Earth Day: A Beginning
HAYES, DENIS
Youth Speaks Up Earth Day: A Beginning by DENIS HAYES Articles on ecology generally tend to lead off with lists of disasters. But the shock effect of disasters is gone. Today such lists may even...
...Those of us who have fought against the war will continue to do so until it is ended...
...The contemporary revolution, however, does not rely upon an exclusively economic analysis, and its goals are not acquisitive...
...It presumes infinite resources, and it presumes a mastery by Man over Nature, and over Nature's laws...
...At a time when survival itself depends upon the development of an ecologically balanced world, the worshippers of "progress" are instead embracing death...
...In a society in which death has lost its horror, with the slaughter of three wars under our belts and our streets full of mugging and indifference, a group of people—mostly young—is beginning to stand up and say, "No...
...That's what America has become, and that's what we are challenging...
...And time is running out...
...If 50,000 people are killed, if ten million people starve, if an entire country is laid waste—we have learned to tuck the information into the proper file and write the affair off as a mistake...
...And with its material goals addressed, the movement invariably lost its teeth...
...Thousands of campuses and communities all across America will be taking part in Earth Day...
...It will be impossible to "buy off" the peace people, to "buy off" the hippies, to "buy off" the young Black militants, to "buy off" the ecology freaks...
...They are the kinds of marginal compromises that a skillful player makes to keep control of the game...
...This has never been true...
...Each will try to develop a holistic strategy for improvement...
...We have The Problem...
...This value is difficult to articulate, but posited most simply it might read: "the affirmation of life...
...Today such lists may even be counter-productive...
...None has any illusions about turning America around in one day, or one week, or one year...
...We are mapping a struggle—not only against the vested interests of the giant corporations, not only against the paid-off senility in our Congress, not only against the Strangeloves in the Pentagon...
...These aren't mistakes at all...
...What's wrong is that the species is breaking the most fundamental biological rule...
...Our challenge must consider not only the pieces but the whole...
...This callousness has allowed us to overlook the modest, intermediate consequences of our crimes...
...And with intelligence, courage, and luck, we may win...
...But it's a beginning...
...All ecological concerns are interrelated parts of the problem of perpetuating life on this frail planet, and our approach to them must be holistic...
...That is what April 22 is all about...
...The sky slowly lightens, and in time the streets become snarled...
...But the cosmetic alterations being offered by our politicians and our industrialists don't really speak to The Problem at all...
...Our population and our rate of "progress" are both expanding geometrically...
...Each of our biggest bombs today is the explosive equivalent of a cube of TNT as tall as the Empire State Building...
...Until recently, American movements tended to have a vulnerability...
...a rejection of the silly idea that somehow bigger is better, and faster is better, world without limit, amen...
...We don't...
...We can't be bought, because we demand something the existing order can't produce education, and health to all men...
...We are beginning to say, simply, "We affirm life —a life in harmony with Nature...
...Survival demands something more...
...People jostle around me, rushing from their dissatisfied homes to their unhappy places of labor...
...The Blacks, and the Wallace working class, the great silent majority—all feel the tense unease...
...Sometimes, around dawn, we finish the previous day's work and I go for a walk...
...This is not to say that the new ecologists oppose patchwork improvements—only that we're fairly indifferent to them...
...The inconsistencies are becoming clearer, and a whole generation is rapidly losing its naivete...
...Each will focus its attention upon the degradation of its local environment...
...At the same time we are systematically destroying our land, our streams, and our seas...
...So if a militant group wanted a piece of the pie, and was willing to fight for it, the economy would simply produce a little more pie and give it some...
...And the only reason we don't have bigger bombs is that we don't have a means of delivering bigger bombs...
...Nurtured in our frontier heritage as the short-sighted inhabitants of a bountiful, underpopulated country, this mental set (found in every economic text in our schools) has yet to grapple with the elementary fact that infinite expansion is impossible on a finite planet...
...The consequences of that are beginning to come home...
...It's a chance to start getting a handle on it all...
...And it's getting worse...
...But new bonds of brotherhood are rapidly linking diverse people around a profoundly simple value: the affirmation of life...
...And that's what April 22 is really all about...
...all failed...
...Youth Speaks Up Earth Day: A Beginning by DENIS HAYES Articles on ecology generally tend to lead off with lists of disasters...
...It is absolute folly to continue to pursue piecemeal solutions— when we know full well that the pesticides, the detergents, and the dams are all fouling the same river...
...We can't be bought because we demand something the existing order can't produce...
...April 22 is a tool—something that can be used to focus the attention of a society on where we are heading...
...If bandages and baling wire make life a little better, that's fine...
...And this made them vulnerable...
...A pregnant new politics is developing, which cuts across former boundaries and which scorns the sterile inflexibility of existing institutions...
...much of it seems unwilling to fight for its life...
...The American economy can manufacture wondrous quantities of goods...
...Tens of thousands could die in Los Angeles in a thermal inversion which is now probably unavoidable—and not one element of the existing system of air pollution control can do a thing to reduce the flow of poisonous traffic into that city...
...He is now on leave to serve full-time as the national coordinator of Environmental Action...
...they are the natural offshoots of the "growth generation"—of the neo-Keynesian mentality that still expects to find salvation in the continued growth of population and production...
...Other social movements have tramped across the dusty American stage...
...All these goals fall under a single unified value structure...
...Our movement must be different...
...The implications of these old myths in the current setting are enormous...
...America has become indifferent to life, reducing that vibrant miracle to a dead statistic...
...Denis Hayes, a graduate of Stanford University, is entered at the Kennedy School of Government and the Law School at Harvard...
...Some local groups are going to be reasonably moderate...
...We have to "unlearn" that...
...We foul our air, deaden our senses, and pollute our bodies...
...Instead of seeking harmony, man has sought to subdue the whole world...
...America is the new Robber Baron—stealing from the poor countries of the world to satiate a gluttonous need for consumption...
...Relying heavily upon an economic analysis, they tended to focus at least in part upon material goals...
...Many began in search of fundamental change...
...We now have the potential to destroy life on the planet, and in our rapacious plundering we are flirting with some frightening probabilities that we will do just that...
...The precedents are clear...
...The course ahead is dangerous and complex and may be impossible...
...This is a clear contradiction of most things for which America stands...
...A focus on one concern does not mean a neglect of the others: We are able to seek more than one goal at a time...
...We waste our riches in planned obsolescence, and invest the overwhelming bulk of our national budget in ABMs and MIRVs and other means of death...
...those who have sought recial justice will not be satisfied until it is realized...
...They suggest we have a number of specific problems we must address...
...And they seem to know something is wrong...
...America is the New Rome, and is making Vietnam the new Carthage—razing her villages to the ground and salting what remains of her fields with long-lasting defoliants...
...The very survival of the species has come to demand an ecologically-balanced planet —a state at variance with most of the value assumptions of Western civilization...
...others will be much more militant...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
