A Not So Silent Spring
HILL, GLADWIN
A Not So Silent Spring by GLADWIN HILL The weekend of the Vietnam protest march last November, 200 students from forty California colleges met at Stanford University for quite a different...
...But organization is not made, as it is so often in the adult world, the endall...
...And I have hope...
...In several pending cases the Department is trying to prop up the hoary business-oriented concept that a complainant has to show substantial economic damage (not just destruction of a beautiful mountain-top view) to have "standing" in court...
...The Sierra Club, although never a gray-beard organization (since the day of its initial member, bearded John Muir), has established a new department for youth coordination—even though it was, in fact, Sierra Club chapters on a number of campuses that provided nuclei for the new movement...
...The gestures had better be genuine...
...One was California's resources director, Norman B. Livermore, Jr., half-suspect because of his career ties with exploitative industry...
...But he was upstaged, in the attention of observers, by his own eight-year-old daughter, a pig-tailed, outgoing little girl whose own painstakingly scrawled declaration in some ways outshone her father's lofty verbiage...
...Moreover, he added trenchantly: "Both activities are working toward the same goal: the survival of the human race...
...Stephanie Mills, slender and black-haired, is a prominent example of youthful activism...
...The underpinning of all these activities is information, data, facts—which youth distinctively has the energy and imagination to corral...
...One only has to attend any sort of conservation or environmental meeting anywhere in the country to be reassured by young people's interest, perspicacity, and zeal...
...There was no need for apologies...
...On the campus the environmental cause is drawing out supporters who wouldn't have dreamed of attending a football rally...
...On youth's part there is a remarkable deference to the experience of age in tackling this new cosmos of challenges...
...sham is one of the things youth is quick to spot and as quick to expose...
...Clinching this new preoccupation for young people was the tapering off of the Vietnam war as an object of practical "now" action...
...So is Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel...
...The First Step We're action-oriented politically...
...At the University of Texas, students are getting out an environmental newsletter to acquaint people with issues...
...Otherwise, Federal lawyers said in a recent case, every Tom, Dick, and Harry will be running to the courts with complaints...
...A new ecological course at the University of Oregon entitled "Can Man Survive...
...It's an encouraging and inspiring picture...
...The atmosphere is one of community of interest...
...It undoubtedly will be up to today's young guard—the countless environmentally minded law students across the country—to push this modernization of the law to a successful consummation...
...Collaboration between the youth bloc and the adult world on environmental issues is the rule rather than the exception...
...And they have pronounced them appalling...
...MIKE FINK Ecology Action Center University of Wisconsin March, 1970 Gladwin Hill is the national environmental correspondent of The New York Times...
...In the area of research, students are the secret arsenal of the environmental revolution...
...The environmental revolution is a sudden, remarkable, spontaneous rebellion not of one group against another so much as of everybody against the physical conditions to which two centuries of promiscuous "progress" have brought us—a world where ugliness is endemic, where corporeal hazards are rife, and where the issue of actual human survival suddenly has become poignantly explicit...
...The youth crusade raises many questions...
...Blue jeans or gray flannels, they comport themselves maturely...
...The intrinsic power of the youth-sparked environmental revolution is its Catholicism...
...Brock Evans, the Sierra Club's Northwestern proconsul and himself definitely in the youth bracket, says: "There's so much to be done, so much that anyone, whatever campus he's on or whatever community he's in, can latch onto with real satisfaction, that I look to see this interest growing rather than diminishing, regardless of what happens with Vietnam...
...After you'd demonstrated and torn up your draft card, if you had one, what was there really you could do...
...The old-line conservation organizations are reaching out for youth...
...But we now have a whole generation of young people under thirty, 100 million strong, who have the insight and perception to look around and appraise conditions objectively...
...What are they doing...
...The Stanford meeting was a milestone in what may become the greatest movement ever to sweep the country: the environmental revolution...
...How substantial and enduring does it promise to be...
