"For the president to call for oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is like
burning the furniture in the White House to keep the first family comfortable."
-- Gaylord Nelson
Earth Day, 2005
In its obituary, The Washington Post described Gaylord Nelson as the
man “who introduced mainstream America to the modern environmental
movement by founding Earth Day.” For wonderful personal and political
anecdotes, read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s obituary. I first knew Gaylord when I was a lobbyist for The Wilderness Society in 1968 and worked with him on Earth Day 1970.
Flying home in 1969 after viewing the Santa Barbara oil spill, Nelson
read about college “teach-ins” protesting the Vietnam War and said to
himself, “Why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment?” When
he publicized the idea, I was completing graduate work at the
University of Michigan and helping organize just such an environmental
teach-in. We contacted Nelson and he invited me to serve under his
chairmanship on the board of Environmental Teach-In, Inc., which took
over the teach-in organizing effort when the idea rapidly outgrew
Nelson’s already-busy Senate staff. We hired Denis Hayes to coordinate
the mushrooming effort.
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| The Gaylord Nelson Newsletter, November 1969. Click here to read more |
Nelson
was the ideal leader for Earth Day. He insisted it be utterly
nonpartisan. He seemed to be everywhere that spring, speaking out for
action on clean air, clean water, and preservation of parks, open
spaces, rivers, and wilderness—issues he was devoted to as Wisconsin
Governor (1959-63), Senator (1963-80), and Councilor of The Wilderness
Society until his death last month. The five-day teach-in at Michigan
was a month before Earth Day itself and 17,000 overflowed the
basketball arena for Nelson’s keynote speech—an initial hint at the
extraordinary outpouring of public support on April 22, 1970, when 20
million Americans participated. American Heritage Magazine described
that first Earth Day as "one of the most remarkable happenings in the
history of democracy."
Nelson was crusading for the environment long before that. In 1963 he
urged President Kennedy to make a national conservation tour. "There is
no domestic issue more important to America in the long run than the
conservation and proper use of our natural resources, including fresh
water, clean air, tillable soil, forests, wilderness, habitat for
wildlife, minerals and recreational assets," Nelson wrote the
president. Kennedy took the tour, during which he spotlighted his
support for the then-pending Wilderness Act, two months before he was
assassinated.
Fervently as he cared about wild lands, Nelson took a broad view. As The Washington Post recounted:
He defined environmentalism broadly. In 1970, he told college
students in Denver that the environment "is rats in the ghetto. It is a
hungry child in a land of affluence. It is 'public housing' that isn't
worthy of the name. It is a problem whose existence is perpetuated by
the expenditure of $25 billion a year on the war in Vietnam, instead of
our decaying, crowded, congested, polluted urban areas that are inhuman
traps for millions of people."
“I admired Gaylord for many reasons,” says Bill Meadows, President of
The Wilderness Society, “his courage, his intelligence, his integrity,
his sense of humor, his ability to work with people of all political
persuasions. When he left the Senate 24 years ago, he could have cashed
in his career and made millions. Instead, he joined our staff and
fought for environmental protection.” Asked why he worked well into his
89th year, Nelson simply said, "Our work's not done."
Nelson particularly savored his achievement when the President signed
his legislation establishing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on
Lake Superior on September 26, 1970. Gaylord Nelson’s work will forever
be enshrined in the National Wilderness Preservation System—last
December, Congress designated the 33,500–acre Gaylord Nelson Wilderness
in the Apostle Islands.
