Our Special Earth Day Issue

Headin' for the Tar  Pits, One and All

“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time …”
– Come on, you know the words, intone along –
“… for y’all have knocked her up,
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe,
I was not offended,
For I knew I had to rise above it all,
Or drown in my own shit.”

That’s the intro to “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic, in case you were absent when American History stopped dead as 10 minutes of Negro fuzztone lamentation washed over it in 1971. “What the truckful of fuck was that?” you might have asked then, for this was not progressive supergroup fuzz guitar; it was a raw cry, Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel operating under first-take instructions from George Clinton to play as if he’d just heard his mother had died. Clinton didn’t tell him it was Mother Earth. That’s where that was coming from.

When you heard Jimi Hendrix play “Machine Gun,” you knew it was the sound of war, but from some extra-human perspective. Listen long enough and you realize it’s the cry of the planet, avulsed by napalm and carpet bombs. That’s where that was coming from.

Things were always coming from somewhere back then. “Dying trees … It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong”; “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen-seventies” – that was coming from Topanga Canyon. Over in Laurel Canyon, it was “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” and escaping the apocalypse in wooden ships. In Brian Wilson’s purple Bel-Air retreat, the Beach Boys weren’t singing “Catch a Wave” anymore, but “Don’t Go Near the Water.” The sound from Woodland Hills was Captain Beefheart warning, “The rug’s wearin’ out that we walk on/Soon it will fray and we’ll drop dead into yesterday/Must the breathing pay for those who breathe in but don’t breathe out?”

That’s how it was circa 1970, with the best and brightest of L.A. and the world’s other cultural centers sounding the environmental alarm. And don’t forget the Motor City: “Mercy, mercy me/Things ain’t what they used to be/Where did all the blue skies go?”

They thought it was almost doomsday back when the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. Now, we call it the good old days.

In 1970, the world’s human population was only 3,692,492,000. It had taken nearly 2,000 years to plump that number up from the mere 200 million who had peopled the Bible days. Now it’s taken only 38 years to bloat the 3.6 billion by another 3 billion. People may not have been listening too deeply to Marvin Gaye’s music, but they were sure fucking to it.

In 1970, gas was 34 cents a gallon and few people pondered what the lead in it was doing (outside of those in the DuPont boardroom, which had covered up lead’s deadly downside for decades). Our oceans were still teeming with fish, and they weren’t anywhere near full of mercury yet. Honking Delaware-sized chunks of Arctic and Antarctic ice shelf weren’t yet crumbling into the sea.

Back then, the weather extremes, species die-offs and oceanic dead zones of today still lived in a murky realm between scientific conjecture and science fiction. Some shit that has since come to pass even sci-fi writers couldn’t have imagined, such as in 2004, when Australia’s epic drought got so bad that thirst-crazed kangaroos began going into towns and attacking humans. Bad Kanga!

Soylent Green is people, if you’re a kangaroo.

In 1970, the dichotomy of us regarding the world as both our oyster and our toilet hadn’t taken so obvious a toll on the planet, nothing like what’s happening now. But it was enough to get people singing and organizing. Earth Day was a huge deal in which some 20 million Americans participated, and it wasn’t just Arbor Day with a splash of patchouli behind the ears. Yes, some of those 20 million were teachers and kids spending an hour at tide pools poking sea urchins, but Earth Day’s participants also fostered substantive legislative, scientific and academic change.

It has since gone global – let’s say hooray in 173 languages – but here at home Earth Day’s slowly become an other testament to our inertia, particularly over these last seven years of environmental rollback. We can bang drums and chant slogans until even the moon says shut up, but it won’t change a thing at the EPA, even though the agency owes its very existence to the first Earth Day.

Oh, tell us the story of the first Earth Day, will you, Hippie Granddad? Sure, kids. Pretend it’s a blustery day and

you’re off the California coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara, but you’re not on a boat; you’re on the Union Oil Company’s Platform A, drilling for oil. It’s six miles out at sea, where the oil is and where California’s bothersome regulations aren’t. Those end at the three mile limit, and federal regulation is much more lax. For example, out here you can use thinner sheathing in your wells.

So there you are giving old Mother Earth a good drilling when – Jiminy Cricket! – there’s a rupture, which is sort of like the rapture except instead of souls shooting up everywhere it’s millions of gallons of oil. Whoopsidaisy!

That was January 29, 1969, and the resulting oil slick covered 800 square miles along the then-pristine coast. Birds, seals, dolphins, fish and their invertebrate brethren all sucked it up – oil that is, Texas tea – and died a horrible death.

Union Oil’s president Fred Hartley was unimpressed, quoted as saying, “I am amazed at the publicity over the loss of a few birds.” But Wisconsin aenator Gaylord Nelson happened to be in Santa Barbara, witnessed the unction in action and was sufficiently appalled to shortly thereafter call for a national environmental teach-in.

Harvard University student Denis Hayes was moved by Nelson’s speech and visited the senator to see if he could help organize the teach-in on his campus. Since Nelson hadn’t yet developed the idea and had sacks of mail from Americans supporting it, he enlisted Hayes to organize the event, not just at Harvard but across the USA. From that happenstance, oil-flecked beginning, Earth Day was born.

