vi ewpoi m t Denis Hayes National Coordinator, Environmental Action
Earth Day was just the beginning Less than four months ago, a handful of young people came to Washington and opened an office to organize Earth Day-a day of action for the environment. This effort touched a responsive chord across the country, and a movement has been galvanized. This movement transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a movement of working men, who are breathing poison every day in the mines and mills, and who raise their children downwind of smokebelching factories. It is a movement of people from ghettos and bamos-the worst of this country’s ecocatastrophes. It includes suburbanites, who have come to realize that the effects of environmental irresponsibility do not stop at the city limits. It is the movement of a generation that has determined to make this country a place we can live in thirty years from now. We have learned not to place our faith in the regulatory agencies that are supposed to act in the public interest. We have learned not to believe the advertising that sells us useless products. We have learned not to trust politicians who will promise the voter anything on the eve of election, but who spend the next four years raising taxes for unwanted wars, useless weaponry, moondust, and technological boondoggles like the ssT-while ignoring the desperate needs of the people. We will not appeal any more to the conscience of institutions because institutions have no conscience. If we want them to do what is right-we must make them do what is right. That will not be easy. The following are some of the tactics we will employ: *Stock proxy fights. Across the country, citizens are going into stockholders meetings to demand that corporations begin to put people’s lives ahead of profits. They are not asking for concessions on isolated issues; they are insisting that the public interest be permanently represented on decision-makmg hoards. Law suits. The courts stopped the Alaska pipe l i e . Companies that do not respect people’s right to a decent environment, and governmental agencies that fail in their duty to protect the public interest, can expect to be sued. Demonstrations. In Charleston, W.Va.; Blair, Neb.; Redwood City, Calif., and scores of other communities, people confronted industries directly for the first time on Earth Day. We have found that there
often is simply no other way of jolting a company into socially responsible behavior. *Research. This organization and many local groups will be conducting investigations of corporations and of government agencies at the local and state level, similar to those that Ralph Nader’s “raiders” have conducted at the federal level. There will be a vigorous effort to single out the worst offenders and to provide alternatives that are socially responsible. Elections. The environmental movement is going to be a powerful force in the politics of this country for the foreseeable future. Many local groups have told us they plan to join forces in statewide and regional organizations that will endorse and oppose specific candidates in the 1970 elections. Some people in this movement regard electoral politics as irrelevant; but the majority seems to feel that with so few ways of bringing about real change, we cannot afford to abandon the political arena to two calcified parties. There is an unease across the country today. People know something is wrong. The war is part of it, but the more thoughtful critics of the war have long known that the war was just a symptom of some thing much deeper. A lot of strategies have been used in the past by people seeking change. Movements have come and gone. In some very real sense, this movement may be our last chance. Our very survival demands that a new constituency be built-of people who will affirm the enhancement of life over the culture of death. Earth Day was a beginning.
Denis Hayes, a 1969 graduate of Stanford University, studied government at Haward before leaving to fain Environmental Action in January 1970 VOIWW
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