On that first Earth Day, he imagined a cleaner planet by now

On the first Earth Day in 1970, I assumed that by the time I was 65 -- or certainly by the time I was 70 -- most environmental problems would be solved. The world would be a clean and sustainable place. I was a young lawyer, just a few years out of law school, and had just joined the Sierra Club. That was my first foray into activism (and it caused me to be a little worried about what the conservative senior partners at my corporate law firm might think).

The first Earth Day was a dramatic expression of a growing awareness that corporations had been using our air and water as a free dump, and that something needed to be done. It occurred at a time of anti-war protests and anti-establishment rhetoric: a time when change seemed not only possible but also inevitable.

Back then, Bad Guys and Good Guys were identifiable. Big corporations were polluting our air and our water and we had to stop them. Timber companies and mining companies were gobbling up the wilderness. Reserve Mining was dumping the equivalent of 65,000 pickup truck loads of tailings into Lake Superior daily. The threats to an aesthetically pleasing, healthful and sustainable world were obvious -- and fixable, if we just got busy and organized. Nobody argued that pollution was not harmful, and none but a few prescient scientists had even thought about global climate change.

Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson proposed Earth Day with students in mind, as a national "teach in" and an opportunity for students to create their own observances. College campuses were the focus of environmental activism as they were for the antiwar movement, civil rights and feminism. Karim Ahmed, a biochemistry graduate student, organized an impressive series of events at the University of Minnesota for a weeklong "Festival of Life." Crowds turned up to hear Sen. Walter Mondale at Coffman Union. He was joined by Sierra Club President Michael McClosky. Ahmed also lined up Paul Erlich, author of "The Population Bomb," and Buckminster Fuller.

This was exciting and heady stuff. As a young idealistic lawyer in an old established firm, it became increasingly clear to me in the aftermath of Earth Day that making the world a better place for General Motors, banks, auto dealers and grocery chains was not the way I wished to spend my career. But there were no jobs outside government where one could purport to represent the public interest, and government was not doing the job well. Just as I was searching for an alternative, Karim Ahmed and other students organized the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG), taxing themselves $1 per student per quarter. I signed up in 1971 as its first employee. In that role I helped MPIRG bring the first lawsuits challenging logging in the BWCAW, leading to a long congressional fight and new restrictions on logging and motor-boating in 1978.

When I joined the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club, it had no budget and about 50 members, but by the 1973 session of the Legislature, these volunteers had managed to put together a fund (with a lot of help from Wallace Dayton) for Project Environment that hired the new law firm of Dayton and Herman (John Herman had been an MPIRG lawyer as well) to be their lobbyists at the Legislature.

Today, Earth Day 40, while still an important affirmation of the need to care for the planet, seems to me less optimistic than in 1970. I no longer think that the big environmental problems will be solved in my lifetime. At nearly 71, I know that we are surely passing on to our descendants huge burdens, including some that may become impossible to solve if climate feedbacks are allowed take over. The Bad Guys often claim they are green and some even argue that pollution by greenhouse gases really won't cause climate change.

The lack of political will to deal with climate change is discouraging. There are signs of public awareness and action, of course. The Northstar Chapter now has 20,000 members in Minnesota, and there about 70 different environmental organizations that belong to the Minnesota Environmental Partnership. And Minnesota has been a leading state in setting a goal of an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by mid-century and requiring that 25 percent of electricity come from renewable sources by 2030. But so far, not much real progress has been made nationwide in actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact they continue to increase.

Change takes time. Take the civil rights movement. When I was a 10-year-old, in an all-white, small Midwest town, the "N" word was common on the playground. Little Rock happened when I was a college freshman, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 just after law school. Sixty years later we have a black president. Real change has happened and continues to happen.

But, for the problem of climate change, we do not have the luxury of time. Greenhouse gas buildup could soon pass irreversible thresholds. But, even though most Americans think climate change is real and we ought to do something about it, they don't care very much about doing something quickly. The problem lacks immediacy. It not a "first tier" issue for most people. The effects are long term, so the result of current actions cannot be observed. On top of that are the climate deniers, who would do nothing, apparently because the scientific certainty is only about 90 percent.

In "Our Choice," former Vice President Al Gore writes: "Not too many years from now, a new generation will look back at us in this hour of choosing and will ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, 'what were you thinking? Didn't you see entire North Polar ice cap melting before your eyes? Didn't you hear the warnings from the scientists? Were you distracted? Did you not care?' Or they will ask instead, 'How did you find the moral courage to rise up and solve a crisis so many said was impossible to solve?' We must choose which of these questions we want to answer, and we must give our answer now -- not in words but in actions."

Perhaps I'm feeling a bit down after reading James Hansen's "Storms Of My Grandchildren: The Truth About The Coming Climate Catastrophe And Our Last Chance To Save Humanity." Hansen, our leading climate scientist, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is always on the leading edge of disastrous predictions and usually turns out to be right. His book gives a detailed explanation of the science we know for sure, that which we don't know, and the horrific consequences that are within the realm of possibility. He knows from his experience of being ignored by the past administration how special interests control government, and is even skeptical that the cap and trade bill that passed the House last year would be helpful, because it protects "King Coal."

What then must we do? Hope is important, even if we're not able to be optimistic. I've always liked William Sloane Coffin's distinction between the two:

"Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful."

Persistence, as Coffin advises, seems essential. It may seem bothersome to limit our own energy use. Many of us hardly give long distance air travel a second thought, for example. It is hard to organize your own church, business or neighborhood to engage in conservation measures. It is time- consuming and difficult to get politically involved for candidates who support actions to curb climate change. It costs money to support the effective advocacy groups. But this much is obvious: We have not yet reached the critical mass necessary for meaningful change to occur. Talking about it a lot and taking action in our own lives is the best thing most of us can do.

Our naivete on that first Earth Day quickly gave way to a recognition that to bring about change we would have to build a national movement and a variety of organizations capable of acting locally, nationally, and internationally. Even as the issues have become more difficult, it is our good fortune to have the legacy of 40 years of environmental activism to remind us that change is possible, but only if we commit ourselves for the long haul.

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Chuck Dayton left private law practice as a young man to work for the fledgling Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG) on improving environmental law at the Legislature. He, along with another MPIRG attorney, John Herman, soon formed the first environmental law firm in the state. Now retired, Dayton still works on environmental issues.

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