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Chapter 3
The Sixties Rebellion:
The Search for a New Politics
“ e l i xe r s o f d e at h ” a n d t h e q ua l i t y
o f l i fe : r ach e l c a r s o n ’s l e g ac y
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception
until death.” With this warning, an exploration was launched thirty years ago
into the world of synthetic pesticides, particularly chlorinated hydrocarbons
such as DDT that had been “so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate
and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere.”1 While the words of
Rachel Carson were perceived by the chemical industry and others as directly
challenging this technology, they also anticipated a new language of environmental concern. The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 and the ensuing controversy that made it an epochal event in the history of environmentalism can
also be seen as helping launch a new decade of rebellion and protest in which
the idea of Nature under stress also began to be seen as a question of the quality of life.
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Born in the small western Pennsylvania town of Springdale on the Allegheny
River, Rachel Carson developed two related passions: nature writing and science
research. While teaching biology courses in the evening, Carson took a job with
the Bureau of U.S. Fisheries (which later became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service) in the late 1930s and began writing about undersea life. Though her first
book, Under the Sea Wind, failed initially to generate interest, she continued to
write about the oceans and other science-based environmental topics. During
World War II, as editor of the Bureau of U.S. Fisheries publications, she became
familiar with new research about the ocean environment. This research became
the genesis of her 1951 book The Sea Around Us, which first appeared under the
title “Profile of the Sea” as a three-part series in The New Yorker.
The Sea Around Us combined Carson’s knowledge of oceanography and marine
biology, her passionate concern for the harm that had been done to the sea and its
life, and a readable style that made her work appealing and immediately accessible. The book was an extraordinary success. It stayed on the best-seller list for eightysix weeks, sold more than 2 million copies, and was translated into thirty-two
languages. (Under the Sea Wind was reissued at this time and also climbed to the
top of the best-seller list, as did a follow-up book entitled The Edge of the Sea.)
Although Carson was a private person who shunned the celebrity of a best-selling
author, she was not as surprised as some about the book’s public reception and its
indication of a popular interest in science. In accepting the National Book Award
for The Sea Around Us, Carson defined this interest in science as reflecting daily life
concerns.“Many people have commented on the fact that a work of science should
have a large popular sale,” she said to the National Book Award audience. “But this
notion, that ‘science’ is something that belongs in a separate compartment of its
own, apart from everyday life, is one that I should like to challenge. We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge is the prerogative of only a small number
of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The
materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why in everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces
that have molded him physically and mentally.”2
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Carson’s environmental curiosity, her willingness to pursue “the what, the
how, and the why” in daily experience, made her a logical candidate to investigate the most striking petrochemical technology success story of the postwar era.
By the late 1950s, when she began her work on Silent Spring, pesticides had
already become a fixture in both agricultural production and other commercial
uses. The pesticide explosion, including the development and use of chlorinated
hydrocarbons such as DDT, largely dated from World War II, although a range
of poisonous and potentially harmful insecticides—inorganic chemicals and
heavy metal products such as lead arsenate—had been widely used prior to the
war. These insecticides had also been controversial: a series of insecticide-related
food poisonings during the 1920s, for example, generated significant public
protest, including demands for product bans and stronger regulatory actions by
the Food and Drug Administration. One best-selling book of the 1930s,
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, focused on the hazards of consumer and industrial
products and specifically singled out lead arsenate for a possible product ban.3
Prewar and postwar pest control technologies, however, differed significantly
both in their volume of use and their environmental impacts. During the late
1940s through the 1950s, the pesticide industry grew at a phenomenal rate. In
less than a decade, sales increased by more than $300 million and continued
thereafter to increase geometrically. Such a rapid expansion of the industry also
had political dimensions. In states such as California, the agricultural and chemical industries became strongly interconnected, forming a potent agrichemical
industrial complex that heavily influenced state legislatures and regulatory and
administrative agencies. By the late 1950s, pesticides had fully supplanted all
other pest control methods and insect eradication campaigns. Their use was of
such magnitude that significant episodes of harm to wildlife and immediate
health impacts on farmworkers began to be recorded throughout the country.
One such episode drew Rachel Carson into what became her final mission.
In 1958, as part of a mosquito eradication campaign in the Duxbury,
Massachusetts, area, state officials decided to spray the area with DDT. This occurred
near the home of Olga Owens Huckins, a good friend of Carson’s. Huckins’s private bird sanctuary was immediately impacted by the DDT, bringing about the
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“agonizing deaths,” as Huckins put it, of several of her birds. Distraught, Huckins
asked Carson if she could help find someone to research the issue. Carson was then
developing new material for a series of articles on ecology but felt compelled to put
aside her project temporarily to make some initial inquiries about this matter. It
didn’t take her long to realize that independent, critical research of pesticides was
nearly nonexistent.4
By the late 1950s, pesticides were being touted as a kind of miracle product,
supported by advertising campaigns (“Better Things for Better Living Through
Chemistry”), government policies designed to increase agricultural productivity, and a media celebration of the wonders of the new technology. Farmers were
receptive because pesticides reduced labor costs and production risks. Public officials appeared ready to unleash, at a moment’s notice, massive spraying of DDT
and dozens of other synthetic organic chemicals on forests, roadways, grassy
areas, and anywhere pests were seen as a threat. Although scant information was
available on the environmental and public health impacts of these chemicals,
enough fish and birds were being killed and farmworkers poisoned to cast doubt
on industry and government claims about the pesticide revolution. These problems had also led to some initial protests against spraying campaigns, including
a DDT-related lawsuit filed on Long Island that served as Carson’s research point
of departure.
As Carson gathered her information, she quickly realized that pesticides had
far greater environmental impacts than commonly assumed. In an interview prior
to the publication of Silent Spring, Carson told the Washington Post that while pesticide impacts shouldn’t be considered directly equivalent to nuclear fallout, that
other major environmental hazard of the period, the two were still “interrelated,
combining to render our environment progressively less fit to live in.”5 Carson
anticipated her information might be explosive, given the petrochemical industry’s power and willingness to attack any criticisms. As a result, she built her case
methodically in the form of a writer’s brief in which the questions and findings
of science could be used to educate and ultimately empower the public.
It is striking to read Silent Spring three decades after its publication. The book
resonates with the continuing debates about pesticides still relevant today and
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reflects on issues currently facing the environmental movement. In a period
when the question of pollution was only just beginning to receive significant
public attention, Carson argued that public health and the environment, human
and natural environments, were inseparable. Her insistence that expertise had to
be democratically grounded—that pesticide impacts were a public issue, not a
technical issue decided in expert arenas often subject to industry influence—
anticipated later debates about the absence of the public’s role in determining
risk and in making choices about hazardous technologies. Carson’s powerful
writing style wedded a dispassionate presentation of the research with an evocative description of natural and human environments under siege from a science
and a technology that had “armed itself with the most modern and terrible
weapons.” This technology, she declared, was being turned “not just against the
insects [but] against the earth” itself. Such writing aimed not simply to present
but to convince. The mission of Silent Spring became nothing less than an
attempt to create a new environmental consciousness.6
To a great extent, this indomitable nature writer was successful in her task. First
published as a three-part series in The New Yorker, Silent Spring generated enormous
interest and controversy even prior to its publication in book form. One pesticide
manufacturer, the Veliscol Corporation, even attempted to prevent the book’s publication by threatening a lawsuit against the publisher. Carson’s attack against the
chemical industry, Veliscol’s corporate counsel wrote her publisher, sought “to create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral” and was designed
“to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of
western Europe, so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-curtain parity.”
