Mr. Earth Day Gets Ready to Rumble

By David S. Jackson/Seattle

Where do you go when you need someone to rally 200 million people? An ex-President, perhaps, or a former dictator? Whenever the environmental movement needs someone to gather the troops worldwide, it turns to a tall, understated activist who rides his bicycle to work, wears flannel shirts and has a unique ability to herd the masses toward a common goal. His name is Denis Hayes, but you can call him Mr. Earth Day. He launched the first one in April 1970, turned it into a global festival for Earth Day 1990 and is looking ahead to the biggest eco-event he can imagine: Earth Day 2000.

Hayes, 54, didn't set out to be an environmentalist. He grew up in Camas, Wash., a small paper-mill town where the air stank from sulfur fumes. Like most other people there, he loved the outdoor life, but his concern over the damage the mills were doing to his beloved forest was tempered by the realization that the industry was also his dad's employer. Not until his undergraduate days at Stanford in the '60s did he become a rabble rouser, and then his target was not pollution but war: he helped lead more than 1,000 students in a campus takeover of a weapons-research lab.

The activist settled down and entered Harvard Law School with an eye to influencing public policy, but a fateful assignment his first semester changed his life. Required to be an intern in a government office, Hayes called Gaylord Nelson, then a liberal U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, and volunteered to organize a series of teach-ins across the country to call attention to the environment. Energized by the memories of the ravaged forests of his youth, he dropped out of Harvard and devoted his time to organizing rallies, street demonstrations and trash cleanups. It all culminated with the first Earth Day, when 20 million people put on the biggest show of flower power the country had seen.

Except for its radical fringes, environmentalism moved into the political mainstream, and so did Hayes. By the time he was 35, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to head the Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado, and clean power became his passion. After finding the time to finish his law degree at Stanford in 1985, Hayes was drawn back onto the environmental front lines by groups looking forward to the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day. The threat of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels had thrust the environment back into the headlines, and it was time to make Earth Day 1990 a global happening. Hayes didn't disappoint. Spurred on by his organizational efforts, nature lovers staged spectacular events around the world, from a 500-mile human chain across France to a gathering of 35,000 in Tokyo Bay. In all, 200 million people paid homage to the planet.

In 1993, Hayes began running the Bullitt Foundation, an endowment in Seattle that funds green projects in the Pacific Northwest. But the coming of the new millennium brought another test: take Earth Day to new heights in 2000. Besides the rallies, concerts, seminars and TV shows, Hayes plans to use a magic wand he didn't have in 1970 or 1990: the Internet. Through e-mail, websites and live Web events, Earth Day participants will be globally linked as never before. "Earth Day is for the environment what Martin Luther King Day is for civil rights," Hayes says. "We know what to do. But can we summon the political will and courage to make it happen?"

--By David S. Jackson/Seattle