Across the country, neighborhood activism surged in response to the radical political climate and the growing media attention devoted to ecological problems. In Santa Barbara, environmental activists formed GOO, Get Oil Out, in an attempt to put an end to the drilling going on off the coast of their community. In Chicago, Paul Booth, a founder of the radical New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society, helped to form CAP, Citizens Action Program, to protest the pollution spewed by the coal-hungry Commonwealth Edison electricity company. “Think Globally, Act Locally” went the cry of these activists as they protested everything from air pollution to the building of new superhighways.23
Thinking in global terms became easier as people’s very concept of the planet earth contracted. Just as detergents and other pollutants worked to shrink the size of the Great Lakes, once thought to be so large that no human activity could harm them, the U.S. space program accomplished a similar feat for the earth itself. In the summer of 1969, a month after the Cuyahoga ignited, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the moon. Americans began to get a clear picture of just how small and potentially vulnerable their planet was as astronauts beamed back images of the earth as seen from outer space. In 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a picture of the earth, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan once called an “icon of our age.” Later in the 1970s, then President Jimmy Carter remarked, “From the perspective of space our planet has no national boundaries. It is very beautiful, but it is also very fragile. And it is the special responsibility of the human race to preserve it.”24
We may never know exactly what caused the birth of the modern environmental movement. But it might be speculated that, together, Carson’s eloquent book combined with an extraordinary dry spell, a superheated political climate, a series of made-for-TV ecological disasters, plus an arresting image of the earth as seen from outer space all dramatized the elemental interdependence of life on the planet. The social and ecological underpinnings of modern consumer society, often masked by distance or suppressed by corporations, briefly made themselves seen. Many no doubt realized the impact turning on the washer could have for a distant lake. A sharpening of the links between everyday life under consumerism and its ecological consequences laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new moral framework, one that urged Americans to take responsibility for their actions with respect to nonhuman nature. Call it the environmental movement.
VULNERABLE EARTH
Four years before this 1972 picture was taken by the Apollo 17 crew, another group of U.S. astronauts orbited the moon. Their trip inspired poet Archibald MacLeish to write, “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.” (NASA)
THE MAINSTREAM
Although his motives were far from pure, Richard Nixon was arguably one of the greenest presidents ever to occupy the White House. In the tumultuous political atmosphere of the 1960s, it was far safer for establishment politicians to support the environment as opposed to the more threatening antiwar agenda being served up by campus radicals. No one recognized this better than Nixon. Some of the most important pieces of environmental legislation ever passed became law under his signature, beginning with the National Environmental Policy Act, which he signed—live on television—on January 1, 1970. Discussion of major federal undertakings, whether it was building a dam or constructing a highway, would no longer take place behind closed doors, but in public where everyone from environmental activists to corporations could debate the potential ecological fallout.25
The act marked the start of a veritable torrent of federal legislation, transforming such issues as air and water pollution, in the past dealt with, if at all, on the state and local level, into matters of national policy, creating more than a dozen important new pieces of environmental legislation. They included the Clean Air Act (1970); the Water Pollution Control Act (1972); the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act (1972); the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972); the Marine Mammals Protection Act (1972); the Endangered Species Act (1973); and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (1975), which for the first time set federal fuel economy standards. To deal with industrial wastes, Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980), better known as the Superfund law. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; established in 1970) became the government’s watchdog on pollution issues, eventually becoming one of the nation’s largest federal agencies.
The massive legislative arsenal read like a gigantic handbook on how to counter the ills of a modern, consumption-oriented society. It dealt with everything from industrial pollutants to protecting endangered species to cleaning up the synthetic detergent problem. Although none of the legislation interfered, to any major extent, with corporate America’s hold over the environment, the gains were real nonetheless.