The Veliscol lawyer concluded that “many innocent groups are financed and led into
attacks on the chemical industry by these sinister parties.”7
Though the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, decided to proceed with the book’s
publication after bringing in an outside toxicologist to review Carson’s material,
the attacks against the book only increased in number after the book was published. These attacks, voiced by book reviewers, scientists, consultants and other
pesticide “experts,” and most prominently the chemical industry, were often bitter and sharp. Anticommunist innuendos were accompanied by hostile references
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to the sex of the author, ranging from suggestions of lesbianism to assertions that
a woman was incapable of mastering as scientific and technical a subject as pesticides. Carson was accused of inaccuracies and bias and of being “hysterically
overemphatic,” while allusions were made to her presumed “mystical attachment
to the balance of nature.” A reviewer for Chemical and Engineering News asserted
that her “ignorance or bias” threw doubt on her “competence to judge policy.”8
Edwin Diamond, a Newsweek senior editor and its former science editor, complained that “thanks to a woman named Rachel Carson, a big fuss has been stirred
up to scare the American public out of its wits.” Diamond then likened Carson’s
book and the public concerns it generated to the “paranoid fears” of “such cultists
as the anti-fluoridation leaguers, the organic-garden faddists, and other beyondthe-fringe groups.” One favorable reviewer reported how Carson had been compared to “a priestess of nature, a bird, cat, or fish lover, and a devotee of some
mystical cult having to do with the law of the Universe to which critics obviously
consider themselves immune.”9
The author’s thesis about reducing pesticide use was deemed controversial
even among members of conservationist groups. In letters to the Sierra Club
Bulletin, several club members employed by the agrichemical industry complained that a favorable review of Silent Spring in the publication did not bode
well “for the future of the Sierra Club as a leading influential force in furthering
objectives of conservation.” The Bulletin editor, Bruce Kilgore, defended the
review while acknowledging that “some members of the Club would disagree”
since the book’s subject matter was controversial within the club.10 Privately,
David Brower complained that some of the club’s board members, including
those tied to the chemical industry, were skeptical of Silent Spring.11
The period following the release of the book was a difficult and tempestuous
time for the shy and reserved nature writer, who was also going through a debilitating bout with the cancer that caused her death eighteen months after Silent
Spring’s publication. The book received enormous attention from politicians and
policy makers as well as scientists and had a wide and passionate following among
the public. In the process, Carson became an imposing figure in her own right. She
strongly countered her critics by continuing to elaborate the key elements of her
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argument: that science and specialized technical knowledge had been divorced
from any larger policy framework or public input; that science could be purchased
and thus corrupted; that the rise of pesticides was indicative of “an era dominated
by industry, in which the right to make money, at whatever cost to others, is seldom challenged”;12 and that the pesticide problem revealed how hazardous technologies could pollute both natural and human environments. Carson saw these
environments as interrelated ecological systems, an analysis she had hoped to refine
in the book she was never able to complete. Recognizing that some threats to the
environment could be traced to an earlier period of industrialization, Carson still
emphasized how many environmental hazards had first been introduced in the
post–World War II period. Thus, while an earlier critic of the chemical industry,
Alice Hamilton, laid the groundwork for discussing environmental themes in an
urban-industrial context, Rachel Carson, with her evocative cry in Silent Spring
against the silencing of the “robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other
bird voices,” brought to the fore questions about the urban and industrial order
that a new environmentalism prepared to face.
g e r m i nat i n g i d e a s : mu r r ay b o o kch i n ,
pau l g o o d m a n , a n d h e r b e rt m a rc u s e
While the publication of Silent Spring was greeted with anticipation and controversy, other lesser-known critics of the postwar order were laying the intellectual seeds for a new kind of environmental approach to be embraced by the
new kinds of social movements of the 1960s. During the early 1960s, diverse
social theorists, ranging from social critic and author Paul Goodman to German
philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin, developed a small but intense audience of students, intellectuals, and activists who
sought to challenge what Marcuse called the “advanced industrial society.” While
addressing a wide assortment of topics, few of which were directly tied to the
themes of the management or protection of Nature, they nevertheless focused
on certain core issues of production, consumption, and urban growth that would
become central to contemporary environmentalism.
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One of the most developed environmental critiques of the advanced industrial society, which both paralleled and contrasted with the arguments of Rachel
Carson, was put forth by Murray Bookchin. Writing under the pseudonym of
Lewis Herber, Bookchin, in books, essays, and pamphlets he wrote during the
1950s and 1960s, sought to examine the new environmental problems of the
postwar years. These included most prominently “new methods of food production, urban expansion, and the haphazard disposal of harmful waste materials.”13 Though Bookchin failed to attract the attention that Carson’s writings
had received, he still became an influential figure despite his limited audience
and relative public obscurity.
Bookchin first explored the environmental questions of postwar science and
technology by analyzing the issue of chemical additives in food products.
Stimulated by congressional hearings on the subject during the early 1950s,
Bookchin’s essay “The Problems of Chemicals in Food” established a long-standing research interest in petrochemical technologies, the focus of his first major
environmental work, Our Synthetic Environment. Published in 1962, this book surveyed the new kinds of postwar environmental hazards. It sought to demonstrate
that while earlier public health problems, such as infectious diseases, had largely
been alleviated, new kinds of environmentally related public health concerns,
including chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer, had also emerged in
the postwar era. These health hazards, Bookchin argued in his book, represented
problems of “human ecology.” The development of a “synthetic environment,”
defined in terms of the restructuring of agriculture, the annual introduction of
hundreds of new chemicals onto the market, the ominous rise of nuclear energy
and nuclear military weaponry, and the rapid escalation of pollution and waste
disposal concerns raised the spectre of what Bookchin called “human biological
warfare.” “The needs of industrial plants are being placed before man’s need for
clean air” while the disposal of industrial wastes gains priority over the community’s need for clean water, Bookchin declared, and the most “pernicious laws of
the market place are given precedence over the most compelling laws of biology.”14
Three years later, in 1965, Bookchin/Herber published The Crisis of the Cities,
in which he continued to draw on public health imagery to develop his critique
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of the postwar order. In this book, issues of air and water pollution and problems of hazardous and radioactive wastes were linked to daily stress and routinized and unrewarding work and consumption. But the environmental issue
for Bookchin was preeminently an urban issue. Pollution had become “the bane
of modern urban life,” with the city both a source and object of the pollution.
“The ecological burden the [modern] bourgeois city places on the natural environment is staggering,” Bookchin later wrote. The city’s continuing growth
“spreads over the countryside like a rampant cancer and destroys waterways and
masses of land whose preservation may well provide the indispensable agricultural margin of survival for humanity in the ages that lie ahead.”15
Drawing significantly on the analysis of regionalists such as Lewis Mumford,
Bookchin argued that the carrying capacity of the contemporary city had
reached its limits. Pollution and uncontrolled growth pushed the antagonism
between the land and the city to its breaking point. However, changes in technology that allowed for sustainable production had also created a “remarkable
opportunity for bringing land and city into a rational and ecological synthesis.”16
These utopian breakthroughs were particularly noteworthy in the area of
energy technologies. Writing several years before the energy crisis of the 1970s
and the renewed interest in alternative energy sources, Bookchin imagined a
future in which solar power (including photovoltaics), wind energy, and tidal
power could provide the basis of a “lasting industrial civilization.” These resources were “economically inexhaustible and harmless to public health.” The
contemporary city, on the other hand, had become dependent on fossil fuels and,
increasingly, the centralized nuclear power plant, which reinforced the “existing
trend toward urban gigantism.” In contrast, Bookchin’s alternative energy technologies could be “tailored to the characteristics and resources of a region,” especially more decentralized, smaller cities dispersed throughout the nation. Thus,
the ecological argument about alternative technologies also became an argument
for creating new kinds of humanly scaled communities.17
Bookchin’s critique of the modern city and its relation to pollution paralleled the
social criticism of New York intellectual Paul Goodman. A prolific writer of more
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than two dozen books of fiction and social and literary criticism, Goodman was
a classic essayist who covered a wide variety of subjects, including urbanism and
technology, sociology and psychology, education, literature, aesthetics, and
ethics. Most of his books were written in the 1950s and 1960s, when academic
specialization and narrowly defined technical expertise dominated both the sciences and social sciences. Goodman was frequently criticized as spreading himself too thin, a superficial generalist who allowed his radical, anarchist politics
and utopian inclinations to cancel out any practical influence he might have otherwise had. Yet Goodman was able to gain an audience among disaffected students and other activists that coalesced into what began to be called the New Left.
