"Give Earth a Chance": The Environmental Movement and the Sixties

Adam Rome

In 1969 the Environmental Action for Survival Committee at the University of Michigan began to sell buttons with a slogan that played off a rallying cry common in the protests against the Vietnam War. Instead of "Give Peace a Chance," the buttons urged Americans to "Give Earth a Chance." Newsweek soon asked if the buttons might be symbols of a new age of conservation. By spring 1970, when the nation celebrated the first Earth Day, the slogan was ubiquitous. In an Earth Day march in the nation's capital, for example, thousands of people joined the folk singers Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs in a great refrain: "All we are saying," they sang, "is give earth a chance."1	1
The popularity of the "Give Earth a Chance" slogan was not happenstance. The rise of the environmental movement owed much to the events of the 1960s. Yet scholars have not thus far done enough to place environmentalism in the context of the times. The literature on the sixties slights the environmental movement, while the work on environmentalism neglects the political, social, and cultural history of the sixties.	2
For most historians of the sixties, the basic framework of analysis derives from the concerns of the New Left. Although scholars have begun to incorporate the rise of the New Right into the narrative of the period, the issues that preoccupied the decade's radicals still receive the most space. Because relatively few new leftists cared about the environment until 1969 or 1970, the literature on the sixties overlooks the growing concern about environmental issues before then. Several histories of the decade fail even to mention Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—a best seller in 1962. Though a few scholars claim environmentalism as a major legacy of the sixties, some works treat the rise of the movement as a postscript to the decade, a sign of fade-out rather than a vital expression of the protest spirit of the time. No history of the sixties considers in detail what the environmental movement shared with the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, or the feminist movement.2	3
For environmental historians, the rise of the environmental movement comes at the end of a story that begins before 1900. The first protests against pollution, the first efforts to conserve natural resources, and the first campaigns to save wilderness all occurred in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the Progressive Era, environmental problems were on the agenda of a variety of professions, from civil engineering to industrial hygiene. To explain why a powerful environmental movement nonetheless did not emerge until the decades after World War II, environmental historians have pointed to three major changes. First, the unprecedented affluence of the postwar years encouraged millions of Americans to reject the old argument that pollution was the price of economic progress. Second, the development of atomic energy, the chemical revolution in agriculture, the proliferation of synthetic materials, and the increased scale of power generation and resource extraction technology created new environmental hazards. Third, the insights of ecology gave countless citizens a new appreciation of the risks of transforming nature. Yet those explanations—the willingness of newly affluent Americans to insist on environmental quality, the increased destructiveness of modern industry, and the popularization of ecological ideas—make clear only why environmentalism was a postwar phenomenon, not why it became a force in the sixties.3	. . .