Vol. I · No. 1 · A Field Report ★ The Whole Earth Dispatch ★ Filed 1960 – 1973
The Environmental Movement A broadside on the rights-conscious sixties, the spring that woke an industrial republic, & the laws it left behind.
Part III · Dispatches Filed from the Field · 1962 → 1973

Twelve
moments that
built a movement.

A book that named a danger. Laws that put words around wilderness. A canyon saved, a river on fire, and a spring in 1970 when 20 million Americans gathered in the streets. Below: a chronicle of dispatches that turned conservation into permanent national policy.

Sept. 27, 1962 Filed from Cambridge, MA. · Wire #01

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.

Carson's meticulously researched book documents how DDT and other synthetic pesticides accumulate in the food chain, devastate bird populations, and threaten human health. The opening "A Fable for Tomorrow" — quoted in our dossier on Rachel Carson — becomes the most influential single piece of environmental writing of the twentieth century.

The chemical industry mobilizes against the book; President Kennedy orders a Science Advisory Committee review that largely vindicates Carson in 1963.

Sept. 3, 1964 Filed from the Rose Garden, Wash. D.C. · Wire #02

The Wilderness Act becomes law.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Wilderness Act in the Rose Garden, capping a nine-year campaign led by Wilderness Society lobbyist Howard Zahniser. The Act creates the National Wilderness Preservation System and immediately protects 9.1 million acres of federal land from logging, mining, road-building, and motorized recreation. Today the system protects over 110 million acres across the United States.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Wilderness Act, September 3, 1964.
The Rose Garden · Sept. 3, 1964 — President Johnson signs the Wilderness Act; Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Alice Zahniser (widow of the Act's principal author) look on. (NPS, public domain.)

The Wilderness Act of 1964 · Section 2(c)

Public Law 88-577 · 78 Stat. 890 · Signed Sept. 3, 1964 · Principal author: Howard Zahniser, Wilderness Society

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

"In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States … it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness."

Why this matters. The Wilderness Act is the first federal law in American history to define wilderness as a legal category. Zahniser's phrase "untrammeled by man" — meaning unrestrained, not unmarked — was chosen carefully to mean a place where natural processes are allowed to govern. By specifying that wilderness must be preserved "for the American people of present and future generations," the Act introduces the principle of intergenerational responsibility into U.S. environmental law, a principle that NEPA (1969) would extend to all federal action. The Act passed Congress 78–8 in the Senate and 373–1 in the House — a bipartisan landslide that previewed the broad public consensus environmentalism would enjoy until the late 1970s.
1966 Filed from the Grand Canyon · Wire #03

The Sierra Club's Grand Canyon campaign.

When the federal Bureau of Reclamation proposed two dams that would flood stretches of the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Club — led by executive director David Brower — fought back with a national advertising blitz. Full-page newspaper ads asked readers, "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?"

The campaign worked: the dams were defeated, and the episode showed that conservationists could win a fight against the federal government by mobilizing public opinion. It also cost the Sierra Club its tax-exempt status — and, in the backlash, helped Brower turn the once-genteel hiking society into the modern environmental movement's most aggressive lobby. (See David Brower.)

Jan. 28, 1969 Filed from Santa Barbara, CA. · Wire #04

The Santa Barbara oil spill.

A blowout at Union Oil's Platform A, six miles off the California coast, releases an estimated 4.2 million gallons of crude oil over the next several months. Beaches blacken; an estimated 3,700 seabirds — gulls, grebes, cormorants — are confirmed dead. Television crews broadcast the images nationally for weeks.1

Local activists form Get Oil Out (GOO) within days. Sierra Club membership doubles in the two years that follow. The disaster is widely credited as a direct trigger for the first Earth Day, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the creation of the EPA.

Aerial view of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
Santa Barbara Channel · 1969 — Aerial view of crude oil spreading from Union Oil Platform A. (U.S. government, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)
June 22, 1969 Filed from Cleveland, OH. · Wire #05

The Cuyahoga River catches fire — again.

A spark from a passing train ignites an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The fire burns for only about 30 minutes and causes roughly $50,000 in damage — but Time magazine puts it on the cover of a new section titled "The Environment," describing a river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays."2

It is at least the thirteenth time the Cuyahoga has burned since the late 1800s — but the first time a fire on the river produces national outrage rather than a shrug. Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes uses the moment to demand federal water-pollution standards. The Cuyahoga fire becomes the iconic image of American water pollution and a direct driver of the 1972 Clean Water Act.

Jan. 1, 1970 Filed from the West Wing · Wire #06

NEPA takes effect.

On New Year's Day, President Nixon signs the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) — declaring it, in his words, "the most important piece of legislation in our history" up to that point. NEPA establishes a national environmental policy, creates the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, and requires federal agencies to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for every major action significantly affecting the environment.3

For the first time, the federal government is legally required to consider environmental consequences before approving highways, dams, military bases, pipelines, or any other federal project.

The National Environmental Policy Act · Section 101

Public Law 91-190 · 42 U.S.C. §4321 et seq. · Signed Jan. 1, 1970

"The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man's activity on the interrelations of all components of the natural environment … declares that it is the continuing policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable means and measures … to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans."