Goodman became, in his own words, an “Angry Middle-Aged Man,” a utopian
and critical thinker who had become “disappointed but not resigned” to the realities of the postwar urban and industrial order.18
Goodman’s influence first emerged during the late 1940s with the publication of Communitas, a short, discursive text written with his brother Percival, a
professor of architecture at Columbia University. This curious book included the
authors’ own hand drawings, trenchant and at times sardonic criticism of what
they called the “American Way of Life,” and commentary on such issues as urban
and transportation planning as well as work and consumption-related qualityof-life concerns. Although receiving only modest attention when published in
1947, the book’s influence grew over time. Reissued in 1960 with new material
by the authors and a cover quote from Lewis Mumford calling it “a fresh and
original contribution to the art of building cities,” Communitas would become
an influential essay of the 1960s, offering a different framework for addressing
the urban environment.19
For the Goodmans, the core of their analysis was the criticism of the “ways
of work and leisure.” “Leisure does not revive us; the conditions of work are
unmanly,” they wrote, defining the system of distribution as “huckstering” and
the system of production as one that “discourages enterprise and sabotages
invention.” Contemporary cities undermined any “organic relation of work, living, and play.” Instead, cities had become “department stores,” where the mass
production of goods and changing fads and styles made consumption preemi-
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nent, while its physical and psychological separation from production activities
reduced any possibility of “work becoming a way of life.”20
The design of cities reinforced such separation. The approach toward traffic
congestion, the Goodmans pointed out, was simply to build farther out, away
from the center and the congestion. That approach only created “a parallel system that builds up new neighborhoods and redoubles the transit congestion,
[while] no effort is made to analyze the kinds and conditions of work so that
people commute less.” Ultimately, an auto-industrial complex of marketing, servicing, and highway construction ends up transforming “the entire environment
in unforeseen ways” by “dictating a whole way of life.”21
This transformation was particularly unsettling, given earlier hopes that
automotive technology could be liberating, as the Regional Planning Association
of America (RPAA) and garden city advocates such as Patrick Geddes and Benton
MacKaye had once believed. The problems of automotive technology, in fact,
demonstrated how technology, in its “immodest” and intrusive forms, and science, as the “chief orthodoxy of modern times,” negatively impacted the environment. Writing in the late 1960s, at the height of New Left activism, Goodman
warned that technologists financed by big corporations “rush into production
with neat solutions that swamp the environment. This applies to packaging
products and disposing of garbage, to freeways that bulldoze neighborhoods,
high-rises that destroy landscape, wiping out a species for a passing fashion, strip
mining, scrapping an expensive machine rather than making a minor repair,
draining a watershed for irrigation because (as in Southern California) the cultivable land has been covered by asphalt. Given this disposition, it is not surprising that we defoliate a forest in order to expose a guerilla and spray tear gas
from a helicopter on a crowded campus.”22
In contrast to these urban social and environmental realities, Goodman offered
his utopian, though (as he defined it) eminently practical, alternatives. He advocated a banning of automobiles from Manhattan; a design for tackling the pollution of New York’s waterfront and constructing a garden city within the inner city
for work, play, and recreation; ideas about decentralizing urban functions, such
as neighborhood control of grade schools; reducing commuting distances between
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work and home; and several other apparently quixotic, but often incisive, concepts.
Given the deadly routine that Americans had sunk into, the “mere possibility of an
alternative,” Goodman proclaimed, “is a glorious thing.” A popular, inspiring figure for the new activists for his unabashed “practical utopianism,” Goodman anticipated and gave substance to a politics of the imagination. His was an effort to
reinvent possibility at a time when the system, despite its unaddressed social problems and environmental externalities, appeared so confident and contained.23
The critique of this closed system was especially popularized by the German-born
theoretician Herbert Marcuse, who became a kind of underground intellectual hero
to New Left activists. Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse became part of the renowned
Frankfurt School that had begun at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and
reestablished itself at Columbia University after the Nazis had come to power in
Germany. Though participants in the Frankfurt School differed in their contributions to what was called “critical theory,” the group came to represent the effort to
revise Marxist theory regarding the contemporary urban and industrial order while
remaining true to a kind of Marxian spirit of method and inquiry.
Until 1964 and the publication of Marcuse’s best-known and most popular
book, One-Dimensional Man, this one-time Frankfurt School theoretician and
Brandeis University professor had been a relatively obscure neo-Marxist theoretician. Interest in his three previous works—Reason and Revolution (an attempt
to root critical theory in Hegelian and Marxist traditions), Eros and Civilization
(a synthesis of Freudian and Marxist approaches), and Soviet Marxism (a neoMarxist critique of the Soviet Union)—had been limited to academic and
Marxian intellectual circles. The rapid and unanticipated popularity of OneDimensional Man, published when Marcuse was already sixty-six years old,
quickly changed that. Within a few short years, Marcuse would become a controversial figure in academic free speech and academic employment issues at
both Brandeis and the University of California at San Diego, where he subsequently taught. Transformed into an international intellectual celebrity, his
detractors scornfully characterized him as a “guru of the student rebels” and a
fomentor of revolutionary change in the United States and Europe.24
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At first glance, One-Dimensional Man seems an unlikely book to have
achieved the influence it did. The language is awkward, the conceptual framework largely alien to an American audience, and the theoretical conclusions substantially pessimistic. Yet One-Dimensional Man struck a chord among the new
activists, who saw his indictment of the role of technology and “the manipulation of needs by vested interests” as laying the basis for their own call to action.25
Marcuse’s analysis, similar to Murray Bookchin and Paul Goodman’s essays,
situated advanced industrial society as no longer primarily defined by scarcity
constraints. Such a society was now shaped by what Bookchin called “conditions
of post-scarcity.” The dangers of such a system, Marcuse argued, reside in its
capacity to achieve the “peaceful production of the means of destruction,” such
as nuclear weaponry, “the perfection of waste,” and a “quantification of nature,”
while simultaneously becoming “richer, bigger, and better” as it perpetuates such
dangers. This militarized, waste-oriented economy, Marcuse states in the opening passages of One-Dimensional Man, “makes life easier for a greater number of
people and extends man’s mastery over nature.” Science and technology become
essential to this structure since “the industrial society which makes technology
and science its own is organized for the ever-more-effective domination of man
and nature, for the ever-more-effective utilization of its resources.” The domination of Nature is thus inexorably linked to the domination of man, a link that
“tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole.”26
The post-scarcity society is also a consumer society with manufactured needs
driving both production and individual consumer choices. For Marcuse, the
manipulated desire to possess things becomes a kind of biological need, a “second nature of man.” These things, or products, promote “a false consciousness
which is immune against its falsehood,” producing a way of life based on what
Marcuse calls “one-dimensional thought and behavior.”27
This intensely pessimistic analysis prevails in much of Marcuse’s writings. His
argument, he suggests, poses a choice between two contradictory hypotheses: the
ability of the advanced industrial society to contain or suppress qualitative change
for the foreseeable future, in contrast with the presence of forces and tendencies
with the capacity to “break this containment and explode the society.” Fearful of
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the staying power of the forces of suppression embedded in a one-dimensional
society, Marcuse ends his book with a poignant quote from Walter Benjamin, the
great German Jewish social and cultural critic and theoretician. Benjamin, at the
onset of the fascist era (and before his own death by suicide while attempting to
escape from the Nazi takeover of France), wrote, “It is only for the sake of those
without hope that hope is given to us.”28
The early 1960s themes of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Murray
Bookchin—the critique of the consumer society and its related way of life, the
prominence of science and technology in establishing such a system, and the system’s new forms of domination of both human society and Nature—paralleled
the new forms of protest and social action that swept college campuses during
the mid- and late 1960s. Each of these writers became participants in his own
right in these upheavals: Goodman, the anarchist/utopian and pacifist, through
his association with such publications and groups as Liberation magazine and
the Institute for Policy Studies; Marcuse through his celebrated role as New Left
theoretician and his informal ties with U.S. and German radical student groups;
and Bookchin as a champion of New Left spontaneity and decentralist action
through affinity groups (small, direct-action-oriented associations of friends)
and social ecology groups (anarchist-oriented radical environmental groups).
