Badger Senator and Father of Earth Day
Good morning, it’s April 22. Today is celebrated around the globe as a time to contemplate the ecology of our planet, as our friends at Google remind us with today’s mesmerizing doodle.
If you click on either one of the cave openings in Google’s pastoral scene, a badger pokes his head out – a subtle salute to Wisconsin native son Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Progressive Republican-turned-Democrat who was the father of Earth Day.
Nelson, who was born in the tiny town of Clear Lake in 1916, left us in 2005. By then, Earth Day was recognized around the world by hundreds of millions of people.
Gaylord Nelson came of age in the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce and higher education hard to come by. The young man tackled those two problems, first by following his older sisters to California, where they had established a beachhead at San Jose State. (An aunt told Gaylord he could room in her home while he attended college.) And during summers, he worked back home in Wisconsin on WPA public works projects.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin law school 1942, Nelson was drafted by the U.S. Army. After the war ended, he returned to Wisconsin and the profession he was born to pursue: politics.
His great-grandfather was a founding member of the Republican Party, and his father was a country doctor and small-town mayor. Nelson later told the story of being taken by his father when he was 9 years old to hear Progressive Party firebrand Robert La Follette speak from the back of a train.
On their way home, his father asked his awed son if the experience had made him want to go into politics when he grew up.
“Yes,” the boy replied. “But I’m afraid by the time I grow up Bob La Follete will have settled all the problems and there will be nothing for me to do.”
After practicing law briefly in Madison, Nelson served in Wisconsin’s state legislature and a single term as governor before running for the U.S. Senate in 1962. In Washington, he found that Sen. La Follette had left plenty for him to do. Nelson’s passion was conservation, which he successfully urged President Kennedy to discuss on a coast-to-coast tour.
Nelson’s crusade was nearly drowned out by the political furor surrounding the Vietnam War, which he came to oppose. But one specific tactic of the peace activists – the college-based “teach-ins” – gave him an inspiration: why not adopt that method for the environment?
While speaking at a Seattle environmental conference in 1969, Nelson announced that the following spring there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment. He invited everyone to participate. His call to action made news coast to coast.
“The response was electric,” he recalled in 2005. “Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air - and they did so with spectacular exuberance.”
Two of his Senate staff members, Linda Billings and John Heritage, were tasked with responding to the mass numbers of inquiries that flooded Nelson’s office. Marching orders were sought from college campuses, existing conservation groups, municipal governments, and environmental action clubs that sprang up overnight on high school campuses.
Somehow it all came together in 1970. It’s still coming together now.
Thirty-five years later, Nelson was proud of what he’d started, but in true Midwestern fashion, he tended to spread around the credit.
“Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level,” he wrote. “We had neither the time nor the resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.”
