Highlights from Our All-In Call with Denis Hayes

On June 16, we hosted our quarterly All In Call, where we spoke with Denis Hayes, lead organizer behind the very first Earth Day in 1970. Denis spoke to us about the very beginnings of organizing the now largest secular day of protest and what lessons we can take going forward.

Bill: One of the people who’s been helping us from the beginning with Sun Day and who we’re going to call on now is my old friend Denis Hayes. Denis Hayes, as a very young man, was the brains and spirit behind, along with lots and lots of colleagues, the first Earth day in 1970, which, though no King’s day, was very big. Earth Day in 1970, was bigger still. 

We estimate there may have been 20 million Americans, 10% of the then population out on the streets that day, and it’s gone on to be an annual celebration, perhaps the largest secular holiday on Planet Earth. We just celebrated its 55th year and many of us were doing one thing or another that we could think of to try and mark that occasion in the fashion it deserved.

Denis, who started Earth Day very young, went back and finished his school later, but not before he served President Carter as Director of Solar Policy, at the last moment in American history when it looked like solar energy was getting ready to take off and boom. So we’re going to talk about a couple things tonight, but first, Denis, welcome, and many, many thanks for joining us all here.

[To set the context] we’re very cognizant of the fact that we’re operating this summer in a difficult political environment, and that there’s a lot going on, and it sometimes seems overwhelming. 1970 was not exactly an easy moment [either]. Kent State was ten days after the first Earth day. You were in the middle of huge protests around Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, and Richard Nixon, and on and on and on. So, as we’re getting ready for Sun Day, talk a little bit about how you helped people keep focus that year as Earth Day came up. How did you manage to kind of allow people to step back for a moment and think about the larger picture, the entire earth?

 

There was a desire to have something that raised important, profound, sweeping issues that we stood a pretty good chance of being able to remedy. The environment with its effect upon human health, its effect upon natural ecosystems on all the critters on the earth and all of the beauty and the tragedy that’s encompassed within the environmental movement, provided that opportunity and people stepped into it.

 

Denis: First, Bill, It’s always a pleasure to be with you. With your resolute optimism you described a weekend of sure tragedy and managed to find a few rays of hope buried within it. 

We were lucky in that if Richard Nixon had invaded Cambodia 10 days earlier, Earth Day would have probably not been much noted, not remembered historically, would not have gone on to become a global phenomenon. Part of it was that we were touching into something that was hopeful at a time when much of America was not terribly hopeful. The Civil Rights movement had been going on for decades, and although a couple of landmark pieces of progress in the Lyndon Johnson era legislatively, the actual circumstances of most were only modestly affected. The war, which was by that time opposed by a vast majority of Americans, seemed to have its own relentless energy, and there was a sense of despair in the country. We had a very conservative President, but not a fascist.

There was a desire to have something that raised important, profound, sweeping issues that we stood a pretty good chance of being able to remedy. The environment with its effect upon human health, its effect upon natural ecosystems on all the critters on the earth and all of the beauty and the tragedy that’s encompassed within the environmental movement, provided that opportunity and people stepped into it.

 

We were very clear, right from the start, that we were going to have a clear set of values that we were promoting but we were not going to be trying to in any top-down fashion, govern what people would do. If you bought into the values, then we just encouraged people to go out and do what was appropriate in their community, and address the issue that was most concerning to them. 

 

Bill: 1970 was before the first energy crisis so people weren’t yet completely focused on the energy side of all of this, but that came very quickly, and by the mid 1970s solar energy was emerging as what looked like the answer to the difficult questions raised not only by environmental considerations, but by geopolitical ones in the wake of those embargoes. You managed to convince the President of the United States that this was not fanciful hippie technology; that this was a solid base on which to build the energy future of the country. Tell us a little bit about that period in the early seventies.

 

Denis: Carter was not a particularly hard sell, but one of our secret weapons is that we were organizing the first—actually, we called it Sun Day—on May 3, 1978. Rosalynn Carter was our honorary chair and she arranged for her husband to be in Colorado to commission the Solar Energy Research Institute that day. All of that helped to create this bit of momentum for something to which the President was already predisposed.

Remember, at that stage the technology was in its infancy. We had solar water heaters. We had passive solar design, but foldable tags were breathtakingly expensive and applied only to things that were able to accommodate that price tag. But Carter had a vision that understood that this is something that could change dramatically over time.

I don’t think any of us back at that time thought it would change as dramatically as it has. Solar is now, as you know, the cheapest source of energy for almost all applications, almost everywhere on the planet. But then it was seen to be one of several attractive things that encompassed wind, power, and geothermal and low head, high row and it fit in with his engineering approach to life. He didn’t see it as the answer, but he saw it as an important component of the answer. Now I think we’re all pretty well convinced that it’s the answer.

 

There’s a theory of organization called chaotic organization which says, you just get the basic theme and 2 or 3 particular details and let everything else go…That’s how we approached Earth Day—you had to be in favor of the environment. But then do something creative. This has been known by religion for millennia. People become more committed to things once they do something that reflects those values

 

Bill: One of the things that’s beautiful, looking back at the first Earth day, and subsequent, but the first one most dramatically was the remarkable diversity of things that happened that day. There were marches and concerts, but there were also people burying cars, and there were people planting gardens. I’ve likened the work we’re doing this summer as we approach Sunday to throwing a potluck supper and just seeing what people will bring. But how did you help seed the creativity that really marked that day?

