Silent Spring Revolution w/ Douglas Brinkley

I'm Ben Sawyer and before we get into this episode of The Road to Now, I just want to let everyone know that moving forward we're going to be editing our main conversations down to 49 minutes. But for those of you guys who support us on Patreon, you'll get the full thing. So if you want to do that, go over to Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow where you'll get the full unedited conversation. For example, today's is actually another 16 minutes of great conversation. So if you want to check that out again, it's Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow for all of you who are already there supporting us. Thank you so much. We hope that you guys will enjoy the extra minutes. For those of you guys who aren't, we welcome you with open arms. Without further ado, this week's new episode. I'm Bob Crawford and I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. Today, we are going to spend an hour outside, at least in our minds, close your eyes and be, picture that, that most beautiful place in nature. You just feel like you're one with nature. Go there in your mind as we talk to historian Doug Brinkley about his new book, which I would say it's part three of a trilogy and it is a magnum opus unto itself called Silent Spring Revolution, John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and The Great Environmental Awakening. Welcome Doug. Welcome back. Welcome back. Oh yeah, welcome back. That's the big thing. Happy New Year to you and everybody who tuned in. I really enjoy what you do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're so grateful to have you. I mentioned that this is part three of a trilogy. The first book was The Wilderness Warrior and it was about Theodore Roosevelt, his life as a conservationist and a president, and then Rightful Heritage, which looked at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies and love for the environment and belief in conserving the natural beauty and resources of the nation. Well now you move us into, really the book really is the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Mainly the '60s and the '70s. So talk about connecting this through line. Well to your point, I was going to really write about the long '60s, beginning the book in 1960 and ended in '73. So define that, define that for our listeners. That's the term that Ben and I have heard, but I think a lot of people out there don't know what you mean by the long '60s. The long '60s really begins with John F. Kennedy and ends in '73 with the Arab oil embargo and with Nixon, that really the collapse of the Nixon administration due to Watergate. The last big progressive legislation that passed was the Endangered Species Act, December of 1973, and by '74 was all Watergate. And then you had the Ford years where it started being the end of, you know, some people call Richard Nixon the last of the New Deal presidents because he did so many big, giant things, you know, like the Endangered Species Act or Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, created NOAA, Marine Mammal Protection, I could go on and on. And that was because Nixon was still part of that long shadow of FDR. But point of the trilogy was I once didn't mean it to be one. I once did a large book called The Wilderness Warrior on Theodore Roosevelt, his generation. When he was president 1901 and 1909, they saved 234 million acres of wild America. They saved the Grand Canyon and Muir Woods and Devil's Tower. Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service. He, you know, created what is ostensibly today's National Wildlife Refuge system. We have 550 of them. So that was the first big wave of what we call environmentalism. Second wave was FDR and The Great Depression. I wrote that in a book called The Rightful Heritage. And that book was, you know, went about FDR in the middle of the Depression, paid a dollar a day to people to plant trees. They planted 3 billion trees, the Civilian Conservation Corps. You know, when you just see random trees, places, there's a good chance they were planted by the CCC. He also, FDR was the progenitor of 800 state parks. And then say places like the Smokies and the Everglades. But that was the second wave of environmentalism. It's called conservation, but we're calling it environmentalism. The third wave is what I was going to write about, and I thought I'd begin it with the long 60s, 60 to 73, Kennedy Johnson, Nixon, Rachel Carson, boom. It turned out the story really began in 1945 because that third wave of environmentalism really began protesting nuclear testing. After we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was wide fear with groups of intellectuals and scientists and concerned citizens that we were going to destroy planet Earth, that we were doomed, that man now had a capacity to devastate itself to the point of no return. And this got amplified by the fact that we were testing in Nevada, desert, willy-nilly blowing up nuclear bombs just regularly to test them, same with the Marshall Islands and the Pacific. The point being, the Cold War was on, and Russia was testing, we were testing. Russia was testing. We'll test a bigger bomb. Poet Allen Ginsburg used to have a poem that way, "My bomb is bigger than your bomb. I've tested a bigger bomb than you're testing." Yeah, well, you want to see this bomb test? Well, it was producing waves of fallout all over the place. And in the '50s, a man named Barry Commoner, a brilliant professor of most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis, and Rachel Carson, who was writing a beautiful sea trilogy, our greatest natural writer who connects the oceans to conservation and what's so magical about our ocean environments, if you've never read Rachel