Fifty Years of Earth Day: “Mother Nature always has the upper hand, and she can be a dominatrix.” via VanityFair
Whenever I think about Earth Day, my mind races back to the morning in April 1970, when I got lost in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building while looking for a scarce women’s bathroom, with the acclaimed anthropologist Margaret Mead. It was a few days before the very first Earth Day, and Mead was scheduled to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on Education on behalf of a proposed bill called the National Environmental Education Act.
The hearings addressed fundamental questions about humanity’s relationship to the planet that were still unresolved. Who was going to be dominant in the relationship? Us or nature? When should children start learning about the environment? What kind of education was even needed at a time when there was no agreed-upon definition of ecology, and no one thought in ecosystems?
On the Hill, Nelson found an ally on the House side in Congressman John Brademas, Democrat of Indiana, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford. Brademas had just gotten his first House subcommittee chairmanship and needed something that would make a splash. “This was Brademas the brilliant,” saysformer GOP senior legislative assistant for the Education and Labor Committee, of Brademas’s authorship of the National Environmental Education Act.
In those days, no one could imagine the ice caps melting or a city-size blob of garbage floating in the ocean. Nevertheless, many of the witnesses’ warnings proved prescient. On opening day, the theologian Joseph Sittler testified: “When man so uses nature to defile her integrity, defile her cleanliness, disrupt her order or ignore her needs, the reprisals of insulated nature often take a slow but terribly certain form. Nature’s protest against defilement is ecological reprisal.
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 basic matters as which chemicals treat drinking water or “the three main chemical categories of exhaust emissions.
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