The public will carried some weight then, and the significance of Earth Day was not lost on then-President Richard M. Nixon. Hayes once told me of a night years later that he’d spent drinking with Nixon insider John Ehrlichman, who told him that “Nixon didn’t care much for the environment and thought all this whining about pollution was a sign of moral decay, a weakening of the American fiber by people who weren’t prepared to suck it up and pay the price of progress.

“But Nixon looks out the White House window and sees the mall full of people, turns on his television and sees gigantic crowds in cities across the country, and reads the Associated Press report that more than 20 million people are involved. He had barely won in 1968 and figured he had to be a player in this.”

Nixon the tactician noted that both his chief Republican rival, New York Mayor John Lindsay, and his putative Democratic presidential opponent Edmund Muskie were involved in Earth Day. Ehrlichman told Hayes he’d suggested Nixon could outflank them by combining various elements of the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture and Health, Education and Welfare and the Atomic Energy Commission, tying a bow around them and calling it the Environmental Protection Agency. That was a direct result of Earth Day, according to Ehrlichman, who was a pretty straightforward guy if you overlook his convictions for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

“We can change the world,” Crosby and Nash sang back then. While some things remained impossible – such as getting CS&N to sing in tune in concert – change certainly was in the air: The Clean Air bill passed, Nixon was toppled, the Vietnam War ended.

Today, people couldn’t be more anxious for change if they were stuck inside a seven-year Pampers. Watergate was a mere bagatelle compared to stuff Bush has tried to get away with, yet Bush did get away with most of it, and he just will not go away.

A great deal of the shenanigans was bad for the environment. Nearly Bush’s first act was reneging on a campaign promise to control power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions, going beyond that disgrace to also have the EPA drop its existing suits against power plant polluters. His excuse was that we needed the energy, citing as a reason California’s energy crisis, omitting that it was rigged by his friends at Enron. But why stop there? He tried to replace the Nixon-signed Clean Air Act with his Clear Skies plan, which, among other niceties, would have allowed 50 percent more carbon monoxide emissions, this despite a National Academy of Sciences estimate that the new standards 8

would cause an additional 30,000 premature U.S. deaths per year. When even the Republican Congress rejected the plan, the administration did an end-run, “reinterpreting” EPA rules, over the objections of staff and a federal advisory panel. While the smokestacks spewed, the administration was instead branding eco-terrorism as our chief domestic threat.

Since then they’ve rolled back or reversed hundreds of environmental laws, usually at the behest of lobbyists and against the better advices of government experts. Here’s one example: The flame retardants PDBEs and deca BDE are banned in Europe and elsewhere because studies found both that they disrupted the brain development, memory, learning ability and hearing of lab animal offspring and that they concentrate in humans at alarming speed. The breast milk of U.S. mothers had 70 times the PDBEs of European mothers – near the levels that were damaging lab rats – yet the Bush administration sided with lobbyists in opposing regulation. Judging by a glut of similar rulings, you’d pretty much have to be pouring effluent straight into a baby’s mouth before they’d intervene.

Lobbyists are in charge of agencies that should be policing the lobbyists’ polluting industries. Whistleblowers are fired. Science has been so censored and distorted by this administration that over 4,000 scientists, including 127 members of the staid National Academy of Sciences and 48 Nobel Prize winners, issued a 49-page detailed letter condemning it. In one example it was found that the reports of NASA’s head climate scientist, James Hansen, were being censored by a political hack, and a 23-year-old college dropout at that.

California has been particularly victimized. There was the rigged energy crisis and the higher rates the feds stuck us with. There was the emergency request from the state for FEMA’s help in clearing trees killed by bark beetles, saying they posed an imminent threat of catastrophic forest fires, a request FEMA sat on for six months, then denied on the same day that catastrophic fires swept the state. Due to federal inaction, California has been screwed out of much of the water it was getting. Then there’s the tooth and nail fight by “states’ rights” Republicans in Washington to deny California the right to set its own smog rules, as L.A.’s sky has grown more sepia by the day.

We could fill this paper with similar depressing stuff, but to what avail? It bums us out, and nothing changes. I just had to go sit under an olive tree for half an hour to watch the leaves and sky and listen for the peepings of the little brown birds in our eaves, to recall that life goes on despite our ruinous idiot schemes.

Years ago the lovely U. Utah Phillips mused, “You know, maybe we’re winning and we don’t even know it.” He was talking about the slow silent acceptance of organic foods, of neighborhood vegetable gardens, about women’s rights, gay rights and global human rights, about our growing respect for the fragility and majesty of the natural world.

There is that, but also this: Walter Cronkite once said – and I can only paraphrase from memory – that the most frightening interview he ever conducted was with a scientist who was studying the effect of pesticides and other toxins on the human brain. “You know,” the scientist said, “one day the human race is going to lose its ability to reason, and we won’t even know it.”

Colony Collapse Disorder – it’s not just for bees anymore! Where are those damn bees? Where are the salmon? Maybe the other species see the writing on the wall and are getting out while the getting’s good. Except the kangaroos. They are going to fuck you up.

Do we rise above it?