...Systematic effort is more common than the impulsive...
...A declaration by the youth bloc at the UNESCO meeting in San Francisco sketched the scope of this: ". . . . sending lobbyists to local, state, and national capitals...
...Everybody knows by now that for countless young people anywhere in the country this is the prime topic of concern...
...Some people think that might be a good idea...
...The environmental weekend, he explained, had been scheduled and organized long before the Vietnam demonstration and could not be changed...
...I like fields where trees and flowers grow and forests where birds sing and chipmunks chatter...
...Its issue of a year before, devoted entirely to the concerns of youth, had not mentioned environment...
...Now, still only twenty-one, she is a paid campaigner for Planned Parenthood in Oakland...
...In some instances, teachers are quietly instigating undercover student investigations into local conditions as part of course work...
...A Not So Silent Spring by GLADWIN HILL The weekend of the Vietnam protest march last November, 200 students from forty California colleges met at Stanford University for quite a different purpose...
...I would like to live in a world full of people who love it as much as I do...
...The Santa Barbara oil well blowout of January 28, 1969 was the Hiroshima bomb of the environmental revolution for both old and young...
...The answers to these questions are emerging daily, and they are uniformly good...
...However, empathy between him and the students developed quickly...
...At the Stanford conference, experts were invited from all over the country to sit in as counsellors of a dozen topic panels...
...The closed-shop compartmentalization of the traditional "disciplines"—such as biology, chemistry, physics, botany, and geology—is being altered in favor of an eclectic approach...
...Some are skeptical of such gestures...
...I hope my children's world is like that too...
...To begin with, they are organizing...
...Generally, however, there seems to be less of a generation gap on the environmental front than anywhere else...
...But astute observers doubt it...
...Is this another "generation backlash" or can young people find common cause with their sluggish elders in radically reshaping a polluted world...
...one student remarked...
...They have said: "Look—the emperor has no clothes on...
...Environmental discontent inherently involves rejection of much of the status quo—rejection of prevailing physical conditions, rejection of the economic mores and governmental mechanisms that allowed these conditions to come about, rejection of the shibboleth of bigness, rejection even of the hallowed "right" of endlessly reproducing the human species...
...There is scarcely a college campus today that does not have one or more "ecology action" groups...
...Cleaning up the country and the world is going to take a vast amount of legislation, litigation, and administration...
...The instantaneous, inexorable urge for reform has been more than mere criticism...
...Political Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Timei "What will they do with their money when they run out of air and water...
...The first step is to create an awareness, so that each citizen won't feel the problems are hopeless...
...Someone like Ralph Nader, after all, has shown what can be done...
...California Governor Reagan is organizing a student advisory panel on environment...
...At Santa Barbara's January observance of the first anniversary of the oil well blowout, a feature of the day was the promulgation of an "Environmental Bill of Rights" composed by a University of California professor, Roderick Nash...
...The world I want," she wrote, "is like a lot of the world I saw last summer...
...The old "conservation establishment"—organizations like the Sierra Club, the Izaak Walton League, the Audubon Society—was so small that it plainly is not something to worry about repudiating...
...Youthful vexation with physical conditions ties in closely with contempt for the mores of big business, which is responsible for so much pollution...
...A week later a youth bloc repeated the performance at a leaden conference in Los Angeles convoked by Governor Ronald Reagan as a pro forma bow to conservation but which ended up with a stirring summons to action, which subsequently has begun to materialize...
...A fortnight later, when a hundred students invited belatedly to the Reagan environmental conference found themselves strapped for money for food, it was Livermore who quietly wrote out a personal check to cover their needs...
...was expected to draw 500 enroll-ees...
...Tired of the verbiage with which generations of adults have avoided a meaningful confrontation with conditions, they maneuvered the meeting into endorsing, "unofficially," demands on President Nixon to take forthright action on prime problems of the day...
...Let's go out and clean it up now...
...There's a creek on the edge of town that's full of junk...
