Green When Green Wasn't Cool

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The first Earth Day

How the First Earth Day Was Borne From 1960s Counterculture

On April 22, 1970, a nationwide “teach-in” inspired millions of Americans to care more about the environment.

SARAH PRUITT

I took a lot of kiddin' 'cause I never did fit in

Now look at everybody tryin' to be what I was then

— Kye Fleming & Dennis Morgan

The Jesuits had assigned us Silent Spring three years earlier, but not because they were environmentalists. 

They considered Rachael Carson's book exemplary science writing and thought we'd learn effective argument from it. 

It did make quite an impression.

So when school let out that April day in '71, my friends and I caught the PATH from Grove to 14th Street.

We dashed up the subway steps and filed into the mob. 

A quarter million hippies and wanna-be hippies were romping 5th Avenue, free of traffic by mayoral decree.

It was the giddy "birth of the green movement," as history books record it.

To us it was a massive schoolboy lark.

The spring weather was joyous, the kind of New York City weather celebrated in schmaltzy Broadway tunes. We bought Good Humor bars from a cart and picked our way along the teeming street, stopping to gawk at the painted performance artists, the jerry-built exhibits and impromptu demonstrations.

Most memorable was the rock band we encountered performing on the pavement in front of Madison Square Park. 

The Lower East Side Band was fronted that day by a long-haired Puerto Rican named David Peel, who belted comedy songs about hippies, teeny boppers, reefer and LSD.

We loved them!

Only a year later, Peel and the band would emerge from obscurity when they were discovered in front of another city park by John Lennon, who rushed out The Pope Smokes Dope on Apple Records. 

The album was banned in every Catholic country.

But Earth Day was not. 

And from it arose the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the EPA.

Not a bad payoff.

Hyperbole

“Truthful hyperbole" is a contradiction in terms.

— Tony Schwartz

Spartan. Dangerous. Terrifying. Nightmarish. Horrific.

Too often in recent days, I've heard these words used by journalists to characterize the temporary hospitals that are propagating the country.

Spare me.

Valley Forge was spartan. 

Vietnam was dangerous. 

The Blitz was terrifying. 

Aleppo was nightmarish. 

Auschwitz was horrific.

In fact, the temporary hospitals are havens for the sick. 

And the job our military is doing is nothing short of herculean.

There's a hyperbole you don't hear enough.

Hedging

You can fudge. 

You can waffle. 

But if you're really low-life, you hedge.

The verb hedge, meaning to "screen yourself from a bad choice," comes from the Old English noun haga, meaning "fence."

The Brits stole haga from the German word Hegga. The Germans stole Hegga from the Latin word caulae, meaning "sheepfold."

In Merry Old England, hedge came to mean "shelter," because the homeless—highwaymen, knights and vagabonds—would sleep under hedges.

By the 16th century, hedge was used as a verb meaning to "dodge" or "evade." By the 17th century, it began being used to mean to "bet against loss."

Money-lenders in the time would make an unsecured loan to a borrower only were he willing to roll it into an outstanding loan that was secured.

The lending practice was known as hedging.

Of course, gentlemen never hedged.

That may have prompted Samuel Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, to say hedge "notes something mean, vile, of the lowest class."

Johnson didn't beat around the bush.

What Is to Be Done?

Last fall—before Covid-19 even had a name—I read historian Maury Klein's 900-page masterpiece A Call to Arms.

Little did I know I was reading the playbook Trump ought to have.

December 7, 1941, hurtled America into war with the Axis.

FDR—a leader who listened—saw in 1939 that to win, the US would have to "bury the Axis in weapons."

(On December 7, the US ranked 28th in the world in the size of its military, which relied on obsolete equipment, weapons and ammunition left from previous conflicts.)

To bury the Axis, FDR undertook what Klein calls "the greatest industrial expansion in modern history.”

But mass mobilization wasn't easy. Union leaders, bureaucrats and businessmen—especially businessmen—pushed back, as did many citizens.

FDR simply pushed harder. 

He guaranteed wary businessmen not only that the government would buy every item manufactured no matter the length of the war, but would assume all the costs of converting the factories back to peacetime production for 10 years thereafter.

The president also enlisted hundreds of "czars" to ride herd on every conceivable raw material, process and product—czars who were experts, not toadies, daughters and sons-in-law.

Within only months, FDR built America's colossal "arsenal of democracy," using brains and brawn—not blustery bullshit.

And America rapidly buried the Axis.

Blame the Left

If you do something bad, never, ever blame yourself.

— Donald Trump

The president's all about blame.

But who's to blame for him?

The left.

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty made that clear in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country.

In the first six decades of the 20th century, according to Rorty, the left tackled big issues like income redistribution and civil rights (think of the New Deal and the Great Society).

But in the latter decades—disillusioned by the Vietnam War—the left got sidetracked. It was led to champion only niggling issues like reparations and cross-dressers' rights (think of Anti-Columbus Day and the Transgender Legal Defense Fund).

Rorty predicted that tragic digression would lead to Trump's election.

American workers would see that government doesn't give a hoot about jobs and wages, Rorty wrote, and "decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots."

And there you have it: America has elected a demagogue to distract itself from its misery.

We have only ourselves to blame.

NOTE: To learn more about Richard Rorty, listen to this podcast.