that the river caught on fire in 1969.

This wasn't the first time it had happened, either.

A much worse fire back in 1952 had blazed almost out of control.

But the fact that in the late 19 sixties it should happen again

was a source of very acute embarrassment to the city and its politicians.

And it's leading industries

and was one of the events which led to a widespread feeling.

We ought not to have to put up with contamination at this level.

Similarly,

in early 1969 there was a leak from an offshore oil platform in the Pacific Ocean,

just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

this was a place in which a lot of wealthy and politically influential people lived,

and the fact that they should have filthy crude oil washing up onto their beaches,

killing the sea birds and the otters and the sea

lions was also a source of very widespread political discontent.

And by 19 by the late 19 sixties and early 19 seventies,

people from many different social classes were all agreeing where a wealthy

society which has created for itself a marvellously affluent way of life,

at least for most of its citizens.

Why do we have to live with these very high levels of contamination?

the first Earth Day was the first mass event of the modern environmental movement.

It took place on April the 22nd, 1970.

It was suggested by a member of the United States Senate, Gaylord Nelson,

who was a senator from Wisconsin.

And he was helped by a Harvard law student called Denis Hayes.

The two of them borrowed an idea from the anti Vietnam War movement,

which was the idea of the teach in.

They said,

We're going to get people together who know something

about these issues to talk to college groups,

school groups,

church groups and concerned sets of citizens

to tell them about the environmental problems

we've got and to suggest ways in which we can re mediate them,

particularly the problem of pollution.

Well, they worked to get Earth Day ready in the last months of of 1969 in early 1970.

They were lucky that April 22nd itself was a sunny day in most parts of the country.

It was a Wednesday.

Congress went into recess,

and most places around the nation regarded it as an occasion for a public holiday.

It exceeded the organisers. Wildest hopes. Millions of people showed up.

It was by far the biggest demonstration in American history up to that time.

And unlike the civil rights demonstrations and the

women's demonstrations in the anti war demonstrations,

this was something which could potentially interest nearly everybody.

One of their slogans was We all breathe the same air.

Everybody had a shared sense of indignation

that environmental conditions were so bad.

And so it was from that date that it's easy to for us to,

um, regard the environmental movement as having come of age in the next module.

I'll move on to talking about the way in

which the politicians responded to this upsurge of public enthusiasm