Carson, read one of her three sea books, it's important. They're like, you know, it's like a classic, like, you know, the scarlet letter or, you know, the visible man or something. But the, with that going on, by the late '50s, Marjorie Spock, who was an organic farmer in New York, started complaining also that DDT was being sprayed over her organic farm. DDT, like nuclear weapons, was one of the marvels of World War II. If you were fighting in the Pacific Theater, you'd get sprayed with DDT because it killed lice and it killed, you know, mosquitoes and helped prevent malaria diseases. But it got green lit on being sprayed on humans and on agriculture and wildlife without really being, in modern terms, you know, deaded or, you know, regulated or tested on its biological impact on living things, living organisms. And so Marjorie Spock, with this big spread of land out in New York, said, you're taking my life away because the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Suffolk County, Mosquito Control, were blanket spraying. Our whole country after World War II was crop spraying agriculture. And we were, well, I killed insects. It was contaminating property and making wildlife sick. So she sued Marjorie Spock but lost, went all the way to the Supreme Court. But Rachel Carson, the great sea writer of a trained marine biologist, she took all of that data and started working on what is one of the most incendiary and important books of social justice ever written in that silent spring. It came out in '62 because at that moment in '62, there was no EPA. There was no sewage treatment plant. There was no Clean Air Act, meaning a one state could say, here's our clean air law while the next state had no law whatsoever. And Eric, you can't have state laws with air. And so her book was like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle when Theodore Roosevelt was President or the pamphlet that Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in the American Revolution. It woke people up to a problem. And Rachel Carson said that connected conservation, Theodore Roosevelt FDR style, saving beautiful places, conservation with public health. Rachel Carson's telling their kids, you're getting sick because of your playing in the backyard. And when you start telling folks that they're getting sick, it's not about saving a monument or a weird species of some kind, exotic species, it's about me. I may be getting cancer in leukemia because of the federal government's not regulating DDT and they're allowing atomic fallout to come and make children sick. The combo of that anti-nuclear testing, anti-DDT movements, the springboard of this third wave. That is interesting in the fact that it overlaps a lot with what's going on at the time. The kind of the old left breaking down into the new left, right? The focus on the individual, it's a new appeal. It's not the mass appeal of like, we should save this for everyone. It's like, it's affecting you personally. And that's so much of what I think is fascinating about your book. To go back, I recently heard Noam Chomsky talking about the day the atomic bomb detonated. He's in his 90s. We've lost the people who remember that. And he said he just went into the woods and sat, he was in high school. He just sat and thought about it. And that is an individual experience, just mind-shattering, dealing with that as an individual. And your book is so much about how individuals themselves have impact but also how their experiences, the experience of this generation, of Kennedy, of Johnson, of Nixon, how that plays out and how that shapes their commitment and even Rachel Carson as well. Could you go back and talk about these stories maybe beginning with Kennedy and Johnson and then the difference in the way they grew up and how it shaped the way they understood the environment? Absolutely. And to your point, that's interesting about Noam Chomsky. I didn't know that. I wish I would have spoken with them. There was a group of people right after Hiroshima Nagasaki that is starting with a man named Norman Cousins wrote an essay called, "Is Man Off Salete?" As much as it was victory over Japan, there were smart people that really were worried about what this portends. And to my utter shock, one of them was John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who's seen as a multimillionaire, womanizing, smart, but manipulative guy. But his moral, his Catholic instinct after he heard of Hiroshima, he went and tried to get convinced. Henry Luce of Time Magazine and the Cardinal in New York and Boston to go to the White House and say, "Do not drop another one of these bombs on people. It's immoral. You're putting a moral stain on the United States." So he was worried about it. And that hit young John F. Kennedy quite a bit. So much so when John F. Kennedy's president, he does one of the great ecological acts. It was seen as a Cold War achievement, but from a point of ecology, JFK worked around the clock to get a limited nuclear test ban treaty. And he used Norman Cousins, who wrote the article in 1945 against nuclear weapons and created saying the activist group, Kennedy secretly used Cousins to do his diplomacy with Khrushchev because anybody in State Department or CIA or defense would not have wanted the stopping of nuclear testing. Cousins got to Khrushchev, quietly made what we call track to diplomacy deal. Kennedy knew he could get Khrushchev to do it. And Russia, Britain, the United States in the summer of '63 spanned atmospheric and underwater testing, which has made our lives today so much better. And the very commoner I wrote about in his book called The Close Circle, an environmental book, said this is the greatest environmental act of all time, the banning of nuclear weapons, because it shows