Gaylord Nelson, father of "Earth Day"

Spending the last two days at the “Earth Day at 40″ conference has made me proud to be a Wisconsinite. There are many reasons why Wisconsin gave birth to Earth Day forty years ago. But the most important can be summed up in four names: John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson.

What an earth-loving tradition these four men created! John Muir — who grew up in Portage, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin — went on to found the Sierra Club, help protect Yosemite Valley, and urge us all to passionately engage with wilderness. As opposed to Muir — who immigrated from Scotland — Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin. Like Muir, he studied at the University of Wisconsin, to which he returned as a professor. He’s best known for his “frontier thesis,” which suggested that Americans were formed by their experiences on the frontiers of our continent. His insight that a people and their culture could only be understood in connection with the land they inhabit has proven pivotal to what became the environmental movement years later.

Aldo Leopold, while not born or raised in Wisconsin, actually developed his most important ideas on 80 acres of sandy bottom acreage along the Wisconsin River while teaching at the University in Madison. What grew from his study of this barren area — damaged by clear-cut logging, repeated fires, and overgrazing — was the “land ethic” outlined in A Sand County Almanac. This concept may predate the notion of sustainability, but it actually goes beyond it by stating “The land ethic…enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Leopold founded the Wilderness Society to protect this larger community which he dearly loved.

And finally, there’s Gaylord Nelson, father of “Earth Day.” Nelson was born in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, a rural area where hunting and fishing were important pastimes. Perhaps this — plus the impact of the other Wisconsinites who went before him — explains why he authored all of the environmental legislation of the 1970s, including the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act which established the EPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the Superfund Act. But more importantly he galvanized the environmental movement that works to this day to protect our planet.

Listening to the history of Earth Day yesterday — as recounted by Professor Adam Rome of Penn State University — plus a description of Gaylord Nelson’s work — by both Professors William Cronon and Gregg Mitman from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — I was struck by how much ahead of his time Gaylord Nelson was. He realized that environmental issues were always economic issues as well. In fact, he said, “The economy is a wholely owned subsidiary of the environment.”

Nelson also proposed a constitutional amendment, which stated that “Every person has an inalienable right to a decent environment.” Walter Cronkite may have been right when he noted that the first Earth Day activists were “predominantly young, predominantly white,” but Gaylord Nelson argued that the “environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is housing that is not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.” Perhaps his environmental vision is best summed up in his own words: “Our goal is decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other creatures on Earth.”