The much discussed pessimism of these writers, especially Goodman and
Marcuse, became a challenge for the new movements. Activists embraced these
intellectual forerunners to disprove their pessimistic conclusions about the
“American Way of Life” and thus underline their utopian insights. At the center
of such utopian notions stood the powerful idea that in a post-scarcity society
everything is possible, even if realizing such possibilities seems distant.
t h e n e w l e f t a n d i ts u n f i n i s h e d revo lut i o n
“We are people of this generation,” The Port Huron Statement began, “bred in at
least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the
world we inherit.”“Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last gen-
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eration in the experiment with living,” the document continued, asserting that
“we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that
there is no viable alternative to the present . . . that our times have witnessed the
exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.”29
This sense of urgency, tied to a search for new values and utopian possibilities, was the organizational motif for one of the most significant New Left
groups, the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. The Port Huron Statement,
its 1962 manifesto, linked that urgency to two movements of the late 1950s and
early 1960s: the antinuclear/Cold War–related protests and the civil rights movement. Both the nuclear realities of the Cold War and the institutionalized racism
of the postwar society provided an important focus motivating students and others to action.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a powerful antinuclear movement
emerged in the industrial countries, particularly the United States and Great
Britain. Increasingly, these movements mobilized around a key environmental
issue tied to the Cold War: radioactive nuclear emissions and fallout associated
with above-ground nuclear weapons testing programs. The growing concerns
about radioactive products such as strontium 90 and iodine 131, intensified by
the adamant refusal of government agencies to admit that any risks were associated with radiation exposure, fueled the protest movement. This movement
included many college and, more strikingly, high school students, at a time when
student apathy was defined as the dominant mood on campuses. By focusing on
environmental impacts and dismissing the incessant ideological messages of the
Cold War, the protesters raised the possibility of a new politics that opposed both
sides of the Cold War equally for their nuclear testing.30
The civil rights movement also shaped the protest movements of the decade.
Civil rights protesters challenged conditions of discrimination and poverty,
related to the system’s failure to make the “American Way of Life” available to all.
Their use of nonviolence and civil disobedience contrasted graphically with the
violent response of southern authorities and the vacillating role of the federal
government. The organizing approach of students and other young activists
within the civil rights movement—many closely identified with the emerging
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New Left—was tied to the hopes of creating an alternative way of life free of
racism, a living example of what some movement activists called the “beloved
community.” This concept of a new way of life, which eventually influenced the
development of cooperative and communal associations, also sought to expose
the hypocrisy and the vacuousness of the “advanced industrial society” and the
jobs and careers for which college students were trained and socialized. The high
intensity of the civil rights experience, with its dangers and new values, heightened this distinctive search for a new kind of “vision and program in campus and
community across the country,” as The Port Huron Statement put it.31
Eventually the nuclear testing issue faded, particularly after the signing of
the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, which eliminated above-ground nuclear testing.32 The
evolving civil rights movement, however, continued to gain momentum as it
began to force whites to confront its issues in their own communities. Protest
movements expanded to include other issues, particularly the war in Vietnam,
reinforcing the momentum toward the creation of a New Left. The university
especially became the focus of protest. At the Berkeley campus of the University
of California, the Free Speech Movement, one of the largest and most dynamic
of the early student protest groups, highlighted the budding New Left’s critique
of the university’s role as caretaker and training ground for students. Although
the movement arose over free speech, many of the movement’s leaders, veterans of civil rights campaigns in the South and eager to introduce their sense of
urgency and search for community into the university setting, sought to raise
larger issues about the nature of the university system itself. Drawing on UC
Berkeley president Clark Kerr’s analysis of the “multiversity” and the “knowledge industry” and the blurring of the distinctions among the large research
universities, the federal government (particularly the Department of Defense),
and major new technology industries, the Free Speech Movement lashed out
at the socialization and training directed at students. In movement leader
Mario Savio’s memorable words, students were no longer willing to be cogs in
the machine, part of “the factory that turns out a certain product needed by
industry or government.”33 Student action itself became liberating, not only by
forcing confrontation concerning the definition of the university, but by sug-
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gesting an alternative mode of living and working and engaging in politics on
and off campus.
While primarily based on campuses, New Left groups also began to organize
within client-based professions and institutions such as those in secondary education, health, welfare, and planning. Similarly, New Leftists sought to address
what were being called quality-of-life issues. These were reflected in rock music
and guerrilla theater, which rejected dominant lifestyle choices regarding work,
consumption, family, and (the absence of) community; through films such as
The Graduate, which also scorned this dominant lifestyle;34 and in the language
of student protesters, who chanted at their demonstrations, “Go to school, get a
job, get ahead, kill,” linking lifestyle choices to the end point of the escalating
Vietnam War. A new focus on the urban and industrial environment, or the
“Daily Smog Smear” as one New Left tract called it, also emerged. For New
Leftists, “technological progress” came to mean “urban sprawl, air pollution,
smog, traffic, noise, and unpredictable changes in the job market.” Two New Left
analysts wrote in a working paper for a “Vocations for Radicals” conference in
March 1968 that “the middle class controls very little that matters—not the conditions or purposes of their work, the myths that pour into their living room
every night, the environment they live in. The sense of being manipulated and
harassed, the sense of failure is a quiet, daily, muffled thing.”35 Movement protest
was thus largely couched in a critique of daily life addressing both values and
institutional change, with environment (referring to both daily environment as
well as the natural environment) an increasingly central focus.
Though the environmental issue tended to be subsumed under the broader
quality-of-life concern during the mid- and late 1960s, a series of dramatic
episodes, including the 1965 power blackout and garbage strikes of New York City,
the 1969 burning of the Cuyahoga River along the industrial sections of Cleveland,
and most visibly the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, highlighted for the New Left the
darker side of a technologically centered, presumably post-scarcity system. This
dark side was most harshly revealed by the war in Vietnam, where the technologies that killed people and destroyed the environment became a potent symbol of
advanced industrial society. The enormity of the environmental consequences and
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hazards of the Vietnam War already emerged as an issue by the mid-1960s, as companies such as Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm, became frequent targets of campus protesters. The term ecocide began to be used in describing U.S.
policy, anticipating later concerns about regional and global environmental catastrophes. Even the American Association for the Advancement of Science, influenced by its younger, New Left–oriented members, adopted a resolution criticizing
the use of herbicides in the war. That issue became most controversial when related
to the health concerns of U.S. troops in Vietnam.36
By the late 1960s, a New Left environmentalist position began to take shape.