citizen protest groups can get a result, even on something as high as a big Cold War issue. And it's meaning it encouraged more people to protest because they won. And one of the things I found in my book, and I tell young people today worried about climate change, is have fun, saving the world is a rough deal, but have fun doing it and get some victories, not some small ones, stop a nuclear plan or save a forest from being clear cut. You can't immediately do the whole climate change agenda, but start and be active and get engaged, have a smile on your face, meet friends, have fun, do it. Now, John F. Kennedy, you have what we call blue mind. He loved the ocean. Even in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he's doodling sailboats and ocean skates. He craved it. He couldn't wait to be at his home in Hyannisport. And so I call that, I mean, I'd ask our people listening and watching, what's your Walden pod? Kennedy was that Cape Cod, and as president, he saved Cape Cod National seashore. To do primary ill estate of Massachusetts, and he saved it. Lyndon Johnson's with this. Doug, can I interrupt before we go to Johnson, because I want to point this out from the book. The upbringings of these presidents, it's like, you know, you're a presidential historian in so many ways. And so you frame this through the lives of the presidents and their connections, their personal intimate connections with nature, right? With the environment. One thing that was fascinating to me is John F. Kennedy, they had a swimming pool that they filled with salt water, and they would bring sea life from the sea to the pool. Exactly Bob. That's how he grew up. That's how he grew up. He and Bobby and Teddy. You got it. Rose Kennedy, their mother, was raised and conquered at Walden pod and became the country's top therovian. People don't realize Henry David Thoreau not just wrote Walden, but he also wrote a book about the main woods. He wrote a book about, you know, Connecticut and Merrimack rivers. And the saying of Thoreau was in wildness is the preservation of the world. Rose Kennedy believed that fully. And she even went for the CIA had Rose Kennedy. When she was in Russia, she went to investigate if Thoreau was being carried in Russian libraries. So this is an engaged conservation family that's thinking in terms of Thoreau and Roosevelt's and preservation. But particularly, John F. Kennedy, we owe for our seashore protection. He didn't just do Cape Cod as president, he did Padre Island, Texas saved it. He did point rays in California as a national seashore. He then created a list of lakeshores and say places like the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin and picture rock, Michigan, sleeping bear dunes, Michigan, Indiana dunes. The point is shorelines was Kennedy's great bit, Johnson coming out of the Petternalli's River in Texas, Lyndon was more of a rancher type, a good one. How do you, I'm going to judge my neighbor, how they take care of their own property. Who's a good rancher, a good rancher today has great conservation ethics that knows how to have a land ethic. But Johnson thought much more in terms of the world as American, he was a TR like in that way. Lyndon and Johnson's president pushed for the Redwood National Park in California. These are our giant trees, save them, they're America, save North Cascades, it's our prettiest mountain range. So I give him credit for all that, but the Vietnam War of course is going on and here you're saving these American heirlooms where we're spraying Agent Orange and chemicals in Southeast Asia, destroying that whole ecosystem. So it's complicated, but none of it is, Johnson did a lot. Just he created our, the trail like here in North Carolina, you know, the Appalachian Trail Systems, Lyndon Johnson or Pacific Crest Trail and I'm in Texas like Guadalupe National Park in the big thicket. Lady Bird was doing wildflower plantings and cleaning up roadsides and it was the people was popular in the sixties. Right. So look, let me ask you this because there are so many through lines that go through the whole book and so many, you introduce us to so many people. Tell our audience, our listeners about William O. Douglas, because he is one of the great characters of this book, the man who would be president, the man who it would have been vice president, if not Harry Truman, introduce us to him and his relationship with Roosevelt and then his relationship with Kennedy. But most importantly, he was a conservationist and environmentalist first and a Supreme Court justice. Second, absolutely. Bob Douglas is a big part of my book. He was born in Yakima, Washington and grew up poor. That's a real agricultural part of the state, but he couldn't walk as a kid. They thought he had polio doctors would tell him he probably never be able to walk, but he started a therapy routine and that walk turned into a longer walk and he developed into one of the world's great mountain climbers and in fact, in 1950s, he went to the Himalayas and climbed and wrote a book about that experience, adopting Buddhist philosophy and bringing into our Supreme Court. But Douglas was a legal wizard, he'd gone to Columbia Law, he was the Sterling Professor Law Yale. John F. Kennedy's father hired him for the Security Exchange Commission at Wall Street during the Great Depression and his job was fighting for bankruptcy. Making sure people weren't cheating the country. By 1937, he's being put on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, and he's FDR's favorite justice. They play poker and from '37 all the way through the 1970s that I'm writing about, Douglas is fighting for environment first, as you said, over anything else. And I write in the book about some of his campaigns, like they were going to build a road