The Clean Air Act of 1970, for example, set air quality standards for pollutants such as carbon monoxide, ozone, and lead—standards based not on what they would cost industry to attain but on a scientific determination of the risk they posed to human health. The result has been unquestionably positive for the lungs of many Americans. By the 1990s, smoke pollution fell nearly 80 percent from where it was in the 1970s, while lead emissions plummeted by 98 percent. Still, the legislation had some significant flaws. New air pollution sources received vigorous policing, but preexisting sources were “grandfathered” in under the law. Monitoring took place close to the factories producing the pollution, leading business to opt for tall smokestacks so emissions would miss the sensors and instead drift off somewhere else downwind. Nor did the initial legislation place any cap on the total amount of emissions, although later legislation regulating lead and sulfur did so.26
The Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 was a tougher measure, mandating permits for all businesses discharging pollutants—no grandfathering allowed. It unquestionably led to major improvements in the quality of the nation’s waters. According to one 1982 estimate, the required pollution control devices had been installed on 96 percent of the industrial sources of wastewater. But because the EPA, charged with overseeing the legislation, had no authority to regulate pollution coming from such sources as hog farms and storm water runoff, some bodies of water actually experienced declines in water quality.27
In putting forth such environmental reforms, Congress took its cue from the American public. Never before had the citizens of this nation shown such over-whelming concern for the planet as they did in the 1970s. The decade opened with Earth Day, the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin senator, who proposed a teach-in on the environment modeled on the antiwar protests popular in the 1960s. He hired some graduate students from Harvard University to pursue the project. On April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million people turned out for a series of demonstrations, parades, and rallies in support of ecological issues, the clearest evidence to date of environmentalism’s status as a mass movement. Students at the University of Minnesota staged a mock funeral for the automobile by burying an internal combustion engine. In New York City, author Kurt Vonnegut told a crowd assembled in Bryant Park, “If we don’t get our President’s attention, this planet may soon die…. I’m sorry he’s a lawyer; I wish to God that he was a biologist.”28
BAD AIR
Scenes like this one from 1953, showing New York City’s Chrysler Building obscured by smog, were common in U.S. cities before the beginning of clean-air regulations in 1970. (Library of Congress)
Although they had little or nothing to do with Earth Day, mainstream environmental organizations benefited immensely from the upsurge of concern it symbolized. Audubon Society membership, for instance, rose from 120,000 in 1970 to 400,000 in 1980. Sierra Club membership swelled more than 46 percent over the same period. In the 15 years after 1970, participation in environmental organizatio
ns went from 500,000 to 2.5 million—powerful evidence of the public’s growing interest in the environment.29
To advance their various causes, the groups found themselves turning increasingly to the law, especially now that the entire environmental regulatory system was open to public scrutiny. The new legislation passed in the 1970s gave these environmental organizations the opportunity to affect the debate over matters of wide-ranging ecological importance. Now the federal government had such organizations as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council looking over its shoulders, making sure it enforced what Congress intended.
Although aggressive litigation led to some important triumphs, the mainstream environmental groups were often beholden to corporate sponsors. Ford Foundation support for the Environmental Defense Fund and other groups, for instance, required them to present all lawsuits to a committee, chosen by the foundation, for review. A 1990 study of seven major environmental groups revealed that their boards were well stocked with executives from such notorious polluters as Exxon, Monsanto, Union Carbide, and other major corporations. And as these organizations became more corporate indentured, they became more persuaded by the logic of “win-win” solutions to environmental problems, an approach that employed market incentives, as opposed to new regulations, to compel corporate compliance. Such talk was of course a long way from the ideals and no-holds-barred approach of such early environmentalists as David Brower.30
GRASSROOTS
While the mainstream environmental movement has made law and legislation its focus, grassroots community groups have carved out a far more ambitious agenda, seeking both ecological justice and social empowerment. Unlike the largely white, male-dominated big green organizations, these activist groups are far more diverse, with working-class women and people of color playing the leading role. They also have been far less compromising and less interested in wilderness, which cultivates an image of nature at some distance from the experiences of ordinary people. Instead, the groups have sought to build decent places to live by liberating their communities from the grip of corporations.
Working-class environmental concerns first began to emerge in the late 1970s with the Love Canal disaster. Located in Niagara Falls, New York, the Love Canal community was built during the 1950s on a landfill once used by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation. Some 100,000 drums of chemical contaminants lay buried at the site. In the early 1970s, a woman named Lois Gibbs moved to a bungalow in the development, thinking she was buying the American dream. She soon learned that what she had bought was a whole lot of misery. Her children fell ill with epilepsy, asthma, and blood disorders.