This position sought to identify and challenge the central responsibility of industry in generating environmental hazards (“Where There’s Pollution, There’s
Profit” was the title of one New Left pamphlet).37 Military and aerospace companies, resource-based industries (such as oil companies), new chemical producers (including pesticide manufacturers), and the automotive industry became
targets of New Left criticism and focal points for organizing. Industry’s role was
tied to the structure of economic and political power and the use of destructive
and hazardous technologies. The “deterioration of the natural environment all
around us,” one New Left environmentalist wrote in January 1970, is “clearly a
product of the nature of production and consumption, of cultural values and
social relationships that today hold sway over industrial technological society—
American or Soviet.” For New Leftists, it was crucial not to divorce ecological politics from an overall liberatory politics.38
New Leftists also sought to relate the hazards of production to pressures to
consume more, resulting in a “society of waste,” the underside of what Marcuse
called “the manipulation of needs.” Several New Left ecology collectives were
organized in the late 1960s to focus on the waste issue and were pivotal in the
formation of community-based recycling centers. These, in turn, became centers for environmental action. And while most New Left politically oriented
groups focused on industry as a source of pollution, a parallel, even more powerful undercurrent of New Left environmentalism linked the question of a
change in values to the question of the environment and the broader restructuring of society. Thus, for many in and around the New Left, environmental-
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ism came to be associated with the search for alternative institutions and a new
way of living.
By early 1970, as plans began to be formulated for the first Earth Day, a diffuse set of demonstrations and campus teach-ins scheduled for April 22, it was
clear that the New Left had already made a distinctive mark on this emerging
environmental politics. At the same time, however, New Left influence on the
new forms of environmentalism quickly began to recede. Several New Left
groups remained wary of the environmental label, associating it with issues such
as population control, wilderness protection identified as a kind of anti-urban
elitism, and personal responsibility linked to a “blame the victim” approach. The
comic-strip character Pogo’s famous statement—“We have met the enemy, and
he is us”—was popular with groups such as the Sierra Club but sharply criticized
by New Leftists, who felt it inappropriately shifted the focus away from industrial polluters. The population argument was especially disturbing to New
Leftists for its politically objectionable aspects, most notably sterilization programs criticized as a form of genocide. New Leftists were also suspicious that
population policies promoted by certain elite foundations such as the Rockefeller
Fund were designed as an antidote to Third World upheavals, caused, according to some foundations, by high birth rates among the poor. The population
agenda, New Left critics declared, was an agenda for containment.39
What most divorced the New Left from the new environmental politics was
its own precipitous decline after 1970, which undercut its ability to influence the
environmental movement at an organizational level. This decline stemmed from
external pressures, such as police harassment and manipulation, as well as
from changing social, economic, and political realities. By the early 1970s, the
New Left’s utopian and post-scarcity visions had been totally eclipsed in the wake
of inner-city riots, further militarization of the economy, economic dislocations
that transformed once prosperous regions into declining industrial belts, and a
traumatic war that divided the country in profound ways. In response to these
changes, New Left urgency turned into blatant political adventurism. Fueled by
the growing fascination with violence as a form of political action, this adventurism became the coup de grâce of the organized New Left. One faction of SDS
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became totally absorbed by this paroxysm of urgency-become-adventurism,
rejecting the possibility of locating any viable domestic agency of change within
the urban-industrial order. Similar evolutions occurred among black and Latino
movements, which also faced what had become insurmountable obstacles in
bringing about real change—including environmental change—in the patterns
of daily life in their communities. This abandonment of political and organizational possibility, occurring at a time of the New Left’s greatest potential outreach
(including the Earth Day demonstrations of 1970), not only served to disperse
this once promising movement but significantly altered the development of the
environmental movement itself. Ultimately, the post-scarcity–oriented New Left
of the 1960s, with its vision of alternative communities, its critique of daily life,
and its focus on industrial-related pollution and the problems of consumption,
represented a direction for environmentalism never fully explored.
t h e c o u n te rc u lt u re i n te r lu d e :
a s e a rch for a lter nat i ve s
Even more than its incipient and interrupted relationship with the New Left, the
new environmental politics of the 1960s became intertwined with what was
labeled the “counterculture.” This disparate collection of social movements, new
forms of cultural expression, and semireligious groups and ideas connected the
New Left critique of the consumer society and quality-of-life concerns with a
desire to go “back to the land,” or at least back to a simpler, more communal,
more natural form of social life. The roots of this counterculture can be found
in the beat movement of the late 1950s (and its appeal to live freer by dropping
out and no longer subscribing to consumption) as well as in the “beloved community” concept of the civil rights movement and its romanticization of the
rural, black South. Its approaches had more to do with its “alienation from much
in the standard American culture, including its political system,” as one counterculture analyst put it, than as consciously designed strategies for social renewal
and transformation. Still, however diffuse and reactive its various expressions,
the counterculture directly influenced a wide variety of social experiments and
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ideas and helped reaffirm the notion that environmentalism was also about constructing alternatives.40
The search for alternative forms or alternative institutions related directly
to the New Left and counterculture’s unresolved debate about whether to change
society or, instead, change oneself. The debate, essentially about the locus of
social transformation, persisted through much of the decade, despite efforts to
resolve or transcend it. As early as 1965, the beginnings of a division appeared
within SDS between advocates of personal and political liberation. This created
an organizational tension that the SDS leadership sought to resolve by arguing
that “our movement must encompass both sets of orientations.”41 The feminist
movement’s proclamation that “the personal is political” also only partially
addressed such distinctions. Over time, these divisions led to an increasing separation between the two kinds of movements. In that context, the insistence by
blacks in the civil rights movement that whites organize their own communities led to a division among the white activists about how to organize in their
communities: whether to advocate for social change or instead to demonstrate
how one could live differently, more alternatively, no longer dependent on dominant institutions.
By 1965, the pursuit of alternative lifestyles and alternative institutions began
to take shape in concrete form. That year, for example, the Free University of New
York (FUNY) was founded, to establish a model for new forms of teaching and
learning. FUNY attracted both political organizers and “cultural revolutionaries,” as many of the Free University participants called themselves. Such free
schools were complemented by alternative publishing ventures, including underground papers and printing collectives; alternative or “free” medical clinics; retail
food cooperatives, or “food conspiracies” as they were then called; and a range
of other alternative institutions. Many were listed in alternative Yellow Pages or
catalogues and publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth
News, which reached audiences of as many as 1 million readers.42
The underground press, which included at its height in 1969 as many as 500
papers reaching more than 4.5 million readers, was especially significant in establishing sources of alternative information—including information not being
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reported, or reported differently, in the established press—and as a framework
for new ideas and action. A number of these papers, including The Old Mole in
Boston, Dock of the Bay in San Francisco, the Rat in New York City, and Great
Speckled Bird in Atlanta, sought to address political issues, such as the Vietnam
War, student protests, the black power movement, and inner-city issues. But by
1967 and 1968, a number of the underground papers, led by the Berkeley Barb,
the East Village Other, and even more political papers such as the Rat and
Quicksilver Times in Washington, D.C., came to focus on cultural and personal
liberation issues as well. For these papers, personal liberation increasingly came
to be defined as a “green” activity, a term beginning to be associated with the
counterculture. With a growing interest in organic gardening and food growing,
urban and rural communal living, and back-to-the-land activities, the underground press contributed significantly to popularizing ecology concepts within
both the counterculture and the New Left.43
One of the columnists for the Rat, for example, declared in 1969 that “revolutionaries must begin to think in ecological terms,” and that “an attack against
environmental destruction is an attack on the structures of control and the
mechanisms of power within a society.” Several underground papers carried an
underground syndicated ecology column written by former Yippie activist Keith
Lampe, who called for a transition to a “broader, ecologically-oriented radicalism.” Drawing on tribal imagery and the romanticization of Native American
culture (and ecological practices) popular with both the counterculture and the
New Left, the underground press became champions of a new ecological consciousness and related way of life. The Revolution, many of the papers began to
proclaim, would be an Earth Happening.44
The interest in ecology within the counterculture was also reinforced by the
rapid development in the late 1960s of communal living experiments in urban
and rural areas as political and cultural events reached a crescendo. A January
1967 “be-in” in San Francisco involving tens of thousands of young people was
followed by similar events in New York, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities.