on the C&O Canal, Washington, D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland, and he hiked 186 miles along the canal with Medial and Toe to show them how beautiful this was. And he won the C&O Canal hike. He went to places like Kentucky and stopped a dam to save beautiful gorge and river system. He went to Arkansas, canoed and demanded that there be no dam and that the Buffalo River of Arkansas be saved as a pristine river and he won. He went to the Olympic Coast with Bobby Kennedy and the Attorney General and future Senator from New York before he was assassinated in '68. And Bobby, RFK, and Justice Douglas hiked all along the coast of Washington to stop a road from being built along the ocean so one could approach an ocean landscape without it being marred by industrialization and commercialism. I just touched on a few. He came down here to Texas, went to the Guadalupe Mountains and went to Big Thicken and helped save them. Besides Theodore Roosevelt, we never had somebody as engaged in land and water conservation with the arch up to this, Douglas. He wrote a couple books called My Wilderness and he took on the big polluters of his day like it was nobody's business. First of all, the C&O Canal part of the book is so much fun because it's the Washington Post, right? He takes a couple journalists from the Washington, maybe the editor, the head of the Washington Post if I'm not mistaken. But so quick aside, C&O Canal, I can't think of that without thinking of John Quincy Adams and perhaps his greatest moment as president was when he went there to break ground on the C&O Canal because he really wanted infrastructure and he had a terrible, really tough presidency and he wasn't a people person but he's there and it's groundbreaking and they give him like a golden spade shovel and he goes to stick it in the ground and he hits a tree stump and everybody's like, "Oh, the crowd is silenced." He tries it again and again, he doesn't break ground and third time he takes off his overcoat, holds up the shovel to the crowd and gives it all he's got and he comes up with a big shovel full of dirt and the crowd cheers and he realizes in that moment, I could have been a different president but getting back really, there's so many people and so much to talk about here but Douglas, like it fascinates me because he was almost FDR, like he was against, he didn't want them to drop the bomb, right? And he came very close to being the guy who would have made that decision. Yep. Talk about that for a second. You know, really it boiled down to Harry Truman or William O. Douglas to be the VP for FDR in 1944, Roosevelt was sick, so who was the VP mattered? Personally, FDR wanted William O. Douglas but because in some ways of his fights with the corporate world, if you'd like, Truman was much closer to, much more liked by a lot of the money people in the party. He was seen as a more moderate person, he would have delivered the state of Missouri which was important at any rate. There's a big story about it, we won't have time for it right now but it could have gone either way and it was like Truman because of the orderings of the name on a piece of paper which wasn't meant to be that, it was just both of their names and it would have been a different world if there would have been no Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II because just as Douglas did not believe that you would use nuclear weapons on a civilian population and he thought that that was a program that at very least he may have shown it in a test but I'm not sure he would have done that but anyway, it would have been a different world. That's one of those what ifs and instead he stayed on the Supreme Court and maybe in the long run did equal amount of good if he could have stopped the bombs because he really was remarkable on his campaign so it was a Douglas stop damming of the help stop the dams being built or we would have lost the Grand Canyon. If you go up to Washington State you'll see vast William O. Douglas wilderness areas. He pushed for wild and scenic rivers that we have around our country today. The list of his achievements in this realm, environmental realm is staggering and so I would ask people to start looking in, read my book but also just pull up online, William O. Douglas and the environment and educate yourself about them because it's worth giving them those minutes. So I realize that there are two stories going on here, right there's more than two but one is this struggle to save the environment, right? The other that's going on is this amazing moment of American expansion and internal expansion like Eisenhower and the highway systems coming in, urban renewal. All this like the environment, the nation is growing and infrastructure is spreading and that is and then scientific technologies and chemicals and all these great discoveries and so there's like this like push and pull between progress and conservation. And so there's really, so at the moment there's all these great environmental victories. There's also an opposition forming and defining itself at the same time. Talk about that for a second. Well, what it is is just what you said after World War II when FDR went from doctor win the war, turn in from doctor new deal to doctor win the war. We green lead everything was green light. There was no regulatory process, it was chemical use it it's a weapon use it we were did we did all hands on deck and so we produce some of these astonishing chemicals during the war and they became and started having commercial use in the in the Truman and Eisenhower years and it was really destroying our landscapes and I mean you couldn't breathe the so many cars were sold in Pasadena, Los Angeles, New York, there are all these smog alerts every day people getting