![[April 24, 1970] Save Our Ailing Planet (Earth Day: April 22)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/700424_3-EarthDayPoster-672x372.jpg)
Tune in tonight at 7PM Pacific for a very funny and excellent episode of Science Fiction Theater!
by Erica Frank
Timothy Leary's exhortations to "turn on, tune in, drop out" have found their limits:
You can't turn on if your every breath is filled with poison.
You can't tune in if you are surrounded by industrial cacophony.
You can't drop out of living on Earth: Science fiction plans notwithstanding, it's the only planet we have.
Before we can live in harmony with nature and each other, we need to address the damage we have done and undo the harms to the land, the sea, the sky that sustain us.
That's what Earth Day is about: A day of protest against industrial waste and environmental toxins. A day of celebration of the world we share and the peace we hope to build in the future. A day of education and cooperation, of hard truths and hopeful plans, of turning fear and anger into new relationships and useful actions.
Smog is also not healthy for children and other living things. Part of the goal of Earth Day is to bring the energy of anti-war protests to protecting our environment.
Image by Another Mother for Peace (AMP), an anti-war activist group.
Earth Day is the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a Democrat, who invited Pete McCloskey, a Republican, to co-chair the project with him, so it would be bipartisan, obvious to all that it was not meant to promote any one person or group's political agenda. (After all, we all live on the same planet.) Originally planned to just be a teach-in event on college campuses, scheduled in the time between Spring Break and exams, it quickly grew much bigger.
Inspirations
In 1962, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring described a world where no insects buzzed between flowers, and no birds chirped over their nests. They had been destroyed by chemical warfare — because of course, chemicals designed to kill locusts and aphids do not carefully pass over the bees and butterflies, nor do their poisons vanish when the insects that have ingested them are eaten by birds.
Her detailed descriptions of the damage caused by chemical insecticides reached an audience that had become uneasy with the growing number of companies willing to ignore human safety in search of increasing profits. "Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death," she wrote, and that message resonated with many. Anti-war protests don't just want an end to violence—the goal is a safe and harmonious world, not one with no war but with constant illness.
The notion of Earth as a single place with limited resources, rather than an infinite font of everything humanity could ever need, has been growing throughout the past decade. In 1967, Buckminster Fuller said, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common." And in 1968, NASA's Apollo 8 took a picture that reminded us that space is huge and we are, in fact, very small:
NASA's "Earthrise," December 24, 1968, shows that the size of Earth is just a matter of perspective.
More recently, last year an oil spill near Santa Barbara dumped more than 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into the water. Union Oil's blow-out was caused by predictable circumstances: While there are regulations to prevent exactly this kind of event, Union Oil had requested, and received, a waiver from them. The standards require 300 feet of conductor casing (the main protective measure for drilling), and 870 feet of surface casing (a secondary protection for high-pressure zones), Well A-21 had only 238 feet of conductor casing, and no surface casing at all. On January 28, 1969, the limited protective measures failed, and the result was 10,000 dead seabirds, dolphins, seals, and sea lions, and a black and stinking coastline as the oil blowout spread throughout the area.
Senator Nelson was inspired to create Earth Day after seeing a photo of the 800-square-mile oil slick, and many of the people who helped with the cleanup were involved in the planning and activities for Earth Day.
All Over America
University of Michigan had a teach-in attended by thousands, and published an article, Ecological Living Calls for New Lifestyles.
Environmental Action for Survival Poster for U-M Teach-In
In New Jersey, a group of young teen girls headed off to their local shopping center to join the Earth Day festivities – but they'd misunderstood the location and found nobody there. So they decided to celebrate in their own way: They visited the stream that ran behind the shopping center—Goffle Brook—and worked to clean it up, hauling a shopping cart out of the water and picking up litter and garbage.
In larger cities, the turnout was huge. New York, an estimated 250,000 took to Fifth Avenue, carrying flowers and signs and often wearing masks. In San Francisco, Union Square was packed with crowds of 20,000 people at a time, with perhaps five times that many visiting over the course of the day.
New York: Unlike many anti-war protests, people brought their families: The safety of the environment is not an adults-only topic.
CBS News even had a Special Report with Walter Cronkite about Earth Day, which you may have seen.
Aftermath and the Future
Over 12,000 events happened on Earth Day, all across the US, ranging from hundreds of thousands in big cities to a few hundred in smaller towns—to just a few friends deciding to put some of their time toward making a better world for the future.
People have long been concerned about companies dumping poisonous waste in their nearby streams and lakes, or factories pouring soot and worse into their skies, or the loss of wilderness to careless campers or community members turning unregulated spaces into garbage dumps. But Earth Day serves as an announcement that these are all one topic, not several; that there is no such thing as a "local environment." We live on one planet, and all its ecosystems are connected.
Let's hope this day is remembered well, and that the teaching and learning continues until we can all live on a planet that is "healthy for children and other living things."
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