These events, or “happenings,” were less an articulation of an oppositional culture (let alone an oppositional politics) than an expression of an often unfocused
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search for new values and a different posture with respect to the dominant institutions of society. Whether that expression took the form of budding alternative
institutions, self-help groups such as the Diggers (who helped establish support
systems in “dropout” neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury), psychedelic drug advocacy and use, or communal living experiments, it still failed
to cohere into organized action or consistent ideas to guide such action.
Although the counterculture generated enormous interest, including several
books and articles seeking to define and/or celebrate it, most failed to account
for the transient nature of the movement. Hugely popular books such as Charles
Reich’s The Greening of America announced a new, revolutionary form of consciousness, and even more thoughtful and insightful studies, such as Theodore
Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, spoke of the search by young people
for a “stance of life which seeks not simply to muster power against the misdeeds
of society, but to transform the very sense men have of reality.” But these books
failed to extend their critique of the “technocratic society” of which Roszak spoke
to include an analysis of the structure, direction, and future of the counterculture in an increasingly polarized and divided society.45
The established media especially helped to perpetuate and fall victim to
myths about the counterculture. The 1967 “Summer of Love” in the HaightAshbury, for example, following on the heels of be-in celebrations and other
counterculture events such as free rock concerts, also became a media happening, one of the first to sensationalize the youth culture for its sex, drugs, and generational rebelliousness.46 While the media hype served as a magnet drawing
young people to the Haight (as well as to places such as New York City’s Lower
East Side), it also brought about a counterreaction from the police, local business and political leaders, and law-and-order–oriented working-class and
middle-class constituencies. Thus, reaction to the events of the summer of 1967
eventually caused a breakdown in the existing self-help support networks. Places
such as the Haight were turned into tiny war zones, forcing the counterculture,
like the New Left, into heightened rhetoric and more desperate actions.
Despite this polarization between “straight” society and the alternative groups,
the counterculture continued to grow in size and influence during the late 1960s,
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at times in conflict and at times intersecting with the New Left. On New York’s
Lower East Side, for example, a new group called the Motherfuckers (after a poem,
“Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker,” by the black poet Amira Baraka, formerly
Leroi Jones) combined both counterculture and New Left approaches. One of the
group’s most celebrated actions occurred during a 1967–68 garbage strike in New
York City, when its members attempted to transfer bagfuls of the offensive trash
(which was creating an environmental nightmare and public health hazard in poor
areas such as the Lower East Side) to Lincoln Center, a performing arts center catering to the upper and middle classes. It was at Lincoln Center, the Motherfuckers
declared, that “the trash really belongs.”47
Groups such as the Motherfuckers and their more visible counterpart, the
Yippies (founded and led by former civil rights participant and later environmental activist Abbie Hoffman), were central to the counterculture’s entry into
organized political action. Though much of this politics remained focused on
issues such as the Vietnam War and racism, the question of the environment
loomed increasingly large by the end of the decade. Events such as the Columbia
University sit-ins (organized initially to protest the conversion of park land in a
neighboring black community into a university gymnasium), the massive
upheaval led by students and young working-class protesters in Paris in May
1968, and especially the People’s Park protests (to prevent the bulldozing of a
spontaneous community garden to make way for a university parking lot) in
Berkeley in 1969 could be seen as “green” events in their symbolism, imagery,
and objectives. The language of the counterculture’s events and activities, from
be-ins and rock concerts to new alternative institutions such as food coops, also
drew heavily on Nature associations. Former beat poet Gary Snyder, one of the
preeminent cultural figures and ideologues of the counterculture, called this language “earth house hold” to describe “the type of new society emerging within
the industrial nations.”48
The events of People’s Park are especially suggestive of how environmental
themes emerged in this period. People’s Park was created by the seizure of a
vacant Berkeley lot owned by the University of California. Hundreds of young
people planted seeds, trees, and sod and constructed a swing set, tables, and
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benches. The land was declared “liberated” for the environment. The creation of
People’s Park became noteworthy as an act of defiance against a dominant institution and for its pursuit of the idea of environmental transformation. Some participants anticipated a violent response by police at the behest of university
authorities: acts of “liberation,” as the events of the late 1960s revealed, were
invariably becoming acts of confrontation. But for many of these premature
environmental activists, the establishment of a liberated environmental zone was
itself a guide to future environmental action and transformation. It produced
what New Left activist Todd Gitlin suggestively called a “conspiracy of the soil.”
At a teach-in on the issue, the local New Left–oriented teachers’ union produced
a pamphlet that linked the events at People’s Park to “questions about the quality of our lives, about the deterioration of our environment, and about the propriety and legitimacy of the uses to which we put our land.” Gary Snyder, who
also made his presence felt during the unfolding of the events, termed People’s
Park a guerrilla strike on behalf of the “non-negotiable demands of the Earth”
and argued that trees were like other exploited minorities, such as blacks,
Vietnamese, and hippies.49
For the authorities, however, including Governor Ronald Reagan, People’s
Park was simply a matter of sixties rebellion. The issue of whether to build a
parking lot for the university or create a “green” zone became incidental to the
rebellion itself. Reagan’s mobilization of the National Guard seemed to lead inexorably to that much-feared yet anticipated confrontation, with hundreds injured
and a former student killed by a police tear-gas canister. This act of environmental liberation, like so much of the protest activity then occurring, appeared
to be just one more example of the denouement of the sixties.
The year of the People’s Park events, 1969, seemed to herald that explosion of
society that Marcuse had foreseen. This was happening not as political transformation and renewal but as confrontation, violence, and, for the counterculture,
turning inward toward alternative forms. Thus, one consequence of the collapse
of the New Left was the emergence of thousands of urban and rural communes
organized during 1969 and the months that followed. In December 1970, the New
York Times suggested that as many as 2000 communes had been established in
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thirty-four states, while other estimates, including those by the underground press,
sympathetic writers, and actual participants, indicated far greater numbers. The
New Yorker, for example, put the number of urban communes in New York City
alone at more than 1000. These were likely to have been conservative numbers,
given the difficulty of determining what constituted a commune. The problem of
identification was further compounded by the lack of organized networking and
the desire of many communal participants to drop out quietly in order to escape
the tensions of a society that seemed at the breaking point.50
Communes became both the symbol for and direct representation of the
counterculture’s search for an alternative form within an environmental or
Nature-related framework. Though some communes were organized by activity
or task, such as the group that compiled and published the Vocations for Change
directory of alternative institutions and services, most communes served as cultural and environmental way stations. They were places where new values would
hopefully emerge, in settings removed from dominant institutions. Yet these values and alternative living arrangements were not tested, for the most part, in any
sustained way; they were ad hoc experiments rather than strategically defined
alternatives. The communes, especially those in rural areas, were also not organized to challenge the existing urban and industrial order, even though they frequently clashed with local interests and became subject to economic pressures
in terms of their survival. Ultimately, most participants in the communes were
just passing through. They left their communes (and participation in the counterculture) not to make a transition back to a middle-class lifestyle, as many in
the media suggested would inevitably happen, but to escape the force of events
and the pressures and reaction of a society that had left no space for alternatives,
no room for a new movement to emerge.
In September 1967, Paul Goodman wrote a science fiction essay, “The Diggers in
1984,” for the New Left–oriented journal Ramparts. Drawing on anarchist and
utopian imagery, Goodman presented a scenario of convulsion and change centered around a prototypical counterculture group he called the Diggers. Looking
back from 1984, the narrator recalls the “Summer of Seven Plagues,” when a tran-
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sit strike led to permanent gridlock, air pollution episodes left thousands dead,
power failures blackened the city, a breakdown in the water system left millions
incapacitated to deal with a drought, the maiden voyage of an SST plunged into
skyscrapers, and, finally, a great riot took place, stemming from the conditions
of the city.