respiratory illness in Denora, Pennsylvania in 1948 I write about an entire community got trapped. It's like a Stephen King novel and a dome of poison and people everybody in the community either died or was rushed to the hospital with serious respiratory illness due to the poison air. And I asked people to imagine a world where there's nobody regulating the stuff we and there is no EPA there is no clean air acts and and so it was a mess we were destroying everything and animal extinction was going out there I mean our symbol the bald eagle due to DDT was on the way to extinction and and you know the California condor was going the way of the dodo bird you know we we had you know just virtually everything you know was was was Helter Skelter and the landscape and so people started protesting and it was you just citizens you know mom smog at tears dressed in Disney costumes to clean the era Pasadena citizen protest groups in the Hudson River know the Con Edison building a a facility at historic part of the river the everywhere if there started becoming grassroots environmental groups and they all started meeting together and we had Kennedy and Johnson and willing to listen to the people's movement and even Richard Nixon was forced to become an environmental president because the public was demanding it Nixon was president only a few days when the Santa Barbara oil spill hit in a group called goo get the oil out formed and that in television went color in 1967 so here it's early 69 and we're seeing in our our living rooms birds trapped against the muck and and you know the blue paradise Santa Barbara just under environmental assault and it starts forcing Nixon's hand and so he becomes an environmental president so the big lesson Kennedy Johnson Nixon is it wasn't that this was their thing per se but the public was demanding it and they heard and together the three of them their administrations accomplished what we live by today NEPA National Environmental Policy Act which means impact statements for anything you want to build which gave really birth to environmental law the Environmental Protection Agency of 1970 Clean Air Act in 1970 Clean Water Act of 72 Dangered Species 73 NOAA got created Marine Mammal Protection this together is what we're living on right now so so look Nixon if you just pull three people off the street and said you know think of say hold Kennedy and Johnson in your mind they get one picture now hold Richard Nixon in your mind they get a completely different picture he did have a connection to the environment talk about that well Nixon first off remember he's from California and you know even if you're a Republican one way or another you're going to be dealing with environmental issues out there and he also lived in San Clemente on the ocean there was always a was and is a big NIMBY not a my backyard group you once you get wealthy and have a beautiful property you suddenly become an environmentalist because you don't want anybody marring your neighborhood because you just bought into it and more than that he was was a friend with John Ehrlichman who went to prison for Watergate but Ehrlichman was a Seattle land and water environmental lawyer a NIMBY lawyer stopping aluminum plant from affecting you know wealthy people there as David Brower the Sierra Club called Ehrlichman a covert green in the Nixon White House Nixon told Ehrlichman look I'll do some far reaching environmental things but I don't want Ed Muskie a senator from Maine getting any credit he hated musky that much can I just step in here and say this is what blows my mind like how many times even when Nixon wants something he's so petty that if somebody else he doesn't like wants it he'll almost be like well then we're not going to do it he was mind blowing it is that way and out of the man who kept the enemies list Nixon the biggest enemy was Ed Muskie which is hard to believe but he was so convinced that muskie was going to be the nominee in 72 it was going to be the face of the Democrats but more to the point early right Nixon's only getting his clothes in the closet of the White House and muskie was denouncing Nixon as a failed president and on Vietnam in particular but also on the environment and everything else and the list of Democrats that would immediately went after Nixon Ted Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy and Frank church and you know Gaylord Nelson all of them except scoop Jackson of Washington state who is known as the senator from Boeing who liked the Vietnam War because he was making all this money for the you know aerospace companies and the like in the in Seattle who happened to also be big pro military spending Cold War Hawk but also a environmental minded senator very environmental sided who had I used to think Ted Kennedy had the best Senate staff that I've seen in recent years but boy scoop Jackson's was good and he hired a bunch of environmental lawyers and they went to work and Nixon would sign it if scoop Jackson was involved it would be bipartisan Nixon Jackson and then Nixon would be able to say screw screw muskie he wouldn't allow muskie into the White House he wouldn't allow him to take credit for anything the pettiness of Nixon with muskie it blew my mind I couldn't believe he would blow an entire policy and yet when I saw Donald Trump's presidency I could see Trump doing that there it's like there it is that's what Nixon used to do yeah same thing except for with fewer results I would I would argue and it was about a couple of individuals in the opposition party but he would punish an individual by siding with their it's what he did with Russia and China Nixon right they don't like we'll triangulate play one off the other he entered the Democratic Party Nixon to play muskie off of Jackson