A Memento Mori to the Earth

IT had aspects of a secular, almost pagan holiday--a sense of propitiating an earth increasingly incapable of forgiving what man has inflicted upon it. Much of Earth Day was festive and faddish; yet it touched the American imagination with a memento mori, a vision primitive as trilobites and novel as the idea of a windless, uninhabited earth orbiting on.

Thus, when Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic for two hours, 100,000 New Yorkers walked up and down in an eerie quiet. In vacant lots, on roadsides from Boston to Sacramento, schoolchildren gathered up beer cans, soda bottles and old tires, as if picking up after a violent party.

Some radicals complained that the nation's relatively abrupt concern for the environment represented a distraction from the issues of war and racism. A few rightists noted darkly that Earth Day was also Lenin's birthday, and warned that the entire happening was a Communist trick. At the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington last week, a delegate from Mississippi declared: "Subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them." Yet unlike, say, a Moratorium, Earth Day at least temporarily gathered nearly all bands of the political spectrum.

Campus Ritual. Expectedly, youth predominated at most of the ecological happenings and teach-ins across the U.S. At 1,500 campuses and 10,000 schools, students, teachers--and sometimes parents--observed Earth Day by studying such previously recondite subjects as hydrocarbons and acid drainage from coal mines. Much of the day was given to theater and ritual. At the University of Wisconsin, 58 separate programs were staged, including a dawn "earth service" of Sanskrit incantations.

Car wreckings--followed by interment of the beasts--were a common protest against the internal-combustion engine. Some students at Florida Technological University held a trial to condemn a Chevrolet for poisoning the air; they tried to demolish it with a sledgehammer, but the car resisted so sturdily that the students finally shrugged and offered it to an art class for a sculpture project.

Some 1,000 students at Ohio's Cleveland State University worked throughout the city gathering litter and loading it into garbage trucks. They ended the day by marching to the almost pestilentially polluted Cuyahoga River. Standing at the spot where Founding Father Moses Cleaveland allegedly landed in 1796, a student held aloft a plastic bag full of garbage and intoned: "This is my bag." Another student, dressed as Cleaveland, rowed up, declared: "This place is too dirty to build a colony," and double-timed back down the river to the almost equally scabrous Lake Erie. In Letcher County, Ky., part of the most ravaged section of Appalachia, 1,200 students buried a trash-filled casket. A young Denver group called CARP (Citizens Concerned About Radiation Pollution) gave the Colorado Environmental Rapist of the Year Award to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Dozens of politicians seized upon Earth Day as a new--and safe--issue. Both New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and New Jersey Governor William Cahill created state environment departments. The Massachusetts legislature passed a constitutional amendment establishing an Environmental Bill of Rights. Both houses of Congress recessed so that members could participate in Earth Day. Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson, who originated the idea of Earth Day, spoke at nine campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

President Nixon relayed his sympathies for the environmental cause through an aide, but otherwise did not participate, perhaps in apprehension that Earth Day might turn into a confrontation. Besides, Denis Hayes, national coordinator of the Environmental Teach-in, had suggested that Earth Day should "bypass the traditional political process." Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, in a display of candor if not superior timing, told an Alaska Earth Day audience that a controversial 800-mile hot oil pipeline will be built from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, despite concern that it will endanger fragile tundra along the way. The Administration holds that it has already established a strong ecological program, but the Commerce Department chose Earth Day to announce the granting of a permit for Hawaiian Independent Refining Inc. to build a 29,500-barrel-a-day oil refinery on 120 acres near Honolulu.

Business Response. Businesses used Earth Day to pledge their concern and plans for reform. Continental Oil Co. introduced four new "cleaner-air" gasolines for its Rocky Mountain marketing area. The Scott Paper Co. came forth with a $36 million project to control pollution at one of its plants. Sun Oil Co. announced a program to develop throw-away containers that can be easily destroyed. Beer companies and bottlers took full-page ads beseeching their customers not to scatter empty cans across the countryside.

But there is no pleasing some people: many ecologists and Earth Day organizers fear that such gestures will destroy a necessary adversary relationship. Says Fred Kent, coordinator for New York's Environmental Action Coalition: "It is irresponsible for business to say that they support us. They are just trying to co-opt us." The apparent unanimity on the issue of environment disturbs many who fear that genuine progress will be lost amid a flurry of superficial reforms.

The environment's future depends in part upon whether the public sentiment mobilized last week will endure to force change, whether Americans will sustain their interest in the longer and duller tasks of cleaning up the land. Says George Wiley, director of the National Welfare Rights Association: "I hope this movement is not a fad, but the signs are not encouraging." Still, there are a few hopeful signs. A Harris poll published last week indicated that Americans, by a margin of 54% to 34%, are willing to pay more taxes to finance air-and water-pollution control. Three years ago, the public opposed such extra taxes by 46% to 44%.

It is also encouraging that the swelling ecological movements seem to be progressing rather quickly from rhetoric to specific regional and local programs. Earth Day brought together 4,000 diverse ecology groups.

"Earth Day may be a turning point in American history," Gaylord Nelson told a Denver crowd of 4,000 last week. "It may be the birth date of a new American ethic that rejects the frontier philosophy that the continent was put here for our plunder, and accepts the idea that even urbanized, affluent, mobile societies are interdependent with the fragile, life-sustaining systems of the air, the water, the land." Nelson's mood may have been a bit too euphoric. Still, even though some of the ecological enthusiasm engendered by Earth Day may fade, the earth itself is not likely to let anyone forget the problem for long.

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