Out of those events a “rural reconstruction movement” had emerged. There
were migrations to the countryside in the form of “be-ins out in the sticks with
transportation provided by the CIA” to get young radicals out of the hair of the
establishment. This led to the construction of rural communes. These had the
blessing of liberal social engineers, who felt the trek to these “rural reservations”
could solve “the young radical problem” much the way the Indian problem had
been solved several generations earlier. But the Digger-led communards persisted
in their ecological activism, seeking to clean the rivers, eliminate the use of insecticides, and stop the despoiling of the land. Now, in 1984, this migration, which
had continued to grow during the 1970s, was threatening to become a flood of
refugees. The crises that had precipitated the migrations had included several
accidental nuclear explosions, such as the one that leveled the city of Akron,
Ohio, blasting and poisoning 2 million people. Those refugees who had settled
in the countryside in places such as Vermont had at least been able to develop
“a rudimentary structure of community” compared to the urban society whose
entire fabric was in shreds. Bracing for the influx of those preparing to flee the
cities, the narrator wonders whether now, at last, peace will be possible and a new
environmental consciousness established, or whether everyone will end up mad,
casualties of the final breakdown of the urban and industrial order.51
Goodman’s tale—a sardonic, utopian (and dystopian) vision that revealed
his complex feelings about where the New Left and especially the counterculture
might be heading—seems oddly prescient today. It is also a cautionary tale in
what it says and fails to say about the future of those movements. A few of the
communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s did survive, and other, one-time
counterculture members settled in places such as Vermont and Oregon, influencing the political and cultural dynamics of those states. But most of the communes and much of the counterculture dissipated during the 1970s and 1980s,
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absorbed into commercialized “New Age” settings or filtered through dominant
institutions in limited, largely unchallenging ways. Despite those outcomes, both
the New Left and the counterculture left important marks on the public discourse. For the counterculture, one crucial legacy was its largely undeveloped
environmentalism: part cultural expression, part social dissatisfaction, part
search for new environmental values. The counterculture survived not so much
in the form of the “new settlements” that Paul Goodman had foreseen, but as a
relatively diffuse environmental sentiment that differed in both language and
focus from earlier movements. Representing an interlude between the old conservationism with its search for a managed or protected wilderness and a hidden
urban and industrial environmentalism that had not fully cohered into an organized movement, the counterculture, along with the New Left, served as a transition to a new environmental politics in which the question of Nature could no
longer be separated from the question of society itself.
e a rt h day 1 97 0 : b e t we e n t wo e r a s
Earth Day started out, rather inauspiciously, as an idea for a teach-in, drawing
on one of the early tactics of the New Left and anti–Vietnam War movements.
It was an idea directly tied to the enormous surge of interest in quality-of-life
and environmental issues in the late 1960s. This interest had influenced the
development of new policy initiatives in the form of proposed pollution control
legislation and discussions about how to craft an environmental policy on a
national level. While these policies were designed to deal with such growing
problems as air pollution and solid waste disposal, they were also directed at an
impatient, emerging activism that some in the press began to call the new environmentalism or “eco-activism.”52 In Congress, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson
and Maine senator Edmund Muskie became the most visible proponents of an
environmental agenda. Nelson was the first to develop the idea for Earth Day,
proposing a “National Teach-in on the Crisis of the Environment” at a Seattle,
Washington, symposium in September 1969. Nelson argued that a teach-in
might be an appropriate forum to help crystallize this new environmental con-
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stituency while also distancing it from more radical New Left and counterculture activists. The environmental crisis, Nelson asserted, was “the most critical
issue facing mankind,” making “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities,
and all the other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by
comparison.”53
By late 1969, as the teach-in idea began to generate interest, a new organization, the Environmental Teach-In, Inc. (which soon became Environmental
Action), was created to handle the numerous inquiries about the event coming
into Nelson’s office. The preparations for the teach-in, however, still seemed overshadowed by the rapid sequence of events influencing this budding new environmentalism. With the events at People’s Park, with the alternative press issuing
its calls for a revolutionary transformation based on ecological principles, and
with several dozen new Ecology Action groups establishing centers, drawing up
manifestos, holding demonstrations, and planning for direct action, the new
environmentalism continued to be seen as an extension of the sixties movements.
More moderate campus environmental groups were also active, pursuing letterwriting campaigns, conducting guerrilla theater–like actions, such as Berkeley’s
“Smog-free Locomotion Day,” and undertaking their own teach-ins in advance
of the national action planned for April 22, 1970. It was toward these more moderate activists that the Earth Day organization directed its efforts.
While the teach-in idea quickly began to take root, the actual planning for
the proposed Earth Day, as the April 22 events came to be known, remained limited in scope. “Once I announced the teach-in,” Nelson recalled, “it began to be
carried by its own momentum. If we had actually been responsible for making
the event happen, it might have taken several years and million of dollars to pull
it off. In the end, Earth Day became its own event.”54
Even as the event gathered momentum on its own accord, its definition
remained problematic. The key figure Nelson recruited to help pull off Earth Day,
twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law School student Denis Hayes, embodied the contradictory impulses associated with the event. On the one hand, Hayes assumed
the stance of an activist and radical critic of existing government and industrial
policies, not dissimilar to New Left and budding ecology action perspectives about
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the urban/industrial order. “Ecology is concerned with the total system—not just
the way it disposes of its garbage,” Hayes stated at a January press conference on
the upcoming Earth Day event. On the other hand, Hayes wanted to project a less
confrontational style and tactical approach than the New Left activists, to have the
event “involve the whole society,” as he put it at his press conference.55
As with the Vietnam Moratorium event of the previous October organized
by Sam Brown, another law student who resembled Hayes in approach and
demeanor, Hayes hoped to pull off what seemed to be an increasingly difficult
task: to criticize the system through a peaceful mass mobilization at a time when
polarization and confrontational events increasingly prevailed. “We didn’t want
to alienate the middle class; we didn’t want to lose the ‘silent majority’ just
because of style issues,” Hayes later recalled. Like the Vietnam Moratorium, after
which Earth Day was partially modeled, it was hoped that by decentralizing the
event and allowing for a wide variety of local actions, as well as by obtaining as
much official support as possible, Earth Day would somehow remove itself from
the politics of confrontation. The event, its organizers urged, needed to be as
much a celebratory as a critical happening.56
For many in the New Left, this approach to Earth Day caused concern.
Despite contrary statements by Earth Day organizers, New Leftists feared the
Earth Day events would be interpreted, as many in the media had already
begun to do, as a rejection of New Left activism and a deflection of a growing
environmental radicalism. The event was also perceived as providing a shift
in focus from the critique of the urban/industrial order and its polluters to
individual lifestyle issues. For both New Left and counterculture participants,
the effort by Earth Day organizers to seek consensus by receiving the blessing
of the press, government, and even industry seemed a betrayal of the search for
alternatives. “When conservationists argue that everyone is in the same boat
(or on the same raft), that everyone must work together, tempering their
actions to suit the imperatives of coalition,” one New Left environmentalist
wrote of the Earth Day approach, “they are in fact arguing for the further consolidation of power and profit in the hands of those responsible for the present dilemma.”57
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While New Left and counterculture groups were wary of the Earth Day organizers and their proposed action, the older conservationist and protectionist groups,
such as the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society,
also seemed hesitant about these new activists and were generally absent from
involvement in Earth Day. The characterization of a “new environmentalism” especially grated on the conservationists, who insisted on the importance of “the old
values in their own right,” as Edgar Wayburn, the Sierra Club’s vice-president, put
it. “We cannot afford to let up on the battles for old-fashioned Wilderness Areas,
for more National Parks, for preservation of forests and streams and meadows and
the earth’s beautiful wild places,”Wayburn warned.58 Some leaders also feared this
new environmental movement might be quite different than just “a relabeled
Conservation movement,” and that such a new movement might draw attention
to “approaches other than those the traditional movement has pioneered and
knows best,” such as wilderness preservation.“We can hope our willingness to learn
and to work with others will induce a spirit of cooperation rather than competition,” the Sierra Club’s Michael McCloskey said of the two movements. But
McCloskey also warned that “either a better synthesis of philosophy must develop
or hard choices will have to be made.”59
There were some exceptions to the conservationist mistrust of the Earth Day
organizers, most notably the leaders of The Wilderness Society and the
Conservation Foundation. The Wilderness Society’s executive director, Stewart
Brandborg, sympathized with and was intrigued by the Earth Day activists and
provided them with financial assistance and space in the group’s publication. The
Conservation Foundation’s executive director, Sydney Howe, one of the original
incorporators of Environmental Teach-In, Inc., was also an important sympathizer. Just a few months before April 22, Howe provided an under-the-table loan
of $20,000 for the organization at a point when it had run out of money. Fearful
that his conservative board would never sanction such a loan, Howe kept it off
the books until Gaylord Nelson, through speaking engagements, was able to
repay the money. The loan, which was never made public, also never came to the
Conservation Foundation board’s attention. Howe, an insightful but littlerecognized figure among the traditional conservationists, continued to try to
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steer his organization toward urban environmental and social justice issues, and,
for a time, succeeded in attracting staff and resources for this approach before
he was finally fired in 1973.60
What became most disconcerting to the traditional conservationists was the
intense media coverage of Earth Day and the sense of discovery, especially by the
media, that a new issue and a new movement had emerged full-blown with little apparent connection to earlier conservationist and protectionist movements.
