[0:06]Hello, my name is Patrick Allett. I'm a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. This course is about the environment, the environmental movement, and the question of natural resources in the late 19, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It was in the 1960s that environmentalism became a mass movement. The word environmentalism was first used in the Washington Post in a story of 1966. Before that, many people had been interested in questions of pollution, overpopulation, um, recreation, resource management. But now all of those things were brought together in this new phenomenon called environmentalism. The late 1960s was a period of citizen activism in the United States, in which many movements, uh, copied the example of the Civil Rights movement, which since the late 1950s had been protesting in the streets for a transformation of America's racial situation. Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the Civil Rights movement had made rapid strides and major legislation of the early 1960s, had led to the passage of a Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. As the Vietnam war became more unpopular in the late 1960s, demonstrators turned out into the streets in huge numbers to protest against America's policy. The new women's movement was also mounting demonstrations, and each of these organizations in turn found that it was a very good way of drawing attention to its cause and a very good way of prompting politicians to take action. So the environmental movement became one more group which understood the possibilities of the publicity which comes from public demonstration. There was growing concern in the 1960s over the indiscriminate use of herbicides and pesticides. And this was brought together by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. Rachel Carson was a trained scientist, but she had a talent for writing about complicated scientific matters in a straightforward language. And her book, which was serialized in the New Yorker and then published as a book, became a surprise bestseller. Normally books which have chemical equations in them a destined for a small readership and obscurity. But Carson had hit a public nerve. She said, we're using pesticides and we're using herbicides indiscriminately. Sometimes they're being sprayed from the air. It's certainly true that they kill the bugs, but they often kill other animals as well, sometimes even people's pets. We need to be far, far more attentive to the way in which we use these things, and we also need to remember that if we use a pesticide too intensively, although we kill 90% of the insect which is targeted, the 10% which have some kind of natural immunity will survive to reproduce, with the result that the next generation will actually have a resistance to the pesticide itself. So she argued for a much more cautious use of industrial chemicals, particularly one called DDT. Another great problem in the 1960s which was causing growing dismay was air pollution. Ever since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, smoke in the atmosphere had been part of the price Americans paid for their prosperity. But it was getting steadily worse, particularly in areas which were heavily, um, in which there were heavy concentrations of motor vehicles. In Los Angeles, California, for example, 100 days out of every 365, the air quality was so bad that children were warned to stay inside, and it became difficult to have sporting activities in a place which had once been a paradise for outdoor activities. The police there sometimes wore gas masks because the pollution was so bad. The river that flows through Cleveland, Ohio is the Cuyahoga River. Oil slicks on the surface of the river and chemical wastes which were floating there were so severe that the river caught on fire in 1969. This wasn't the first time it had happened either. A much worse fire back in 1952 had blazed almost out of control. But the fact that in the late 1960s it should happen again was a source of very acute embarrassment to the city and its politicians and its leading industries, and was one of the events which led to a widespread feeling, we ought not to have to put up with contamination at this level. Similarly, in early 1969, there was a leak from an offshore oil platform in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Now this was a place in which a lot of wealthy and politically influential people lived. And the fact that they should have filthy crude oil washing up onto their beaches, killing the seabirds and the otters and the sea lions, was also a source of very widespread political discontent. And by 19, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, people from many different social classes were all agreeing, we're a wealthy society which is has created for itself a marvelously affluent way of life, at least for most of its citizens. Why do we have to live with these very high levels of contamination? Well, the first Earth Day was the first mass event of the modern environmental movement. It took place on April 22nd, 1970. It was suggested by a member of the United States Senate, Gaylord Nelson, who was a senator from Wisconsin. And he was helped by a Harvard law student called Dennis Hayes. The two of them borrowed an idea from the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was the idea of the teach-in. They said, we're going to get people together who, uh, who know something about these issues to talk to college groups, school groups, church groups, and concerned sets of citizens to tell them about the environmental problems we've got and to suggest ways in which we can remediate them, particularly the problem of pollution. Well, they worked to get Earth Day ready in the last months of of 1969 and early 1970. They were lucky that April 22nd itself was a sunny day in most parts of the country. It was a Wednesday, Congress went into recess, and most places around the nation regarded it as an occasion for a public holiday. It exceeded the organizers wildest hopes. Millions of people showed up.
[6:56]It was by far the biggest demonstration in American history up to that time. And unlike the Civil Rights demonstrations and the women's demonstrations and the anti-war demonstrations, this was something which could potentially interest nearly everybody. One of their slogans was, we all breathe the same air. Everybody had a shared sense of indignation that environmental conditions were so bad. And so it was from that date that it's easy to for us to um regard the environmental movement as having come of age. In the next module, I'll move on to talking about the way in which the politicians responded to this upsurge of public enthusiasm.
