We Need to Save Planet Earth Now, Says Historian

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Turning now to the history of environmental activism in the United States. After a year of constant climate catastrophes, in his new book, “Silent Spring Revolution”, Douglas Brinkley traces the rise of activists in the 1960s to bring attention to the climate change movement. He joins Walter Isaacson to talk and discuss this environmental awakening.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Doug Brinkley, welcome to the show.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR, “SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION”: Well, thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: You know, this book you’ve just written is the third in a trilogy. You started with Teddy Roosevelt, and sort of the preservation movement. The outdoor conservation movement. How is the movement of the 1960s that you write about this time, how is that different and how is it connected to the Teddy Roosevelt era?

BRINKLEY: It’s the — it’s a great question. They’re really — we’ve had three waves of conservation/environmental movements in America. The first 1901 to 1909, that’s when Theodore Roosevelt was president. And we put aside about 234 million acres of wild America. Roosevelt created the national forest service, he created federal bird reservations, new national parks. And he elevated conservation as the number one issue of our time. John Muir and other people were about it — involved. But it was about preservation of open spaces and iconic heirloom parks, like the Grand Canyon or Crater Lake. The second wave is FDR from 1933 to 1945 when in the midst of, particularly the dust bowl, the great depression, Roosevelt starts bringing federal largeness into the picture to start saving a very drained and destroyed (ph) America. We plant a couple of billion trees in America with the civilian conservation corps and FDR also saves places like the beginnings of saving the Everglades and the Smoky Mountains, and Channel Islands in California, on and on. The third wave that I’m writing about, “Silent Spring Revolution” is different than those two because it’s not really about a president. It’s about how Rachel Carson’s book in 1962, launched a revolution saying, I love the wilderness lobby. I loved what TR and FDR did. But now, due to World War II, we have nuclear fallout, you know, we have, Walter, so many nuclear tests in Nevada that were making people sick. And DDT being sprayed out of planes over vast acres were making people sick. So, a conservation started becoming a public health concern, life quality, and at the same time, a smog had taken over Los Angeles and New York. Our lakes and rivers were dying. So, the environmental awakening of the 1960’s led by Rachel Carson had three presidents following her and the public demand, and I write about those presidents, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and all the incredible things we accomplished in that era.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s start with Rachel Carson. I think there was a quote from Lincoln once about meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, maybe apocryphal. And he said, it’s good to meet the lady who started the civil war. To what extent does Rachel Carson’s book ignite a movement and how? I mean, we don’t have books like that these days.

BRINKLEY: It’s rare when a book is — galvanizes something like “Silent Spring”. Rachel Carson was from Springdale, Pennsylvania, along the Allegheny River. She was a brilliant girl who love the natural world and had a literary gift. She went to do her masters in zoology at Johns Hopkins. Studied at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic laboratory right down the road from the Kennedy compound at Cape Cod. And then starting in 1941 with “Under the Sea Wind”, it was — it became a mega bestseller, two more bestsellers. So, by the time she wrote, “Silent Spring” —

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Let me interrupt there. Why did they become bestsellers? Is there a hunger for this at that time in the 50s?

BRINKLEY: Nobody, Walter, wrote about the oceans with the beauty of Rachel Carson. Scientific exactness with the grace of a great novelist. And so, they all hold up today. You read them and you learn about seashore life, or about eels, or starfish. And they’re remarkable. And Jacques Cousteau started kicking in with saving the oceans. They’re — we focused so much on space in John F. Kennedy going to the moon. But there was, in the 1950s and 60s, a real interest in ocean studies. Oceanography. There were books about that, you know, dolphins are smart as humans. We were recording the sounds of whale songs for the first time and the like. And Carson was the leader of what I would call ocean conservation movement.

ISAACSON: But then. “Silence Spring” gets you into DDT. I mean, it’s a whole different genre.

BRINKLEY: As a government bureaucrat, if you like, she learned all about the tests going on at a place FDR created, Patuxent, Maryland. And there you would use these newfangled chemicals like DDT and test them on a river. Test them in the woods. See the — get the scientific data about how it was affecting an osprey or eagles. So, she basically was the whistleblower. When she had cancer, living in this Silver Spring, Maryland, fighting against the clock. She would die two years after her book came out of cancer. So, it’s an epic story of her writing this book and launching it in June of 1962. First in a famous serialization at the New Yorker, then John F. Kennedy at a press conference addresses her book, and creates a stir. And then the book comes out and — the — it’s disgusting to see what big chemical — the conglomerates (ph) did to try to destroy Carson and her research. But alas, DDT was bad and it took a decade to get it banned in North America. It’s finally banned in 1972 by Richard Nixon. But particularly because of the first head of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, was a true man of science, and faced the fact that you could not be putting this much DDT into our ground or atmosphere.

