A CHAT WITH
DENIS HAYES,
FOUNDER OF EARTH DAY
INTERVIEWED BY DAVID HIRNING
THE FREE PRESS
A quarter-century ago, there was no such thing as "environmentalism." Today, the issue is one of the most important in our entire political and cultural fabric. One of the single most influential individuals responsible for that evolution in our society lives and works in Seattle, is in fact a native son of Washington (he grew up in the small town of Camas in southwest Washington). His name is Denis Hayes, and 25 years ago he was the driving force behind Earth Day.
When Hayes, then a Harvard law student, masterminded the very first Earth Day campaign back in 1970, it literally created the concept of a widespread environmental movement. Twenty-five years later, he continues to shepherd the movement which has grown dramatically in numbers. Today, Hayes is the president of the Bullitt Foundation, a well-endowed ($85 million) local group that provides major grants to a myriad of environmental organizations and projects around the Northwest. This year's Earth Day, officially set for Saturday, April 22nd, is particularly icompelling, but for all the wrong reasons. The environmental movement is currently under massive attack regionally and nationally, with wide-ranging anti-regulatory statutes being proposed (such as the "takings" laws) and landmark environmental legislation such as the Endangered Species Act being threatened. So, as part of the heritage of Earth Day and in the hopes of revisiting the environmental "zeitgeist" of the 1970s, the Free Press sat down for a talk with Hayes.
In a Seattle Weekly story on you a few years back, a comment was attributed to you about environmental groups spending too much time and energy inside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. But I gather you yourself still spend a fair amount of time in D.C., and there is something to be said for working on a national scale to really bring about wide-ranging environmental changes. Do you still think that the environmental movement is too wrapped up in Beltway politics?
The difficulty with the national groups is not that they have a presence in the Beltway, it's that they tend to have no time for communications with their members. They view their members in some large measure as a source of funding. It's not, "What do you people really feel about this issue, are we going in the right direction or the wrong direction?" There is a tendency to become so consumed with the policy needs of the machine you're feeding in Washington, D.C. that you lose contact with other sources of commentary and expertise. So it does become this closed loop of people who talk with one another, share a lot of common assumptions, and the movement is sort of homogenized.
I don't feel any antagonism towards (the national groups), hell, I spent a big chunk of my life working on issues in Washington, D.C. I think it's a critically important thing to do. There is a disconnection now, but I think the information revolution has the potential to make some serious changes. It is now possible to conceive of ways to turn broad geographical areas almost into a neuron network, (to arrive) at informed decisions that are much more consensual than the way they've been done in the past, with more primitive modes of communication....if there's the will to do it. And in fact, working in conjunction with the Brainerd Foundation, we're going to be launching an effort toward that in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaking of D.C., you've had some background working for the Carter Administration on energy issues in the 1970s, and you had the opportunity to go back into that kind of position with the Clinton Administration. Considering the current political climate, and the attacks the environment is under, are you very hopeful for governmental efforts to protect the environment? Or, are you just really glad now that you decided to come to the Bullitt Foundation instead of going back to D.C.?
I certainly would not want to be living in Washington, D.C. right now. Particularly, I wouldn't want to be busting my tail 18 hours a day in an administration where there isn't a higher degree of support for most of the things I believe in than I think there is in this administration. Times are certainly tough. There is a pendulum that operates in American politics, and I thought that it was swinging back the other direction, and they caught it and pulled it back even further than it had been in the (James) Watt era.... At the same time, you'd have to be a fool to try to argue that many environmental laws don't have deep and abiding flaws, both in their design and in their implementation. We've created a bureaucracy that is enormously unresponsive to the public, to shifts in evidence.
Vested interests develop very rapidly. It got much worse during the Reagan Administration, interestingly, because during that time, many of the most talented, creative, hard-working, thoughtful people were forced out of the (Environmental Protection) Agency, a lot of dead wood rose up through the civil service system, and now that deadening kind of function has resulted in an Agency that I don't think is particularly impressive in the way that it has implemented a number of different laws, (or in) the lethargy with which it approaches them.
