Looking for a Ladies’ Room With Margaret Mead: The Hearings That Launched the First Earth Day - Vanity Fair

Jerry Mander, director of Friends of the Earth in San Francisco and owner of an ad agency, said that in 1969 public utilities spent $300 million on advertising, eight times more than on environmental research. Yet, he noted, a series of Shell Oil ads trumpeted “how they saved the lives of a lot of fish by not polluting things as much,” followed by a second ad about “how they are feeding starving millions by producing more and better pesticides (which on the other hand are killing the fish they just saved).” Greenwashing has always been with us.

In Los Angeles, Gladwin Hill, the first national environmental correspondent for the New York Times, testified on behalf of the media. “The degree of public ignorance today is appalling,” Hill said of his readers. “Environmental quality begins at home, and most people have no idea where their local sewage plant is, let alone what sort of treatment it gives to sewage.” He went on to lament the public’s ignorance of such (to him) basic matters as which chemicals treat drinking water or “the three main chemical categories of exhaust emissions.” How many of us would pass that pop quiz today?

More haunting was the poignant testimony, in Los Angeles, of Watts Labor Community Action Committee organizer Ted Watkins, who wondered whether it even made sense to try to teach conservation to minority children living in polluted inner cities. He identified three neighborhood schools surrounded by junkyards or adjacent to industry waste. “I don’t know how a kid can think in terms of the kind of environment we are talking about when from elementary school until he graduates from high school, he is placed with the junkyards and the trash.” Rereading his words reminded me of a conversation I had last November with Karen Weaver, the former mayor of Flint, Michigan. She said residents there still don’t have clean drinking water because the state government has failed to fund replacement of all the faulty pipes that connect the main water line to people’s houses, as well as their contaminated fixtures and appliances. When I asked how much that would cost, she answered between $10 and $12 million.

The hearings consumed more than a thousand pages of the Congressional Record and were summarized in a book, The Environmental Problem: Selections From the Hearings of the Environmental Education Act of 1970, which is available online. Then the march to legislation began. Despite being opposed as unnecessary by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the National Environmental Education Act passed both houses of Congress—not a single Senator voted against it—and was signed into law by Richard Nixon on October 30, 1970. Just over a month later, on December 2, 1970, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order. Such was the momentum of Earth Day.

Unfortunately, that momentum wasn’t sustained. By 1972, Nixon’s top priority was normalizing relations with China, which put him at odds with many U.S. conservatives. To placate them, he declined to robustly fund environmental education. After 1973, the act more or less languished at HEW until 1979, when it was shifted under the jurisdiction of the newly created Department of Education. It was defunded from Ronald Reagan’s first budget, in 1981, then revived during the first Clinton administration, when the notion of government-as-solution enjoyed a resurgence. Today, the Clinton-era Office of Environmental Education resides within the Environmental Protection Agency. It awards $3 million annually to outstanding local environmental projects.

Eventually, Margaret Mead and I found our way to the imposing Education and Labor Committee hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building, where her testimony kicked off the day’s proceedings. She said the environmental crisis was upon us because “the population explosion and the technological explosion crept up on us and found us totally unprepared.” Americans, she warned the committee, tend to be lousy “global housekeepers.” And while “thermal pollution or the wreck of the oceans or [the fact that] we may not even be able to live here in 50 years” might be “dramatic” enough to prompt action, she said, what came next would be “the long-term and rather boring” chore of upkeep. “The people of the United States are particularly bad about maintenance.”

Now, during the quarantine, when I read about animals reclaiming their lost territory and seas turning crystalline blue again, I think back to the one theme that, above all others, emerged from the Environmental Education Act’s hearings: Don’t try to control the environment. Instead, care for it. Mother Nature always has the upper hand, and she can be a dominatrix.