because who do you think muskie started hating now Jackson because Jackson got the was getting all the perks of the becoming mister environments that a muskie so anyway it's interesting if you want to get in the weeds of that kind of political infighting well I want to bring it back out that's okay because I think this book it really crystallized just a lot of things and I want to say this your book is a hopeful book you even say that up front you're like this is heavy but it's hopeful and I agree with you but I couldn't help but feel like when I found out that North Carolina passed its own environmental bill of rights in like 73 I was like I grew up there I didn't know about it side note they stripped it apart when Macquarie was governor 2015 so that's just a little interesting thing there that I learned but you get at this point where when you're talking about it you're talking about the environmental protection act almost nobody votes against it it has incredible support across the board and now we live in a world where that has become partisan and you peg that at like 1980 you say like in 1980 it's like every the the pro environmentalist faction of the GOP just vanished and I think it's interesting because there's the question of why and you talk about Nixon's post presidency and you say in there Nixon felt like he did so much for foreign relations that he felt like he didn't need to like stand up for what he had done in Watergate like he was just kind of like whatever like the results are clear which meant that he never made his environmental accomplishments part of his like post presidential legacy so you have those two things and that was an interesting side to it but the thing that I wonder going back to what I said about individual experience maybe the reason you see less support for environment is because it worked we might just be victims of our own success really interesting because both are true that we were victims of our own success the environmental movement I'm writing about in my book Silent Spring Revolution one they had win after win after win after win it was awesome victories for environmentalists by 73 there became a counter revolution to roll back that Silent Spring Revolution and that was the birth of there was a man named Justice Lewis Powell before he became a Supreme Court Justice he was the Chief Tobacco Lobbyist and Powell was angry that that he now had to put on cigarettes those warning labels and they weren't allowed to do certain kind of commercials that they're being demonized tobacco as being poisoning you right and so Powell writes a memo to the chamber of commerce head and said we've got to create an entire different revolution Ralph Nader Rachel Carson types William O Douglas they beat us we're being regulated to death my look at tobacco what's happening to us we've got to all pull together meaning the oil and gas mineral extraction alcohol industry whatever might be that was starting to get regulated in different ways we pulled together and we're going to create a capitalist laissez faire revolution to slay these socialist dragons of Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader and he they say Powell it'll take about 40 years and out of this guys this memo is born the Cato Institute of today the American Enterprise Institute the Federalist Society the Koch Brothers the Scape the Brothers I mean Heritage Foundation it's endless it became a right-wing counter revolution to dismantle the accomplishments of the silent spring revolution because they feel they went so far and not to dismantle some things like the the saving of North Cascades National Park or not to dismantle parts of that but to go at the core of this idea of impact statements endangered species slowing down real estate because if you want to build a shopping mall but a rare bird a golden gold cheek warbler lives there you you're delayed for five years and they you know this is what their war became against by and by 1980 with the Reagan Revolution they killed off the leading environmental by targeting the leading environmental senators like Gaylord Nelson lost a Wisconsin like George McGovern you know a South Dakota many more and by 80 we're in the Reagan Revolution and no longer is environment a bipartisan endeavor it's now it's become energy independence and unregulated unregulated capitalism versus the individual yeah versus the environmental community activism and we're they're at loggerheads you know and that's we're at right they're pounding at each other instead of working together but the the winds were big of the generation I write about they won a lot and so yes the air is better in Los Angeles you know Lake Erie was almost dead Kurt Vonnegut said Lake Erie's filled with human excrement and Clorox bottles and Dr. Seuss had a line about it in the in the Lorax in Lorax in Dr. Seuss theater guys will later a student group says we've cleaned Lake Erie up now you can fish in it again and Seuss changed the line in a later edition of the book to told the kids yeah you're right you guys did good there you started cleaning the lake meaning there's six I it's not perfect like Geary it's got a lot of problems today but at least you're not feeling if you go in the water you might die I mean people have to remember in 69 the Cuyahoga River caught on fire rivers on fire because of dirty oil grind the Rouge River in Michigan on fire that's not happening right now didn't Randy Newman write a song about that Randy Newman wrote a song about it yeah and actually music Bob is a big part of all this I know that kind of thing interests you a lot but that first Earth Day of 1970 I mean Pete Seger singing all these environmental folk songs but I write up you know about Marvin Gaye Mercy me the ecology and the impact that becoming