"The Congress recognizes that each person should enjoy a healthful environment and that each person has a responsibility to contribute to the preservation and enhancement of the environment."

Why this matters. NEPA is the legal expression of the ecological worldview that Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold had pressed into American thought. Its first sentence acknowledges "the interrelations of all components of the natural environment" — the central insight of the science of ecology. Its key innovation, the Environmental Impact Statement, gave citizens and courts a powerful tool to force government agencies to disclose what their projects would do to air, water, wildlife, and historic landscapes. Within a decade, NEPA lawsuits had stopped or modified hundreds of federal projects. Its language about "present and future generations" echoes the Wilderness Act of 1964, but NEPA extended that principle to every federal action, not just land-use decisions. More than fifty years on, NEPA remains the most-cited environmental law in U.S. courts.
Apr. 22, 1970 Filed nationwide · Wire #06

The First Earth Day.

Twenty million Americans — by some estimates, one in every ten people in the country — gather in schools, churches, parks, and on city streets for the first Earth Day. Senator Gaylord Nelson's idea of an environmental "teach-in" has, in his own words, "organized itself" through the grassroots. The day is "carefully managed by people who wanted to avoid associations with the radical left," historian Alan Brinkley notes — and as a result it appeals to Americans who are uncomfortable with antiwar protest, making it possibly the largest single demonstration in U.S. history.4

Within months, Congress passes the Clean Air Act of 1970 (December) and the EPA opens its doors (December 2). Earth Day will be repeated annually thereafter and observed in some 200 million-strong form internationally by 1990.

President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon plant a tree on the White House South Lawn in recognition of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.
White House South Lawn · Apr. 22, 1970 — President Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon plant a tree to mark the first Earth Day. (White House, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)
Dec. 2, 1970 Filed from the new EPA headquarters · Wire #07

The Environmental Protection Agency opens.

President Nixon's Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970, submitted to Congress on July 9 of that year, consolidates pollution-control programs scattered across more than a dozen federal offices into a single new agency. On December 2, the EPA officially begins operations under its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus.5

"The Clean Air Act, also passed in 1970, and the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, added tools to the government's arsenal of weapons against environmental degradation," Brinkley writes.4 The EPA quickly sues Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit over water-pollution violations, signaling that federal environmental law is now real.

Dec. 31, 1970 Filed from Capitol Hill · Wire #09

The Clean Air Act of 1970.

Signed by President Nixon at the end of the year, the Clean Air Act sets national, federally enforceable air-quality standards (the "National Ambient Air Quality Standards" or NAAQS) and requires automakers to reduce tailpipe emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides by 90% by 1975. It is one of the most ambitious environmental laws ever passed — and one of the most successful: U.S. air quality improves dramatically over the following decades even as the economy continues to grow.

June 14, 1972 Filed from EPA Headquarters · Wire #10

EPA bans DDT.

Ten years after the publication of Silent Spring, and eight years after Rachel Carson's death, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus announces the federal ban on virtually all uses of DDT in the United States. Bald eagle, peregrine falcon, and brown pelican populations — devastated by DDT-induced eggshell thinning — begin a slow recovery that will eventually allow all three species to be removed from the Endangered Species list.

Oct. 18, 1972 Filed from Capitol Hill · Wire #11

The Clean Water Act of 1972.

Congress overrides President Nixon's veto to enact the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 — better known as the Clean Water Act. The law sets a national goal of eliminating discharges of pollutants into navigable waters by 1985, establishes a federal permit program for industrial discharges, and provides $24.6 billion (in 1972 dollars) for municipal sewage-treatment construction. American rivers — including the Cuyahoga — begin a slow but historic recovery.

Dec. 28, 1973 Filed from the West Wing · Wire #12 · FINAL

The Endangered Species Act.

President Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act, giving the federal government broad authority to protect species — and the habitats on which they depend — from extinction. Passed nearly unanimously (92–0 in the Senate, 355–4 in the House), the ESA is the capstone of the great wave of 1960s and early-1970s environmental legislation. Within its first decade it will become — controversially — one of the most powerful environmental laws in the world.

The era of bipartisan environmental lawmaking that began with the Wilderness Act in 1964 closes with the Endangered Species Act. The movement does not end, but the easy political consensus that produced this remarkable run of laws will not return.

1. NOAA Office of Response and Restoration, "45 Years after the Santa Barbara Oil Spill"; UCSB Library, "Anguish, Anger, and Activism: Legacies of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill."
2. U.S. National Park Service, "The 1969 Cuyahoga River Fire"; Smithsonian Magazine, "The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969."
3. U.S. EPA, "Summary of the National Environmental Policy Act"; Council on Environmental Quality, "A Citizen's Guide to NEPA."
4. Alan Brinkley, American History: Connecting with the Past, 14th ed., ch. 30, pp. 849–850.
5. U.S. EPA, "Origins of the EPA" and "Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970."

What did the
movement leave behind?

See how the laws, organizations, and ideas of 1960–1973 shaped American life in the decades that followed — and a full bibliography of the sources used to build this project.

Explore the Legacy