...The college trustees are contemplating a dubious land deal...
...More than 2,000 registered, and the initial class on January 13 brought the biggest academic turnout in the university's history—6,000 students...
...She is the girl who, at the Mills College commencement in Oakland, California, last June, declaimed as valedictorian that the world was such a mess she didn't propose to bring any babies into it...
...It was to form a federation of campus organizations concerned with environmental problems, from pollution to birth control...
...and if no candidate makes any ecological sense, running and supporting our own candidates...
...Their sense of organization and effectiveness far surpasses that of the average fumbling, windy, all-adult gathering...
...Youth's new concern conceivably could slacken with the inevitably slow pace of reform...
...A week after the Stanford conference, it was young people who ran away with a stodgy environmental-problems conference of the U.S...
...The University of Hawaii has a score, each organized around a particular cause...
...Parliamentary and bureaucratic mechanisms, such as the ubiquitous Committee, are rejected instinctively in favor of action...
...A conspicuous feature of every environmental gathering is the mixture of gray heads and young people...
...The number one theater of war is now the war for ecological survival...
...But they will collaborate with "bird watchers," local civic groups, or with anybody who's going their way...
...The status-quo world is not going to be able to take these assaults with equanimity...
...campaigning against candidates whose positions don't make ecological sense...
...Rather, the feeling now is like the evangelical "one big union" concept that once sparked the labor movement...
...The Department of Justice, to name one status-quo monolith, doesn't like the idea of citizen groups coming into court with environmental dissatisfactions and challenging, for instance, the decisions of Federal administrative agencies...
...Finally, there is the realm of political action, in which the adult world has been delinquent and passive...
...We rode through big rapids...
...Where does it stand in relation to that other high concern of young people, Vietnam, and our other murky overseas involvements...
...New Lefters regard Vietnam and environmental enormities as opposite sides of the same coin of Establishmentism...
...That is what the adult world has done...
...You can't look at turbidity in a stream intelligently," Washington University's Professor Barry Commoner explains, "without having some knowledge about the banks of the stream and the forest that's growing twenty-five yards away...
...At Northwestern, they are agitating against Abbott Laboratories' chemical discharges into Lake Michigan...
...Environment, dramatized by Santa Barbara, was a burning issue, here, omnipresent—with a 200-year backlog of pollution to clean up...
...The chairman of the meeting, a Stanford student named Glenn Lopez, half apologized for the digression from the cause at that moment preoccupying millions of other students across the country...
...And it is young people who are the vanguard of that revolution...
...At Boston University, students are collaborating with state officials on water pollution problems...
...Let's mimeograph some fliers and start picketing the administration building, now...
...Whatever your ideology, personality, or intellectual bent, the water is just as dirty, the air just as smoggy, the dangers of DDT-laden fish just as alarming...
...Students are precipitating deep changes in college curricula...
...Lawrence Lipton, perhaps the original hippie, summarized recently in his column in the underground Los Angeles Free Press: "A poisoned earth isn't worth fighting for, win, lose, or draw...
...Across the nation, the college environmental zealots seem more inclined to maintain the autonomous spontaneity of their own movements than to immerse themselves in the formalities of national organizations...
...We drank cold water from clear streams...
...On many college campuses, progressive faculty members have been the prime movers in galvanizing the new interest...
...The February, 1970 issue of Fortune was devoted entirely to environment...
...But she also has become a sort of Joan of Arc of environmental reform, an ambassador between youth and the adult world, turning down lucrative lecture dates to appear at conservation meetings all over the country to articulate the problems we face and youth's demands for action...
...drawing up proposals to be offered to competing candidates...
...supporting officials who have taken a strong stand for a healthy environment...
...Humans, like all animals, display a remarkable, if often lamentable, capacity for adjusting themselves to their surroundings...
...Commission for UNESCO in San Francisco...
...At Santa Barbara, they are challenging the state's right to run a highway through an ecologically choice marshland...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