This element of discovery was further reinforced by the increasing political significance attached to this new movement and its pollution-centered issues, most
dramatically revealed by President Richard Nixon’s State of the Union address
three months prior to Earth Day. Proclaimed “Nixon’s New Issue” by Time magazine, the president, in devoting the major portion of his speech to the environment, sought to elevate environmentalism as the new “selflessness.” The great
question of the 1970s, Nixon proclaimed, was whether “we surrender to our surroundings” or “make our peace with nature” through “reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water.” Concerned about the
political inroads made by potential presidential challenger Edmund Muskie,
Nixon sought to preempt the environmental issue by putting forth a technologycentered, pollution control approach to such concerns as water pollution,
garbage disposal, sewage discharges, and air pollution. Designing and constructing waste treatment plants was at the heart of Nixon’s new cause, with his
cleanup of water pollution to be “the most comprehensive and costly program
in America’s history.”61
Though Nixon’s policy turned out to be short on specifics and funding mechanisms, the elevation of pollution control and technology-based solutions was
especially made to appeal to Nixon’s mainstream constituency, his “silent majority.” These middle-class and working-class constituents, while hostile to the antiwar, black power, New Left, and counterculture movements, were nevertheless
concerned about the environment, as polls at the time pointed out. By visibly
identifying himself and his administration’s policy with the environmental cause
and linking those issues to the search for technology-based solutions, Nixon
explicitly sought to distinguish between the antisystem New Left and counter-
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culture activists and the consensus-seeking effort to fix the system. Nixon wanted
to be seen as a new Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican champion of efficiency
and technological improvement making peace with nature. He further cultivated
this image by inviting traditional conservationist leaders to the White House for
a pre–Earth Day meeting, which he characterized as equivalent to the May 1908
Governors’ Conference.62
Nixon’s avowed embrace of environmentalism, however, failed to convince
even the more moderate of the Earth Day activists of the sincerity of his administration’s intentions. A number of environment-related government agencies,
for example, were instructed to support Earth Day through office displays, press
releases, and speeches at Earth Day events, but then failed to address their own
long-standing prodevelopment biases and actually increased security measures
in anticipation of possible picketing or demonstrations at their offices. Nixon’s
secretary of the interior, Walter Hickel, was the most visible of the cabinet members wishing to assume the environmental mantle, but he was also the most vulnerable to criticism for his vigorous support of the Alaska pipeline. For the Nixon
administration, the effort to coopt the issue, as various environmental critics
characterized his new approach, seemed tentative at best and often backfired in
terms of the reactions it generated.
While the Nixon administration sought to refashion its image and influence
Earth Day, industry interests similarly adopted a stance aimed at incorporating
the corporate point of view into a newly defined environmental consensus.63 By
1969 and early 1970, a number of industry groups and individual companies had
begun to reposition themselves around pollution and waste issues. They argued
that they were making adequate, even innovative, responses to these environmental concerns. The packaging industry, paper companies, chemical manufacturers, automotive industry, and utilities were especially concerned that they
might become targets of environmental action and legislation. In response, companies reluctantly began to associate themselves with the new pollution control
technologies, such as mass-burn incinerators, air scrubbers, and catalytic converters for automobiles. Some companies, such as Monsanto, even heralded their
readiness to become environmental leaders in the coming decade by applying
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pollution control technologies in their own facilities and then marketing such
systems as a profitable line of business for the company.64
With Earth Day generating more and more media attention, a number of
companies and industry groups decided to embrace the event through advertisements, displays at corporate headquarters, announcements about new
demonstration technologies or other pollution control efforts, speakers made
available for teach-ins and forums, and even financial and in-kind contributions,
such as those received by the Earth Day steering committee at the University of
Michigan from Dow Chemical and Ford Motor Company.65
The utility industry undertook perhaps the most visible campaign around
Earth Day. Wary of the movement’s possible influence on regulatory bodies, utilities made special efforts to counter the anticorporate sentiment within the new
environmentalism. One utility, Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison, through
its newly created environmental task force, planned to send 175 speakers to various Earth Day events at colleges and high schools. Other utilities mobilized as
many as 1000 industry personnel to be made available on April 22. In a similar
vein, New York’s Consolidated Edison provided New York’s mayor, John Lindsay,
with an electric bus to ride around in during the day’s festivities and displayed
an electric car near its headquarters. These were rather disingenuous acts, since
Con Ed had not pursued any plans to stimulate the development of electric vehicle technologies readily available for investment and support. One trade journal characterized the industry’s public relations efforts “as a platform for outlining
what it has done and what it is planning to do” to establish its environmental
credentials.66
Not all industries, however, felt comfortable participating in Earth Day.
Several companies feared the anticorporate rhetoric and the association with
New Left and counterculture groups and ideas adopted by some of the Earth Day
organizers. One industry trade journal warned that the ecological movement
“carries with it the danger that it may be seized by the radical left as a broad
attack on the entire industrial system.” The article warned that “a lot of young
idealists, waving banners that advocate love and a better quality of life, can be
used by radicals for revolutionary purposes.” For some industry groups, concerns
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about the radical nature of the event turned into paranoid fears stimulated by
right-wing politicians who suggested a conspiratorial connection between the
date selected for Earth Day and the centennial of Lenin’s birthday. This coincidence of dates received a fair amount of media attention and was even raised by
one Conservation Foundation trustee who worried that any support for the
event would be tainted by the presumed association with Lenin.67
The actual events of Earth Day, as it turned out, reflected both the antiestablishment and consensus-seeking impulses of its organizers. Government
and corporate speakers were subject to hostile attacks, frequent interruptions,
and creative protests. At the University of Alaska, Secretary of the Interior Hickel
was booed off the stage when he laid out administration support of the Alaska
pipeline. In Denver, antinuclear activists presented the Colorado Environmental
Rapist of the Year award to the Atomic Energy Commission. The use of guerrilla
theater techniques was also prominent. At the University of Illinois, students
came on stage to disrupt a Commonwealth Edison speaker by throwing soot on
each other and coughing vigorously. In another instance, Florida activists presented a dead octopus at the headquarters of Florida Power & Light, a utility
responsible for the thermal pollution of Biscayne Bay.68
Despite the desire of the Earth Day organizers to avoid confrontations and
Nixon administration efforts to divorce environmental from Vietnam and racerelated issues, a number of Earth Day actions occurred along those lines. At the
University of Oregon, students demonstrated against the campus’s Reserve Officer
Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters throughout April. The protests culminated
in a massive sit-in at t...
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