If I had been on the ball, this column would have appeared last week, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
But I’m getting old and forgetful.
On Wednesday, April 22, in order to atone for this oversight, my lovely wife Carolyn and I walked around the middle school playing field behind our house, filling a 13-gallon trash bag as we went with beer cans, liquor bottles, sandwich bags, candy wrappers, odd bits of clothing and scraps of paper, one of which turned out to be a $10 bill.
Freelance journalist Edgar Allen Beem lives in Brunswick. The Universal Notebook is his personal, weekly look at the world around him.
Earth Day was the brainchild of U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wisconsin, who got the idea in 1969 while flying back from a tour of the Santa Barbara, California, oil spill, when an oil rig blowout dumped 100,000 gallons of crude oil into Santa Barbara Channel. Figuring a successful campaign to protect the environment should be bipartisan, Nelson enlisted conservation-minded Congressman Pete McCloskey, R-California, to co-chair Earth Day.
In Maine, Earth Day events in 1970 took place on most college campuses. At the University of Maine in Portland, where I was a student at the time, a group calling itself People Living Under Garbage, or PLUG, gave out tongue-in-cheek awards to major polluters.
The Unmitigated Gall Award went to Great Northern Paper Company. S.D. Warren Paper Company was given the Master Polluter Award. And PLUG gave a special award to the city of Portland for “dumping unbelievable amounts of raw sewage into Portland Harbor each day.”
The most colorful Earth Day demonstrations in Maine took place in and around Portland. Folksinger and humorist Jud Strunk, who would become famous two years later as a regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” played his banjo in Portland’s City Hall Plaza and served as emcee for a freewheeling show of support for the environment and contempt for industry that attracted some 400 supporters. The Blackbird Theater, a group of local street performers, led a march down Congress Street to the plaza featuring characters such as Mr. Industry and the Oil King.
A local character named Philip Jenkins donned a 55-gallon oil drum emblazoned with a skull and cross bones and walked from Biddeford to Portland.
Out in Westbrook, some 50 demonstrators held their noses as they marched past the S.D. Warren Paper Mill, one of the state’s biggest polluters.
These days, Republicans under Trump are the enemies of the environment, working frantically to roll back environmental protection laws, but, as I never tire of reminding people, the environmental movement in Maine in the 1960s and 1970s was led by Republicans such as Horace “Hoddy” Hildreth, Harrison Richardson, Joseph Sewall and Margaret Fuller Brown. Democrats like Gov. Ken Curtis and Sen. Edmund Muskie were all in favor of oil refineries being proposed up and down the coast of Maine.
Hoddy Hildreth, who helped defeat several refinery proposals, spoke at a Westbrook Junior College teach-in, telling students that no one knew how much damage had been done to the environment already. He cited overpopulation, air pollution, the harmful effects of greenhouse gases and the pesticide pollution among the major challenges facing the world.
“Your role,” Hildreth charged his young audience, “is to infuse in your children the kinds of attitudes man must adopt unless there is to be an end to man.”
That was 50 years ago. I’m afraid we are heading in the wrong direction.
(This column was adapted from “The Law of the Land,” a privately commissioned book on the early days of the Maine environmental movement I published last year.)
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