In 1978, a reporter did a story on the buried chemicals and their potential dangers for the people of Love Canal. It turned out that Gibbs was not alone in her troubles; other residents suffered from chronic illnesses, birth defects, and miscarriages. Banding together, Gibbs and other afflicted residents organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association to deal with the problem. But state and federal officials responded slowly to their plight, so slowly that at one point Gibbs and 500 others took two EPA officials hostage for five hours to call attention to their dilemma. Jimmy Carter eventually declared Love Canal a disaster area, and the government paid for its evacuation. Gibbs moved to Virginia and went on to found the Citizens Clearing House for Hazardous Wastes (now the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice), an organization that by the late 1980s provided support to more than 5,000 grassroots groups concerned with the effects of toxic waste on their communities.31
Love Canal evolved into a symbol of reckless corporate behavior, but even more importantly, it worked to galvanize women around the issue of environmental justice. One of the most successful Love Canal protests was a Mother’s Day Die-In, in which women called attention to the relationship between corporate-generated toxins and reproductive health. In the wake of the New York disaster, other groups led by women arose, including Mothers of East Los Angeles and Mother’s Air Watch of Texarkana, Arkansas. These activists have tended to forgo litigation for the sake of aggressive protests and publicity campaigns. The mainstream environmental organizations, Gibbs explained, ask: “ ‘What can we support to achieve a legislative victory?’ Our approach is to ask: ‘What is morally correct?’”32
That approach, however, has led many to brand them “overemotional” women. Cathy Hinds, from a small rural community in Maine, became concerned, correctly as it turned out, that her well water might be contaminated. When she reported her suspicions to her physician, he downplayed them and instead prescribed a tranquilizer.33
LOVE CANAL
Members of the Love Canal Homeowners Association protested Hooker Chemical’s dumping of toxic chemicals in their neighborhood. (Buffalo Courier-Express Collection, E. H. Butler Library Archives, Buffalo State College)
To brand women environmental activists as “hysterical housewives” and deny their claims is to embrace a very narrow and unsophisticated understanding of how we learn about the natural world around us. In this view, it is absurd to think that one could learn anything about the relationship between ecology and health from housework. Yet it turns out that Hinds first suspected her water was contaminated after observing dark stains on her clothes and fainting spells among family members. One does not need to reject scientific knowledge to recognize that there are also simple ways, outside the laboratory, of gaining insight into nature.
Race was largely absent from the debate over Love Canal because the victims were primarily white working-class people. But in 1982, when an EPA-sponsored toxic waste dump was slated for Warren County, North Carolina, a poor and largely African American area, residents rose up in protest. With dump trucks loaded with contaminated soil set to roll, protesters, including many women and children, threw their bodies in the way. More than 500 people were arrested, including several civil rights leaders.
The protest resulted in a number of inquiries into the relationship between race and hazardous waste siting. Were African Americans and other people of color literally being dumped on? The evidence, generated through both government and other studies, strongly suggested that they were. One 1987 study found that three out of five blacks lived in places with abandoned toxic waste dumps.34
Although people of color have borne the greatest burden for toxic waste, it remains unclear as to whether such groups were explicitly targeted for abuse. It would be surprising, however, if some racism did not come into play. It is also likely that toxic waste landfills, once sited, lowered surrounding land values, drawing those who lacked the means to live elsewhere to these areas. In any case, a 1992 study pointed out that fines imposed on polluters in white areas were, on average, more than five times the fines leveled on outlaws operating in minority communities.35
American Indian communities also had to confront toxic waste problems. Although not directly targeted for dumping, Indian reservations often sat atop rich uranium deposits—a fact that often made them repositories of the nation’s industrial poisons. Uranium mining in the Southwest began in the 1940s with the advent of nuclear energy. By 1960, some six million tons of uranium ore had been mined on Navajo lands, generating serious problems with both water and soil contamination. Perhaps not surprisingly, teenage reproductive organ cancer rates in Navajo quarry areas are 17 times the national average. In 1979, shortly after the well-known nuclear reactor disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a dam at the Church Rock mine in New Mexico ruptured, sending radioactive tailings spilling into the Rio Puerco River. To this day, radiation levels in the area around the spill remain high. Although at times offering resources, the mainstream environmental organizations have largely ignored the uranium issue, leaving it to small grassroots groups such as the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining to wage the battle.36
William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first administrator, who later became the head of Browning-Ferris, a major solid waste hauling firm, once called the grassroots movement one of “the most r
adicalized groups I’ve seen since Vietnam.” But the larger question is whether the efforts of the grassroots groups are effective in taming the behavior of American corporations. The available evidence suggests that they have been. In 1990, an EPA report noted that public opposition to hazardous waste sites was creating a landfill capacity problem. That no doubt encourages Lois Gibbs, who once said that her organization’s goal with respect to toxic waste was “basically like plugging up the toilet.” Whether fewer disposal options will translate into actual waste reduction, however, remains to be seen.37
JOBS VERSUS NATURE
While the grassroots groups were demanding environmental justice for the dispossessed, a radical group named Earth First! came to the defense of the plant and animal kingdom. Taking a page out of the work of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, members of Earth First! rejected the view that human needs should form the basis of our relationship with nature. Casting aside this shallow ecological framework, they opted instead for what Naess called “deep ecology,” the view that all living organisms, both human and nonhuman, had equal claims on the earth. Philosophically speaking, they argued, human beings are no more important or valuable to life on the planet than lichens, trees, grizzly bears, or wolves are. It was, by most accounts, an extreme view. And one that eventually caused cracks to open in the Earth First! organization, as those concerned with the plight of workers worried that the focus on preserving wilderness at all costs had backfired, driving people who made a living in the woods directly into the arms of their corporate employers.
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 34
