Opinion: The fading hope of Earth Day at 55

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Raise your hand if you’re devoting any part of today to commemorating Earth Day, the annual rite of offering hope for an ailing, still failing, Mother Nature. Good for you, and thanks from the generation that in 1970 was among the tens of millions who pledged environmental action — with reasoned expectation that our living planet would at long last be protected.

For Charles Dayton, a young Minneapolis lawyer and self-committed environmental lobbyist, the remarkable public response to Earth Day together with legislators in St. Paul lining up to support dozens of environmental bills, made him believe that by his 65th birthday much of nature would be healed.

Now 86, Dayton said he still waits for the up-rising curve of natural destruction to start heading down. Hope glimmers and Dayton says he’ll “keep fighting,” but he accepts the optimistic naiveté of youth isn’t ending well.

But, oh, the glory days when most everyone donned green, and figuratively planted trees for generations to hug. Dayton and another young lawyer, John Herman, became Minnesota’s most effective environmental lobbyists, helping to guide into law the state’s foundational Environmental Rights Act (empowering citizens to sue for environmental damage), and the Environmental Policy Act (requiring a full eco-review of planned large-scale projects).

More of their good works included power plant siting, waste-dump controls, recycling old tires and beverage containers, restricting harmful PCBs in electrical distribution, controlling animal feedlots, and state financing of environmental officers in every Minnesota county. In Washington, D.C., Dayton helped win wilderness protection for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Minnesota was a step ahead. In 1967, GOP Sen. Gordon Rosenmeier of Little Falls pushed legislation to create the Pollution Control Agency and, to buffer the agency from political mischief, gave policy authority to a nine-member citizen board. Newly elected DFL Gov. Wendell Anderson and his staffer Peter Gove, worked tirelessly with Grant Merritt at PCA to successfully support dozens of eco initiatives.

A mega-push to protect and conserve nature was full on, powered by author Rachel Carson’s accounts of DDT’s lethal effects natural fauna and by daily news of chemical-soaked rivers catching fire and countless sea birds smothered by oil spills. Public opinion fused into atom-like energy to demand what became a stunning course correction.

One of the unheralded eco-influencers was a young, talented writer from Georgia who arrived in the (then) Minneapolis Morning Tribune newsroom with an eagerness to write about the environment. John Heritage soon won support from his editors to create the paper’s first environmental beat; among his many credits was a series on environmental degradation being nominated for a Pulitzer in 1967.

Next door, aides to Wisconsin’s U.S. senator, Gaylord Nelson, took notice and recruited Heritage to help Nelson burnish national environmental credentials. Heritage was immediately consumed in ways Nelson might build on the energy of student “teach-ins” on American college campuses to oppose the Vietnam War.

Their plan blossomed into what would become the nation’s first Earth Day. Heritage pitched the media, with major stories published in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine. The overwhelming response drove Heritage to plunge into planning and staffing an effort that quickly grew and moved to nearby space on Capitol Hill.

It all exploded in late 1969 when Heritage’s mother died suddenly. Overcome by grief and exhaustion, Heritage found it impossible to carry on the Earth Day campaign. His wife filed for divorce, and Heritage slipped into severe mental dysfunction that would cripple him for the next 40 years.

Another young activist, Denis Hayes, took over and applied his remarkable marketing skills to make the first Earth Day in 1970 a success beyond expectation. Up to 20 million attended teach-ins and committed to eco action. There followed enactment of a bounty of good laws, with dozens of advocacy groups formed to carry the crusade.

But all the while, the world — like John Heritage — was giving way. Public opinion gradually shifted as auto companies fought emission controls, businesses fumed about environmental regulation burdening profits, unionists saw job threats, and the agricultural industry unleashed powerful lobbies to stop rules to control runoff from over-application of field chemicals.

Much worse, scientists the world over produced myriad documents of the dire effects of climate change, something little realized in 1970. A warming climate became serious enough for 196 nations to gather in Paris in 2015 to sign a climate accord to turn things around.

It’s not worked, mainly because the captains of commerce have made headway with their argument that economies would flutter if too much is done to save our only planet. Now, an ideological tick has infested the debate with the idea of a hoax, and so the U.S. has quit the climate change accord and is eliminating environmental regulations.