Beyond the Limits of Earth Day: Turning Up the Heat on Climate Change Action

Size doesn’t matter.

Or at least, size is not the only thing that matters. In 21st century American democracy, massive public support is certainly desirable, especially over the long run. But what really counts with Congress is intensity.

A huge majority of Americans favor gun control, for example. According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, four out of five believe a police permit should be required for the purchase of a firearm.

But a small, intense set of Second Amendment absolutists will vote against any politician who favors such an approach. In most elections, a dedicated group of 10 percent, or even 5 percent, of voters can tilt the outcome. So politicians cater to the position whose supporters are most intense — who make sure a politician aligns with them on a single issue before they even examine the rest of his record.

What does this have to do with Earth Day?

Earth Day 1970, for which I served as national coordinator, was huge. Twenty million Americans took part. Millions of Americans who didn’t know what “the environment” was in 1969 discovered in 1970 that they were environmentalists.

Moreover, Earth Day was bipartisan. Although there was some antagonism toward President Nixon among the organizers, the campaign was co-chaired by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey. The 1 million-person event in New York City was chaired by the progressive Republican mayor, John Lindsay.

Over the next three years, Congress passed the most far-reaching cluster of legislation since the New Deal — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and myriad other laws that have fundamentally changed the nation. Trillions of dollars have been spent differently than they would have but for this new regulatory framework.

The conclusion the environmental movement drew from this was that it should try to grow as large as possible and to be bipartisan.

In recent decades, this hasn’t been turning out too well.

What everyone has forgotten is what happened after the first Earth Day. Just one week later, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia. The Kent State shootings followed a few days later. The spotlight shifted abruptly away from the environment.

But the environment returned to national prominence in the fall of 1970. The Earth Day organizers jumped into the Congressional elections, seeking to defeat a “Dirty Dozen” of incumbent Congressmen. The targets were selected because they had abysmal environmental records, but also because they were in tight races and were from districts with a major environmental issue that voters cared about.

The first of the seven Congressmen we took out that fall was George Fallon from Baltimore. Representative Fallon was chairman of the House Public Works Committee, the “pork” committee, and a powerful opponent of mass transit. Politicians of all stripes took notice: If Fallon was vulnerable, everyone in politics was vulnerable.

In that single primary election (won by a young upstart named Paul Sarbanes), Earth Day’s organizers had made “the environment” a voting issue. A few weeks after the election — despite the furious opposition of the coal, oil, electric utility, automobile, and steel industries — the Senate version of the 1970 Clean Air Act, authored by U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, passed the Senate unanimously. It was later adopted by the House on a voice vote.

Air pollution control enjoyed widespread support (much of which had been generated on Earth Day by participants in gas masks and college students burying internal combustion engines — leading to press coverage of depressing facts about air pollution on children). But what fundamentally changed the political dynamics was the intense engagement of a much smaller group of voters in the Congressional elections.