a hit with the in a particular hit in the environmental justice movement of today but it you know Neil Young and you know Paul Williams wrote a song out in the country which became a popular hit there's start Joni Mitchell you know writing Big Yellow Taxi and and there be just became environmental consciousness that rock and roll started and folk music started really honing in on and helping the movement can I ask you about the connection between the civil rights movement and the environmental movement I mean because Coretta Scott King is a character in this book on her standing on her own as an activist for the environment big time more than Martin even well look Martin Luther King said in something like this over and over again what good does it do for us to integrate a lunch counter or say Greensboro North Carolina what good is due to integrate that lunch counter if the milk we're drinking is contaminated with radioactive fallout from blowing winds of the nuclear test race can only go so far if we're poisoning everybody and Coretta Scott King was the leading voice most effective activist with anti-nuclear weapons nuclear disarmament banning the bomb nuclear testing she go to Geneva she protest in front of the White House she protest in New York I mean old-fashioned picket carrying protesting and that was seen as left-wing behavior back then but when you look at it from today's perspective it's very sane like why should why are we poisoning Americans by nuclear testing you know so but she you're right she's a a major figure in my book well Bob I want to I got a question now I think Bob's gonna like this question I'm just gonna say you Bob you tell me if you like this question and you that that last question really I was already gonna ask this but it makes it even more perfect so behind the scenes it's not that no one resists the environmental movement in fact there is a very prominent early critic of all of this who would also be very opposed to the civil rights movement a man who when we talked to Jeff Cowey recently about his book freedoms dominion this came up it's George Wallace George Wallace is against all of this from before earlier from earlier on you say like even in the republican democratic parties where there's wasp support Wallace is calling out his trash and we talked about Bob in that last question like is modern politics George Wallace politics and so I wonder when you see him you know this this this emerging what do you think is today's politics like that yes the big people beyond you know an obvious company that's being sued or something but politically George Wallace and Barry Goldwater but particularly Wallace was opposed to all of these regulations he was a leading anti-environmental voice what's different the the it was kind of Wallace for the blue collar voter white blue collar men versus Walter Ruther the head of the United Auto Workers up in Michigan who was an environmentalist and Ruther gets killed in a plane crash in 70 and with the death of Ruther Ruther funded the first earth day of 1970 with the death of big labor leader on the environment like Walter Ruther it allowed that George Wallace faction to hit the factory suddenly and I'm just calling it white blue collar factory you know white working class men in the manufacturing industries were calling environmentalist pinkos they're going to take your jobs away they want to shut your factory down and Wallace was a leader of that kind of rhetoric trying to helping sway working people to disdain the environmentalists and that happens today you know people tree huggers get out of here because some workers say environmentalism means my factory gets closed and I lose my job or in a little later iteration the factory closes in Akron and moves to Mexico where they don't have environmental laws like this and so it creates a working person problem the environmental movement and that's why the right is painted off environmentalist as the leadest don't you think it's ironic that people who hunt sit in tree stands right beside a tree is almost like they're hugging them and they call other people tree huggers it's just wanted to point that out hey Doug I know we can't talk about everybody in this book but can you just speak for a few minutes about Stuart Udall Stuart Udall's great man and his son today is our ambassador to New Zealand Udall came out of Arizona he played basketball he was a world war two hero he became a democratic congressman from Arizona friend of Jack Kennedy Kennedy appointed him a secretary of interior and he's our great interior secretary for Kennedy and in Johnson Udall wrote a book as interior secretary called the quiet crisis which is quite good but more importantly the interior department now was an alliance with groups like the wilderness society the Sierra Club national Audubon the nature conservancy he's working with them all very closely and so when you rank interior secretaries Udall is the top one in fact our the interior building in Washington today is named after Stuart Udall and you know the interior is an interesting place it's it harbors the national park service U.S. Fish and Wildlife Bureau of Indian Affairs you know it's just a lot going on in in interior and Udall was able without without Udall I'm not sure the environmental movement could have caught fire the way it did in the 60s the activists knew the federal government was on their side and the great thing also is a man in Udall and the other guy that's in my book William Ruckel's house the first head of the EPA because he had to be as first EPA had to be a cop he had to go in there and say you're not complying to the EPA and to the NEPA and impact statements on the environment and so he had to go after cities people and bus polluters just like the Brown versus