ISAACSON: So, this book comes in 1962, chemical companies started attacking it, and John Kennedy is president. We know his love of the oceans, you know, from his sailing. So, he’s very familiar with Rachel Carson. How does he defend her when she starts getting attacked?

BRINKLEY: You know, the big thing is the man William O. Douglas, he’s the green justice.

ISAACSON: When you say justice, he was a Supreme Court justice.

BRINKLEY: The longest serving and he is from Yakima, Washington, and he was John Muir/Henry David Thoreau die in the wool environmentalist. And he discovered Rachel Carson’s ocean books, and they collaborated. And Douglas adopted Rachel Carson in every way imaginable. She — they’re in cahoots together. And Douglas’, the — is extremely close to the Kennedy family, and Rachel Carson helped write the Democratic Party plank in 1960 on environment and ecology. And so, she was a Kennedy/Ike. And so, Jack Kennedy was backing one of his own when he said, look, we’re going to look into Rachel Carson. But I’m going to put the best scientist in America to study her book, and the verdict will come in. And the verdict came in that Rachel Carson was right.

ISAACSON: You talk about Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas. And he is an incredible advocate. I mean, he is not just sitting there on the Supreme Court trying to judge cases, he is leading the environmental movement. We think now that the Supreme Court has become activist, but this really surprised me, how partisan and — well, I won’t partisan, but activist and ideological he became.

BRINKLEY: You know, when people are real environmentalists, they think about it in planetary ways. Saving planet Earth. Douglas was one of them. He bent the law in favor of the environment time and time again. And Walter, his office became a clearinghouse for the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Izaak Walton League, because there was no environmental protection agency until 1970.But Douglas —

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Wait. Was that appropriate for a Supreme Court justice, in his office, in chambers, to be, sort of, a focus of a movement that would have cases in front of the court?

BRINKLEY: His view was, I’m a citizen, I can write and say what I want. And I — and he started fighting, advocating to a new bill of rights, a wilderness bill of right that every American should be born to a right to clean air and clean water. So, yes, one of the dramatic parts of my book is exposing Douglas. If you’re a die-hard environmentalist, you’re cheering him on. If you’re somebody that is worrying about constitutional law, if you’re scratching your head saying, how did he get away with it? He’d always was a maverick individualist to the extreme and believed a lot in liberty, but he particularly believed that wild America was a birthright.

ISAACSON: But there’s something on the other side. You then have Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, who was very much an activist for the corporate side and the chemical companies.

BRINKLEY: Absolutely. They’re — they — they’re pitted against each other. Powell writes his famous “Powell Memo” in 1971 to the Chamber of Commerce. And Powell, he becomes Supreme Court justice in ’72. But Powell is warning, Douglas is taking over, Rachel Carson is taking over, Ralph Nader is taking over Barry Commoner. And that the — Powell was saying the left or environmentalist, if you like, had taken over the universities, media culture, “New York Times”, think tanks, book world. You know, David Brower’s Sierra Club’s thinning (ph) out all these books. And out of the “Powell Memo” is born what we’re dealing with today. It gives birth to Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Koch Brother Industry nonprofits, the Coors industry. Meaning, they saw that environmentalism was hyper federal regulation was going to put extract cost — the extraction industries a lot of money. And so, they united to fight environmentalism. And so, by the time Nixon becomes president, he’s inheriting all of this environmental activism and has to decide how to play his hand.

ISAACSON: Back, then it was a non-partisan issue. I was surprised to read unanimous senate votes in the early 1970s on things like Environmental Protection Act or Clean Water. Why was it non-partisan, and what happened to destroy that?

BRINKLEY: You know, Walter, the Endangered Species Act is signed by Nixon, December 28 1973. It passed the senate 92 to nothing. This was the beginning of saving all of our species. You just take a state, let’s just say Florida, or I could do it for any state, suddenly the crocodile gets saved, the alligator, manatee, whooping cranes coming back into play. They’re getting media attention, all of this. The Republicans were still Theodore Roosevelt conservation back then. You know, you should read Howard Baker’s testimony on the Clean Water Act of ’72, it’s a beautiful environmental manifesto demanding clean water. Part of it was, how could you be a politician and defend Cuyahoga River being on fire in Ohio? I mean, if you’re in Ohio, you’re no longer — what party matters when your rivers are burning?

