Earth Day

I know, I know--it was yesterday. I'm a day behind, and I suppose it'll slowly get worse.

But the old man just thought he'd say that, sure as anything, he remembers the first Earth day. I was a senior in college, and I remember April 22 because what happened that day was something the whole college participated in. The administration somehow legislated the affair to be legit. Earth Day may not have been holy, but it wasn't considered "of the Devil" (some tossed Satan around far more easily back then).  

Oddly enough, Earth Day didn't follow the deeply set fault lines. It drew all of us, many at least.

What I remember was there were things going on, a kind of "teach-in," on campus, even though no one used that phrase because it belonged to the pinko anti-war crowd who were attempting to bring down everything America stood for.

Dordt College was massively conservative, overwhelmingly Republican, and deliberately pro-Nixon, a place where un-American views were assumed to arise from spiritually deviants in a culture gone mad, "freaks," who neither appreciated or believed that God himself had a hand in bringing Tricky Dick to the throne in Washington. Hey! Love it or leave it!

Okay, I'm overplaying it, but in 1970 the Department of Defense had just created a wheel of fortune, a lottery, to determine who would be drafted to relieve the grunts--those who returned alive and those who didn't--from their years in the bloody mess that was Vietnam. I was tagged with number 189, but I had this weird heart. On April 22, 1970, I was just a week or so away from flunking my draft physical because of it and only then knowing I wouldn't be among the draftees. 

Nationally, things were a mess in April, 1970. Six thousand Americans would die in Vietnam that year, down from 11 thousand in 1968, but anti-war sentiment was spilling into the streets all over the country.

I was as anti-war as anyone on campus back then, and even public about it, writing things in the student newspaper that got me in trouble with the powers-that-be as well as throngs of students who'd come into the world as Republican as they were Dutch-American. Still, what I remember best about that first Earth Day, 1970, is that it seemed a cause that brought us together, an issue on which we could agree. It wasn't just the long-haired hippie-types who celebrated, but even the Pre-Sem Club. That, I remember, was strange.

I can't recollect how we celebrated, but I know we did, lots of us. The cause of tending the earth, new as it was back then, belonged to all of us. What we now call environmental stewardship wasn't just the agenda of the lefties, all of us played a role. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof."

Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-WI, got it rolling, my own state's Washington voice. He was anti-war also, but that didn't matter. "Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being," he said, "rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution."

Those words are still a bit un-American, aren't they? And it's hard to believe that Dordt College, vintage 1970, celebrated the way we did. Hundreds were part of it. I found that amazing. Still do.

My most vivid memory of the original Earth Day, Dordt College, 1970--the very first--is of remarkable cooperation. We were, all of us, on this earth together. I'm sure some stayed away, sure the agenda was somehow communist, but on April 22, 1970, on the Dordt College campus there were no blues and reds. We were all greens.

Cool.