Denis: We were very clear, right from the start, that we were going to have a clear set of values that we were promoting but we were not going to be trying to in any top-down fashion, govern what people would do. If you bought into the values, then we just encouraged people to go out and do what was appropriate in their community, and address the issue that was most concerning to them. That was a nice thing about the environment. You’ve got a hundred issues you can choose from—to do something that was colorful and creative.

I think many of them viewed us as their pipeline to potential national attention if they were creative enough. So we asked them to send us their best ideas. We then sent those ideas on to others to inspire them. 

There’s a theory of organization called chaotic organization which says, you just get the basic theme and 2 or 3 particular details and let everything else go. It was first created by the guy that did the Visa card, so it has to be a particular size. It has to have the strip in a particular fashion, but you can give frequent flyer miles. You can make it blue, or orange, or have beautiful desert scenes or mountains, or anything else, as long as you’ve got those numbers across the top you got the magnetic strip, and it’s the right size. 

That’s how we approached Earth Day—you had to be in favor of the environment. But then do something creative. This has been known by religion for millennia. People become more committed to things once they do something that reflects those values. I mean, we were involved with policy. From the beginning we were pushing to have the Clean Air Act embraced in 1970, and it had the great good fortune that Ed Muskie, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was a principal sponsor. 

But beyond policy and that wave of legislation that followed, we encouraged people to do things in their own lives that were concrete. This was generating [some] scorn and maybe bemusement on the part of radical activists in the anti-war movement, for whom throwing a brick through a florist window, is more an act than planting a tree or picking up litter, or but coming up with a series of actions that people would do daily in their lives as a reflection of their values. Even this contention about recycling, I think, was just enormously important in terms of giving this movement staying power.

 

Organizing takes time. And that’s one of the reasons that Act 3 is such a great position because you’ve got people with skills and resources and time. The other part of America with some time are kids. And I would really love to see if this can be turned into sort of a gray green coalition of the very young and the very old.

 

Bill: The other important thing was the sequel to the first Earth Day—the political campaign that followed. You’ve spotlighted a dirty dozen Congressmen that you wanted gone, and in an era when incumbency was even more powerful than it is now, you managed to send a real message.

 

Denis: Ten days after Earth Day, three days after Nixon invaded Cambodia, eight days later was Kent State and then came Jackson State, another massacre by Federal forces, and nobody was talking about the environment. 

We were trying to figure out what we could do to bring it back, and my own staff was split between people who were really into the lifestyle thing—you change the way that you behave, and society is going to have to adjust to how all of us have changed our behavior—versus the political types, basically cigar smoking advancement who said, you had one-tenth of all America out on the streets, and you’re going to sit out an election, you’re out of your minds! 

The way that I finally threaded that needle was to not endorse anybody but to come out against twelve of the worst. We chose twelve candidates who had terrible environmental records. It was relatively easy to find. Everybody in Congress had a fairly terrible environmental record. But we chose ones who were running in districts that they’d won by no more than three or four points where we had a really strong organization from Earth Day, where there was an important environmental issue that the person was on the wrong side of.

And then, with just a little bit of money, we managed to tilt enough 4, 5, 6 percentage points and take out of the initial twelve dirty dozen, we defeated seven of them, including the chairman of the House Public Works Committee in that one race, and that was that. 

That also happened in November. The Clean Air Act was voted on in December. This was a piece of legislation that was opposed by the oil industry, the coal industry, the automobile industry, the airline industry, and the electric utility industry. It was an amazing wave of fierce opposition. It passed the Senate on a voice vote. It passed the House of Representatives with one person dissenting, and that then began to continue that momentum, so that when the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the wave of more than a dozen important pieces of legislation came down, the tide was carrying the surf board forward from that launch.

 

Bill: As we close, Denis, an extraordinary thanks for what you did in 1970, because that set up all the environmental legislation that we still depend on, and that the trump administration is busily trying to destroy even now, an enormous thanks for all you did in the years afterwards, not only the solar work in the 1970s, but all your work at the bullet foundation for decades afterwards, and your willingness to be the most generous of mentors and helpers to a movement, and many of us going forward. It’s hard to think of many more impactful lives in our time. 

 

Denis: One of them clearly being you, Bill, if I may. There is one final thing I wanted to say: Organizing takes time. And that’s one of the reasons that Act 3 is such a great position because you’ve got people with skills and resources and time. The other part of America with some time are kids. And I would really love to see if this can be turned into sort of a gray green coalition of the very young and the very old. If you can get millions and millions of school kids to go as little green gorillas to their parents, that will work. And for the first Sunday we had a partnership with the National Science Teachers Association of the United States and boy, they had tens of thousands of schools with solar curricula.

 

Bill: You’re speaking our language. You’re speaking our language. There’s nothing we like more to do than work with young people, and this is a great opportunity.