ISAACSON: Nixon’s State of the Union speech in 1970 is sort of a — an amazing declaration in favor of environmentalism. Tell me how that came about.

BRINKLEY: Well, it came about because Earth Day, April 22, 1970, and it was such a big national event. I mean, everybody participated in the teaching. Nixon thought it might be a left-wing liberal plot, but nevertheless, he planted a tree on the White House with Pat for Earth Day. And he allowed Walter Hinkle and the interior department to do — teach and work on the environment. Nixon started seeing environment as a winning issue. By the end of that year of 1970, he created the EPA, passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, and established NOAA and much more. One of the reasons Nixon gets abandoned by conservatives, by the “Powell Memo” people is they don’t like what he did. You know, everybody likes to tell that Barry Goldwater told, Nixon, he’s a liar and I don’t trust you in Watergate. Goldwater was livid at Nixon for his EPA work and his environmental impact. It was bending billions of federal dollars on the environment that the hard right of the party didn’t like.

ISAACSON: But Nixon in 1973 shifts back a bit. Why is that?

BRINKLEY: Walter, he shifts back because of high gasoline prices and the Arab oil embargo. And that hits October ’73. When gas prices go up and inflation kicks in, and hit the right — his base is furious at him, he just won a big — landslide in ’72 and he decides, I am going to back away from more environmental legislation. And Watergate, just consumes Nixon. And so, really, that wave I’m talking about, the Rachel Carson wave, ends in 1973 with the Endangered Species Act. It has a little pop moment when Jimmy Carter is president, because Carter moved in and did such a great work on saving Alaska lands. But by 1980 with Reagan, environmentalism becomes seen as a Democratic priority, while the Republicans are for the oil, gas extraction, chemical industries and we haven’t been able to get back together on the same page since ’73.

ISAACSON: The 1960s environmental movement you talk about seems to me a bit — of sort of a backyard thing. We care about oceans and fish, and sort of our natural habitat and stuff. Did they have any sense of the much bigger issue, things like climate?

BRINKLEY: You know, yes. Yes, they did. We first learned about climate from a TELUS report, really 1958, we know about it. I write in my book how Kennedy’s — John F. Kennedy administration knew that climate, meaning global warming, was going to be a problem due to fossil fuels. LBJ gives a speech about it. It just gets buried, because so much is going on with civil rights in Vietnam and the like. And I write in the book about Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s alarming memo that he writes. And he says, look, this climate change, this is — it — the data is right. He then, somewhat jokingly says, that that might mean goodbye Miami, goodbye New York, goodbye Washington. I don’t know about Seattle. And it just tells you how frustrating it is to talk about climate issue, which is such a big one, but the media never puts it as front the way Theodore Roosevelt put conservationists. The number one issue, we — environment, we had midterm elections and climate change, was probably, at best, fifth on the list of national concerns. It seems only gen — generation Z people are putting it at the top of their agenda.

ISAACSON: The 1960s, the long 1960s, between 1962 when Rachel Carson does her book to 1973 or so. This is a non-partisan issue. Republicans are almost in the forefront of some of the environmental acts then. How is it we could get it back to being a non-partisan issue?

BRINKLEY: It’s going to be hard to get on the same page now, because people don’t like to call things, including the media, a climate event. Anytime it’s a hurricane, people will say, well, there were hurricanes since the beginning of time. How do you decipher what’s caused by climate change and not? But we are going to meet our comeuppance here. You can’t play ostrich symbol forever. So, I think we need a leader — leadership talking about an Earthshot. You know, I’ve written about the Moonshot and going to the moon. But we need to save planet Earth now. And realize, like TR would say, every flower specie is a masterpiece and we don’t want to lose them. And unfortunately, we are having massive species extinctions going on right now. And I think it needs to be elevated on the list of public concerns. I hope with books like mine, with new activists, young people, documentaries, novels that are creating the new awareness, they are signs that the 20 years old get it and they’re ready to be the generation that becomes the new — that triggers that Rachel Carson moment.

ISAACSON: Doug Brinkley, thank you so much for joining us.

BRINKLEY: Thank you, Walter. I really appreciate it.