Why Earth Day Still Matters

When Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin launched Earth Day in 1970, positive response was overwhelming. Twenty million people – 10 per cent of the U.S. population — participated. But it also drew fire from both ends of the political spectrum. 

The far-right John Birch Society accused Nelson of choosing April 22 as an ill-disguised attempt to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Russian Red Vladimir Lenin. Nelson defused that with some research and humor, explaining that April 22 was the birthdate of literally millions of people, including Queen Isabella, St. Francis of Assisi, and – most importantly – Nelson’s Aunt Tillie.

On the left, critics said environmental issues were trivial compared to other severe societal problems like racism, poverty, and the Vietnam war. Journalist I.F. Stone, speaking at the Earth Day rally at the Washington Monument, called Earth Day a “beautiful snow job” designed to distract attention from government military and spending policies. “We here tonight are being conned,” Stone said. “The country is slipping into a wider war in Southeast Asia and we’re sitting here talking about litterbugs.”

But Nelson wasn’t just talking about litterbugs.

In his speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on the eve of Earth Day, Nelson made it clear he saw the movement as broadly focused. “Our goal is not to forget about the worst environments in America – in the ghettos, in Appalachia and elsewhere,” he said. “Our goal is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other living creatures – an environment without ugliness, without ghettos, without poverty, without discrimination, without hunger and without war. Our goal is a decent environment in its deepest and broadest sense.”

Introducing a bill on a study of ecological damage in Vietnam, Nelson catalogued the damage: An area the size of Rhode Island flattened and scraped bare of foliage. Prime forest acreage the size of Massachusetts, destroyed by 100 million pounds of poisonous herbicides. Twenty-three million huge craters, forty feet across and twenty-six feet deep, created by 500-pound bombs, with tonnage amounting to three pounds for every person on earth – eight billion pounds. Destruction of eighty per cent of the timber forests and ten per cent of all the cultivated land in the country. 

“That is what we have done to our ally, South Vietnam …The huge areas destroyed, pockmarked, scorched, and bulldozed resemble the moon and are no more productive … I am unable adequately to describe the horror of what we have done there … There is nothing in the history of warfare to compare with it. A ‘scorched earth’ policy has been a tactic of warfare throughout history, but never before has a land been so massively altered and mutilated that vast areas can never be used again or even inhabited by man or animal. This is impersonal, automated, and mechanistic warfare brought to its logical conclusion – utter, permanent, total destruction.”

Fifty years later, as war rages in Ukraine, the damage and destruction caused by militarism and war are on every television screen and newspaper front page – widespread loss of human life, millions of refugees, growing world hunger, and so much environmental damage that it is being called ecocide.

The war “will likely push the existential risks posed by climate crisis to national and global security further onto the military’s backburner,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns. Both sides are spewing greenhouse gases from tanks, trucks, and a wide array of vehicles and weapons. But the dirtiest of them all is jet fuel, burned in incredible quantities. 

Even in peacetime – a rare occurrence in this century – militarism fuels the climate crisis and degrades and destroys the environment. And Pentagon spending by the U.S. is the leading culprit. The Department of Defense (DOD) is the largest consumer of energy in the nation, and the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum. The U.S. military burns 100 million gallons of oil a year, produces more greenhouse gases than many industrialized countries. The US spends more on the military than the next 11 countries combined – three times as much as China and 10 times as much as Russia.

Closer to home, a long, ongoing and losing struggle in Madison against basing a squadron of new F-35 fighter jets at Truax Field has focused on health effects, noise, harmful effects on families in nearby neighborhoods, the disproportionate negative impact on low-income and minority populations, and the dangers if the planes carry nuclear warheads. Then there is the environmental concern: The Air Force’s F-35A burns about 2.37 gallons of fuel per nautical mile, a Boston University professor found. On a single tank of gas, one plane can produce almost 28 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Each jet will emit seven tons of CO2 for every hour in flight. The Air Force plans to deliver the first F-35 to Truax next spring.

Veterans For Peace, an international organization with a chapter in Milwaukee, has launched a campaign to educate the public about the connection between militarism and the climate crisis. For more information follow their Facebook group.

Bill Christofferson, a member of Milwaukee Veterans For Peace and Peace Action Wisconsin, is the author of The Man From Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Sen.Gaylord Nelson.