Topeka decision right on race civil rights no more separate but equal okay Brown's past well what happens after Brown is are you are people following the federal government that's what Little Rock was about in 57 that's what Ruby Bridges in Orleans in 1960s about with with the EPA created it was about are you complying in to his credit Ruckel's house in Nixon in 71-72 started busting people left and right for not following they're saying EPA is real well today you see the Republican Party wanting to destroy the EPA whatever George W. Bush would try to fire all the wildlife biologists they don't want to know how it's going to affect the environment they want instant money instant building nothing to slow down their corporate endeavors and and so it we're still in a war with this going on here right now between the silent spring revolution and the Lewis Powell memo group where it's a fight for our what kind of country we live in right now in the southwest there's a battle over a lithium mine and I don't know if you've been following this but it's kind of fascinating because where do we go on the one hand we need the lithium to make the batteries for cars on the other hand that mine is going to devastate the landscape around it is this contradiction between environmental and priorities is this something new or is this something we've seen before and how might we reconcile that it's very hard to reconcile because by nature we're consuming right where Americans are six percent of the world's population and we're consuming like 30 percent of the world's natural resources I tell people never to shame somebody for their you know unless they're throwing garbage out their window and you know they're doing pouring you know breaking laws toxic you know polluting rivers arrest them in in the full force of the law but shaming somebody because they're driving on gasoline or shaving somebody because of their carbon footprint is not the way to go it's about love and it's about loving you live it's about loving your local lake and local river and just saying hey I want this community the kids growing up to be able to swim in my river that's not radical that's not and when I speak places if I go in and say that if I go or let's say I go to Cleveland say keep Lake Geary so we can swim in it and fish Lake Geary keep the beaches clean I will get a bipartisan standing ovation if I use the word environment or climate change I lose half at least of the audience because those words have become politicized they're seen as trigger words for Democrats and the right box but yet when I said let's just have Lake Geary clean and everybody wants Lake Geary clean so there's a there's the spot everywhere where you guys are living locals want it to be special nobody wants a dirty community or you know a toxic sludge dump site in your neighborhood so if we start locally and think about it I think that'll start an reaction of an informed citizens that start thinking that can we make the whole world livable like that and it might be pie in the sky but localism is really I think the key right now at this moment in time because nature is such a part of being human that we all love it so much it's part of our life but we get lazy and wanting to fight to protect it and so a $20 to some local group or you know talk to some kids about get some kids into bird watching or whatever it might be has an impact and that's why we we're where we're at right now the generation Z is poised to do a lot of the heavy lifting but all of us have to do local work Doug it is always a pleasure to have you amongst us this is great man thank you you're the best because you actually read books and know what you're doing and I'm honored that you guys have me on a couple times man come come back anytime and and we love it we love what we do this is our our history it's the spine of our lives it connects us to those who came before and it helps us to frame the future so it's it's the most important thing in the world the book is silent spring revolution john f kennedy rachel carson linden johnson richard nixon and the great environmental awakening it is available in text it is available on audiobook you guys if you want to know more we only touch the tip of the iceberg that is melting with this conversation like 700 pages well Doug we'll let you go and enjoy your home time and hopefully we talk soon thanks guys take care all right have a good one bye bye thank you so much thank you for listening to the road to now if you enjoyed this episode please text a link to a friend or share a link on social media or go tell the world by giving us five stars and a review on apple podcasts or five stars on spotify or the most stars you can give on whatever podcast app you use there's a bunch of them now we'd like to say a special thanks to our supporters on patreon with special recognition to our washingtonians tanya marsh mary hawking tim and katlyn wells vig white matt williams team martin and williams and frank edwards nate farer jennifer m magnolia and regina divine if you'd like to support our work and get extras for it join us at patreon.com slash the road to now you can get the full uncut version of this episode extra episodes bonus materials and more that's all available at patreon.com slash the road to now for more on the road to now visit our website the road to now.com where you can easily search our back catalog and quickly find links to content why is it so good because it was designed by seven ages design the road to now is hosted and produced by bob crawford and benjamin sawyer our associate producer is gary flecher this episode was edited by gary flecher and ben sawyer our theme music is by paul defiglia for bob crawford this is ben sawyer thank you for listening to the road to now take care