Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise

Foreword

Foreword Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I remember what America was like before Earth Day; the Cuyahoga River burned for a week with flames five stories high; Lake Erie was declared dead. As a boy, I was warned not to swim in the Hudson, the Potomac, or the Charles Rivers. I recall how black smoke billowed from the stacks in Washington, D.C., so that we had to dust daily for soot, and how on some days, you could not see the length of a city block. I remember in 1963 when the eastern anatum peregrine falcon—arguably America’s most spectacular predatory bird—went extinct, poisoned out of existence by DDT. On Earth Day in 1970, an accumulation of such insults and the leadership of Senator Gaylord Nelson drove twenty million Americans— 10 percent of our population—into the street in the largest demonstration in American history. They demanded that our political leaders return to our people the ancient environmental rights taken from our citizens during the previous eighty years. Motivated by that extraordinary show of grassroots power, Republicans and Democrats working together passed twenty-eight major laws over the next ten years, to protect our air, water, endangered species, wetlands, and food supply. Those laws, in turn, became the model for over 150 nations that had their own versions of Earth Day and started making their own investments in their environmental infrastructure. The far right complained that Nelson’s new environmental movement was a communist plot and pointed for evidence that Earth Day was also Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. They accused Nelson of being a xi radical, divorced from American values. They could not have been more wrong; Gaylord Nelson and his followers were engaged in a battle to reclaim America’s most basic values. The environmental movement embodies the essential American principles, including democracy, free market capitalism, property rights, and the central importance of human dignity. Federal environmental laws democratized our communities in a remarkable way. America’s progressive social movements, the women’s movement, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement were all intended to make our society more democratic by spreading out power and by allowing our most humble, vulnerable, and alienated citizens to participate in the dialogues that determine the destinies of our communities. I would argue that none of them have accomplished these goals as effectively as has the environmental movement. Nowadays, we often hear the anti-environmental right wing vow to rid our nation of its federal environmental laws in the name of democracy. “We are going to get rid of the big federal government, and return control to the states,” they say. “After all, local control is the essence of democracy, and the states are in the best position to defend, protect, and understand their own environment.” The real outcome of that devolution would not be community control but corporate control. Gaylord Nelson understood that federal laws were necessary to protect small communities and individuals because large corporations can so easily dominate the state political landscapes. The Hudson Valley is only one of thousands of communities across America still struggling with the legacy of the pre–Earth Day version of “community control.” The General Electric Company came into the impoverished upstate New York towns of Hudson Falls and Fort Edwards, promising the towns’ fathers a new factory, fifteen hundred new jobs, and a raised tax base. All the town had to do was to persuade the state of New York to write GE a permit to allow the company to dump toxic PCBs into the Hudson River. If they refused to cooperate, GE threatened to move its jobs to New Jersey. Hudson Falls took the bait. A few decades later, GE closed the doors on these factories and left a two-billion-dollar cleanup bill that nobody in the Hudson Valley can afford. xii FOREWORD Federal environmental laws were meant to put an end to that kind of corporate blackmail and to stop corporations from whipsawing one community against another in a race to the bottom to lower their environmental standards and recruit dirty industries in exchange for the promise of a few years of pollution-based prosperity. Today, thanks to Gaylord Nelson and the federal environmental laws Earth Day inspired, communities have the clout to say “no” to companies like GE. If you are an American in almost any state, and some big company tries to put a...