What’s lost since Philly’s amazing 1970 Earth Week | Will Bunch Newsletter

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Then-23-year-old University of Pennsylvania grad student Austan Librach really had no idea what he was getting into at the dawn of the 1970s when he signed up as local chair for this vague idea — to raise environmental conscious by organizing something that a U.S. senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, was calling “Earth Day.”

But when the third week of April 1970 rolled around, the ecological celebration in Philadelphia was arguably the most robust in the nation – so much so that Librach and his main co-organizer, Edward Furia, had to expand Philly’s event into Earth Week to accommodate a guest list that included then-presidential front-runner Sen. Edmund Muskie, Ralph Nader, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and the Broadway cast of Hair, which sang, of course, “Air!”

» READ MORE: How to celebrate Earth Day’s 50th anniversary while following stay-at-home orders

On the eve of the 50th anniversary, the other thing Librach told me he couldn’t realize back then was how much Earth Week would change the rest of his life. A regional planner who eventually settled in Austin, Texas, Librach set up environmental departments everywhere he worked. Looked back on Earth Week, he told me by telephone: “I think it was the best thing I accomplished in my whole career.”

It’s hard to disagree. The original Earth Day – April 22, 1970, marked by large events in cities from coast-to-coast – was arguably the most successful event of its kind ever held. With months, President Richard Nixon, a pro-business Republican, had helped launch the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and over the next few years Congress had passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

But simply celebrating that remarkable achievement isn’t the only reason I wanted to talk to Librach and recapture a little of the spirit of 1970. That first Earth Day happened only after decades of ignorance of what the Industrial Revolution and its greedy shortcuts had done to the planet, capped by cities darkened by smog at high noon, polluted urban rivers catching fire, and oil-soaked seagulls on California beaches. A lesson had been learned, but little more than two generations later that lesson has been forgotten.

Librach, now 73, is a man of very few words, but he does not mince those words when I asked him what President Trump has done to the legacy of Earth Day. “I think it’s very negative,” he said. “The Trump administration is anti-science. They’re not doing anything about global warming and other key environmental issues. I think it’s terrible.”

It’s beyond ironic that Trump, when asked about the environment, brags about America’s clean air and water – the legacy of pioneers like Librach, Furia and Nelson – but denies the reality of wildfire, droughts and floods already being caused by climate change that are continuing to get worse while Trump’s government rolls back regulations and hands departments like the EPA over to former fossil-fuel lobbyists.

While America in 1970 was hardly a nirvana (read more lower down), today’s climate denial and Republican-led war on science would have been unthinkable. Fifty years ago, Big Business knew it had to clean up its act – Earth Week got money from the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, including members who’d been accused of pollution – and even the GOP understood clean air was good politics. Nixon’s first EPA chief William Ruckelshaus (later made famous in Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”) reached out to Earth Week’s Furia and convinced him to work for the government as the agency’s mid-Atlantic director.

Indeed, the can-do brio of that first Earth Week seems remarkable in hindsight. The activists didn’t just give speeches but forced City Hall to make public water pollution data it had long kept secret. It’s no wonder that both Librach and Furia, the project director, never stopped working to clean up the environment. After his EPA stint, Furia moved to Washington State and worked on non-polluting electric cars – but unfortunately he won’t be around to see the 50th anniversary. Librach told me Furia died a couple of months ago.

We need his spirit today, but we also need something else we’ve lost since 1970. The quaint idea that saving Planet Earth isn’t just a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It’s a human problem – and we’d better get moving. Again.