Today is Earth Day (and, I might add, Rita Tucker’s birthday) and President Joe Biden Jr. will be announcing the Solar for All program, a new initiative to bring residential solar power to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities in “every state and territory in the nation”.
Last week, the Department of the Interior published a final rule to maximize the protection of irreplaceable wildlife habitat for caribou and migratory birds on more than 13 million acres in the western Arctic, while supporting subsistence uses and needs of native communities in Alaska. The Interior Department released a final environmental analysis that recommends the denial of a right of way for the Ambler Road project which would cross more than 200 miles of pristine lands, having a significant impact on caribou and subsistence resources relied upon by more than 60 native communities in Alaska. The Interior Department also released a rule to help guide the balanced management of all 245 million acres of America’s public lands that are overseen by the Bureau of Land Management to protect the land and outdoor recreation, and manage clean energy development.
All of this a continuation of the Nixon-era effort to reverse the damage that people have inflicted on the planet. The environmental movement traces its roots to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which revealed the harm that the use of DDT and other pesticides were doing to living organisms, including humans, and the links between pollution and public health. Then, an oil spill of between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, polluted 35 miles of California beaches, killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals over a period of 10 days in January and February 1969. Later that year, in June, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire — again — from the chemical contaminants that industry had dumped into the river. (I say “again” because it had happened several times, but that incident gained national coverage.)
Contrasting with those environmental threats was the image that astronaut William Anders had taken on December 24, 1968, of the earth rising over the moon’s horizon during the Apollo 8 lunar mission. The color photo served as a powerful reminder of the beauty and isolation of the planet.
Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson decided to promote a national “teach-in” on the environment at college campuses, which he thought would send a message to Washington DC politicians about public support for an environmental agenda. He asked students to fight for environmental causes with the same energy they were giving to oppose the war in Vietnam. The result, on April 22, 1970, was the first Earth Day, which attracted an estimated 20 million people nationwide. A decade later, Nelson recalled, “My primary objective in planning Earth Day was to show the political leadership of the nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement. While I was confident that a nationwide peaceful demonstration of concern would be impressive, I was not quite prepared for the overwhelming response that occurred on that day. Two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand high schools and grade schools, and several thousand communities in all — more than twenty million Americans — participated in one of the most exciting and significant grassroots efforts in the history of this country.”
In the 10 years after 1970, Nelson pointed out, Congress had passed the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments, the Resource Recovery Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.
Even ahead of the Earth Day celebration, President Richard Nixon had embraced the need to do something about making the country safer. In February 1970, he declared in a message to Congress, “[W]e … have too casually and too long abused our natural environment. The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future. … [It requires] fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry, and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Not everyone was happy with the government’s new regulations. Among the groups fighting such progressive initiatives was the John Birch Society. Adherents of the group’s “philosophy” believed that communists had infiltrated society — their motto was, “Wake up America, the enemy is within!” — and they argued that the date of April 22 was chosen because it was the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. (Actually, Lenin was born on April 10, 1870. Historically, April 10 is the date that the RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, in 1912; Paul Von Hindenburg was reelected German president in a runoff where Adolf Hitler came in second in 1932; and Paul McCarthy announced that he was quitting the Beatles and would be coming out with a solo album in 1970.) I believe — but have been unable to confirm — that the John Birch Society is the source of an anti-OSHA cartoon, “Cowboy after OSHA Inspection”.
Retired candy manufacturer Robert Welch, whose company brought us Sugar Babies, Junior Mints, and Pom Poms, secretly formed the John Birch Society in 1958, inviting wealthy businessmen — including the Koch brothers’ father, Fred Koch — to join in fighting communism in the United States. The group is named for a US Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists in World War II. At its peak, the group had between 60,000 and 100,000 members. Another of its slogans was “Get the US out of the UN” and Welch claimed that President Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. John Birchers also claimed that Reverent Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement were directed by the Kremlin and that African Americans were being manipulated by Moscow.
Some conservatives, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., were critical of Welch and, by the mid-1970s, his organization was greatly diminished, but its influence has remained among many conservatives. Author and historian Matthew Dallek, who has written extensively about the group, says many Republicans still reflect some of the John Birch Society’s views.
Curiously, though, the most extreme members of today’s Republican Party no longer worry about Russia and, in fact, embrace Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian approach to governance as manifested by Donald Trump. Their influence (and Trump’s) took a sharp hit this past weekend, however, when House Speaker Mike Johnson ignored threats from the Putin wing of the party and advanced aid packages for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, with additional humanitarian aid for Gaza and other threatened communities. Johnson risked his political career by deciding to put the country ahead of politics — at least in this case. The aid package passed, 311-112.
What is uncertain is whether the Putin wing is truly on the wane, or whether the national security implications of their stance motivated so many Republicans to ignore them on this issue.