1970: In Philadelphia, consciousness got nation’s biggest boost

This article originally published in The Inquirer on April 16, 1990.

As Thacher Longstreth remembers it, it all began when he, as president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, agreed to meet a couple of young men who were planning something called Earth Day for the spring of 1970.

“I thought at first it was just a confrontation,” Longstreth said. “The Earth versus business, primarily to get attention. I thought the only way they could do it would be to set fires, throw oil, other sophomoric stunts.

“But I had read Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring,’ and it got to me — the idea of not hearing birds in the morning . . .” Longstreth said. “They assured me they had constructive ideas and wanted no confrontations. I flipped.”

And so, 20 years ago, the planners of the first Earth Day — it became Earth Week in Philadelphia — had gotten, that quickly, the cooperation of The Establishment.

They made the most of it, capping it on April 22, 1970, with a six-hour festival in Fairmount Park that drew 25,000 to 30,000 clean-air lovers. It was the biggest event in the country that day, remarkable considering that there were Earth Day events in countless cities and towns and at an estimated 2,000 colleges and 10,000 high schools.

It all sprang from U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s idea for a national event on the environment, first voiced in September 1969. Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, envisioned then a nationwide series of teach-ins, mostly on college campuses; the term Earth Day was born later.

In Philadelphia, four young men studying city planning under Professor Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania embraced Nelson’s idea.

“I can’t remember who started it” here, said one of them, Austan Librach, in a telephone interview last week. “But I ran with it,” and became chairman of the fledgling planning group.

But soon it became apparent that a full-time director was needed. McHarg told the group about a former student named Edward W. Furia.

“I had just gotten degrees in both law and city planning at Penn,” Furia said in a telephone interview, “and in my graduate thesis had written that the way to develop programs was to use the mass media to bring your ideas to the ordinary people and get them accepted.

“I was not an environmentalist,” Furia said. “But I wanted to use my concepts to sell a set of values, much the way Procter & Gamble would set out to sell soap.”

Furia took over the show. Among his tasks: raising funds for all expenses, including his own salary.

Into the mix then came Elliot Curson, a friend of Furia’s from Air Force days who was making a name in advertising circles as creator of the slogan ‘’They’re Younger, They’re Tougher and Nobody Owns Them” that had gotten Arlen Specter and Tom Gola elected as district attorney and city controller.

“We were coming out of the turbulent ‘60s and wanted to so something that was memorable and that avoided controversy,” Curson said last week. “We used a great deal of humor. I think we brought out the problems in a positive way. We identified the problems but didn’t give specific instructions on what to do.”

Before Curson could get his advertising campaign under way, before Furia could plan his events, the fundamental problem arose: money.

“Many of the more radical members of our committee did not like the idea of going to the chamber, thinking this was going to the enemy,” Furia recalled. “But we needed the business community. We’d gotten some seed money from the Philadelphia Gas Works, but we needed more.”

As Furia puts it, Longstreth, then as now also a member of City Council, became a “key performer . . . He got in tremendous hot water in the chamber. But Thach really knocked heads; he told them he felt this was an issue that would have enormous impact on the business community and that it had to be dealt with.”

“I laid my job on the line,” Longstreth said.

An important battle came when Furia and Librach invaded a chamber board meeting that was considering an ad campaign saying the business community wasn’t to blame for environmental problems.

“Thach let us speak,” Furia said, “and we told them that the reality was that a major problem existed and you can’t hide from it. We don’t want to make any scapegoats, but we want you to join us.”

In the end, local industries not only coughed up lots of money, but they sent technicians to speak at two symposiums that became an important part of Earth Week, producing book-thick documents that long served as what-to-do models.

With support increasing, and with college organizations raining ideas upon him, Furia decided that Philadelphia would have an Earth Week, not merely an Earth Day.

Gradually, the activity and enthusiasm of the planners began to have serious effects. Early in April, after two months of unrelenting pressure from the Earth Day gang, the city released long-secret data on industrial polluters. It was the first major victory.

Some of the humorous ideas also had an effect. Swarthmore’s Phil Simkin came up with a winner — the bags.

One day in early April, a truck unloaded 11 writhing, tumbling burlap bags on Chestnut Street near Broad. Traffic was brought to a halt; lunchtime pedestrians were agog. The bags crawled and rolled from street to sidewalk and back, strange noises emanating from their innards.

“Ummmm, bag. What are you doing?” a well-dressed businessman asked, leaning over one of the burlap mounds. “I’m dying,” it gasped. “What time is it?” shrilled another. “Too late,” boomed a third. The message got across: Clean up the environment before it swallows us.

The evening before Earth Day itself, there was a big rally on Independence Mall. It featured the cast of “Hair,” U.S. Sen. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and Ralph Nader. It drew 7,000 people, and a Chestnut Street parade that preceded it was watched by thousands more.

Earth Day eve was cold, damp, smoggy. But the day itself dawned bright and clear. Warm sun pushed the temperature well into the 50s. Several thousand people gathered at the Art Museum and paraded to the main event on Belmont Plateau. They wore their tie-dyes, they played kazoos, they sang.

In the park for the noon-6 p.m. program, the turnout was spectacular. The throngs listened to the gospel of environmental rights, they cheered, they sang some more. Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine spoke, along with Penn’s McHarg and biologist George Wald. Poet Allen Ginsberg called Earth Day an ‘’educational picnic.”

Furia, age 28, and Curson, age 31, had melded old and young, liberals and conservatives, dreamers and doers. Earth Day had been a roaring success.

The icing on the cake, for McHarg: “Those thousands of people didn’t leave a bit of rubbish. They picked up every speck.”

And now?

McHarg, still a professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at Penn: “The environment was a subject no one cared about then. We brought it to public consciousness. Now we have legislation and a national environmental policy. There have been great accomplishments. But we haven’t done enough. There are problems now we never dreamed of then. We have much to do.”

Curson, owner of his own advertising agency in Center City and noted for his successes in running Republican political campaigns: “We brought about greater understanding. We know things are not good now, but we probably kept them from being worse. Who knows how bad it could be without EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency) and all the new legislation?”

Longstreth: “I think it started to arouse the awareness of the American people so they appreciated the seriousness of the issues that were raised. If I may use the expression, it brought the issues out of the closet.”

Librach, director of environmental services for the city of Austin, Texas: ‘’Earth Day 1970 was fantastically successful in terms of its impact. It raised consciousness, sensitized people, was instrumental in getting legislation on every level. The whole country has made great progress in environmental protection since then, but now a new set of problems is facing us.”

Furia, for several years regional director of the EPA here and now president and managing director of the Seattle-based Earth Day 20/Earth Week 1990, working nationwide on Earth Day 1990: “I think 1970 was tremendously successful. Any failures since then have come because we lost sight of the original concept, that of reaching the man in the street. Now we know we must sell pollution prevention, rather than just pollution control, and we must sell it globally.”