Now there may be some really creative ways to use market forces that haven't been used in a largely regulatory-oriented environmental protection. Ways to send different kinds of price signals and use those things more creatively, in ways that the Republicans could be enthusiastic about, to build upon the strength of a market economy, instead of constantly having a fight between the regulators and the entrepreneurs. So that may be naively hopeful, but that's sort of the best outcome I can see out of this Congress, once they've sort of got their youthful testosterone spent, maybe we'll get down to trying to blend their ideas with the kinds of values that still are dominant values in America, that have to do with caring about the world that our kids are going to be inheriting.
When you started Earth Day in 1970, it was modeled after the Vietnam war protests, young people taking to the streets and protesting what was happening to the environment. Today you don't see people taking to the streets that much-they're more likely to hop on the Internet to express their views. Tell me a little bit about the differences in organizing Earth Day in 1970 and again 20 years later.
Hmm. That's interesting. It's true that people who go into the streets in an activist way tend to be young, tend to be college-educated or in college, for a variety of reasons: a purity of vision that is not yet brooked by a series of compromises, a lack of financial obligations to families and the stability that that necessarily introduces in your life.... To put together a rally in Washington, D.C. on any topical issue... it is dominated by youngsters, and probably always will be. Those do tend to be the same people that are increasingly hopping onto the Internet, and there is an argument that that could be sapping off some of that energy....
[Earth Day] in 1970 grew out of the 1960s, it was a climate where a whole group of people across the country knew how to organize.... In 1970, what we set out to do, fairly consciously, was to create a new vocabularly... to find a way for a lot of people who felt on the right side of a lot of progressive issues to come together around something that would be broadly inclusive of America. When we organized, there was virtually no role to speak of for any of the old-line conservation groups. What we did was work with a whole bunch of brand new groups on college campuses, a lot of churches, civic organizations, garden clubs, leagues of women voters... to try to show that all these issues were linked together. That we could learn things from ecology, that you should celebrate diversity, should try to structure systems that have redundancy and resiliency....
And there was a place for everybody, if you wanted to pick up litter, you could pick up litter.... What we did was take a country that in 1969, if you asked the average citizen, "What do you think of the environment?" they probably wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about.... By the end of 1970, something over three-quarters of Americans in polls would say that they were environmentalists. And combined with the Dirty Dozen campaign that fall, where we managed to defeat seven pretty senior members of Congress who had abysmal environmental records, it really became sort of the apple pie of American politics. For six or seven years, we were almost unstoppable.
In 1990, it was different. In 1970, it mostly consisted of pointing fingers at industry, governmental agencies, and officials, and saying, "Stop doing that-you guys are screwing up the planet." But the big difference is that in 1990 there was an acute awareness that you had to try to get people to take a higher degree of responsibility for their own behavior. The decisions you make-how many children are you going to have, how many cars and what kind are you going to have, how much are you recycling ... all these things have an enormous impact when added together. And we carried that message much more thoroughly in 1990-we got it out through just about every identified medium of communication in society. And the biggest accomplishment almost certainly was recycling. The amount of recycled material in the U.S. in 1990 increased by 100 percent-we doubled it.
Would you do something like that (Earth Day) again? What's next for you?
Well, I'm getting kind of old for this. [laughs] But it would have to be something where it either had a large direct political impact, which may be something that's passed in America.... But it might be worth it to get that message out in people's faces again if there's an issue where individual behavior is arguably more important than the government (policy). The one that leaps out at me is population. If you believe as I do that we have already overshot the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth at any lifestyle that I find attractive, then you have to convince billions of people to, instead of having 3, 4, or 5 kids, have 1 or 2 kids. I think that you could have a huge impact, and I could see myself getting involved in something like that someday, although I certainly have no plans to at the moment.
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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1995 edition of the Washington Free
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