Silent Spring Revolution, a Conversation with Douglas Brinkley

Bart Elmore 

It's a pleasure to be with all of you and to welcome our guest today. All the way from Austin, Texas to be with us, Dr. Doug Brinkley. I want to thank so many people who helped make these things happen. Yeah, I need to have a Coke product up here. Thanks. Thanks. Whether we like it or not, Coke's certainly here at Ohio State, so that's a good thing. But so many people make this possible, and it's worth acknowledging them. Laura Seeger is over here helping out with the tech on our side. She's just amazing. Alyssa Reynolds who helped out with arranging so many things. Amanda Budreau, who helped out with planning and Sarah Beaumont-White, on the back end of things. Amber Diplaw, who is from the Development Office, and Scott Levi, who believes in our environmental history program here and really was so supportive from day one. So thanks to everybody who's helped us get to this point.

 

Bart Elmore 

You have quite a resume, Doug. So it's hard to get through all of it. And I'll just mention a few things because he's done so many amazing things. New York Times bestselling author, you know, it's been a long time as CNN history commentator. He's now the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair of Humanities at Rice University, and teaching their teaching history other things. Wrote so many different books on so many different topics. It's tough to try and figure out how to compartmentalize it from Rosa Parks to Kennedy's American moonshot to a book about Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and wilderness ideal, all sorts of amazing things. And today, he's going to be talking about his newest book that came out in 2022, Silent Spring Revolution, and it just looks like an amazing book. So we're really fortunate to have him here, but I'd be remiss with one last piece of his bio, which is that he's coming home in a way because he was a 1982 alum of not just any department, but of the history department here. So let's give Doug a warm welcome.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

It is, this truly is a homecoming for me to be in this building. And I've had flashbacks when I'm in Dulles of conversations with Warren Van Tyne and Gary Rashard and some of the professors. I'm so glad to see some young people, students or, or environmental activists people here. Thank you guys for coming. Sometimes it's just the core faculty, all of you that are here. I'm going to let my son go. But my son Johnny, we live in, I teach at Rice, history professor. We live in Austin, Texas, and but both Johnny in the maroon sweater, Johnny Brinkley has applied to Ohio State and has gotten accepted. So he's here looking at campus. And his friend from high school Westlake High also, Ryan, has just gotten accepted in Ohio State. So instead of listening to dad talk on the environment, I'm letting them go wander campus, look at the quad, hit the gift shop and all, but thank you guys for stopping. They're coming to the game tonight. We're going to the Ohio State game. Well, here's the book.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And I will simply say I just recall I did a paper on Joseph Wood Krutch when I was undergraduate, and he appears in this book. But I've written what's now a trilogy of environmental history. I did the Wilderness Warrior on the Theodore Roosevelt generation, and then one called Rightful Heritage about FDR, and now the third volume Silent Spring Revolution. So let me tell you about the other two. Just imagine all three in a row. You don't have to read them. They're independent books. But here's what my journey was. When we lived here in Ohio, Perrysburg, my mom was a high school teacher ran the English department in high school. And my dad was a social studies civics history teacher. So I come from a background of teachers.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

We had a Pontiac and a 24-foot Coachman trailer and you don't get much money as a high school teacher but you do get some time off in the summer and we would hit the road. And we would particularly aim to go to national parks, state parks, monument wilderness areas. It wasn't glamping, but it wasn't real camping either We would be at KOA kind of, of facilities, but it was kind of in between. And I had asthma as a kid. I grew up around the Toledo area. I really had, I had to sleep with a vaporizer, and I had asthmatic issues. And so I read a book on Theodore Roosevelt, a children's biography, and he had asthma.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And then I loved all of these national parks and wherever I go in those days, before the iPhone, as most of the people will remember there were pamphlets everywhere. And I grabbed these pamphlets and they all said Theodore Roosevelt created that spot. It'd be amazing. It'd be the Grand Canyon, Theodore Roosevelt, Muir Woods, Theodore Roosevelt in the, you know, the Badlands. Theodore Roosevelt did that. And it was just amazing. And I had written a book on him and he had asthma, and he loved the outdoor world and loved animals, because I always had a zoological bent. Theodore Roosevelt was a president and he had 37 cats in the White House, which amazed me. He included a hyena that was given to him from Ethiopia that they had kept there, and he later gave it to the zoo. He had a pet badger that would run around the White House that's buried next to his site. He had parrots and dogs and snakes and, and so when you're a kid, that's very Doctor Dolittle, colorful stuff. And then forgot a lot about my childhood and came to Ohio State here, I wanted to go into labor history. I got an article published as an undergraduate in the Ohio Brotherhood and Carpenters of America Union Book, wrote an essay for and that's really how I got to go to Georgetown for my graduate degree, because I didn't, I had all A's in history, but I didn't do well in science classes. But I had a published article as an undergrad, you know, and got noticed.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And, and so only when I had Johnny, you just met and my own three kids, I started wanting to take them in these parts and travel and think about the environment and all and I started writing The Wilderness Warrior, and on that TR generation. Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858. And in 1859, Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, now when you're fighting at Shiloh, or Gettysburg, or Antietam in the Civil War, how important is Darwin? Not too many. But to Theodore Roosevelt, it was epic. They were the leading family that was promoting Darwin in New York. Theodore Roosevelt's father was the chief fundraiser for the American Museum of Natural History, based on Darwinian principles. And beyond The Origin of Species, young Theodore Roosevelt, some of you aspiring historians, I mean, I call it leavings. People leave things behind. The earliest things we have of Theodore Roosevelt was he'd draw a stork and say, "Darwin's theory of my brother evolving," and you know, all these like eight-year-old things, but all about evolution and Darwin. And of course, Theodore Roosevelt had a multifaceted career. But he basically was sick with asthma, and he found a cure in his mind in nature. This was a New York City he grew up in, that was industrialized, horses would die on the streets. There were, there was dysentery. There was smog. There was everything. But he was sick. But when he got to the Catskills, and especially in the Adirondacks, he suddenly his lungs cleared up, and he felt like a million bucks.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I'm not promoting nature as curative as being real there. I mean, there's so much, but I am sure that clean air and clean water contributed to all of our, our needs. And it's what the whole environmental justice movement of today is anchored around. But he went to Harvard as an undergraduate and wrote his first book called The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks. And then he went on to a storied career and wrote beyond being a president and the rest, you know, type of a prize winner for mediating the Russian Japanese war. TR wrote, out of the 37 books he wrote, many of them are about the natural world. He wrote very well. He was a fanatic about Henry David Thoreau. He is president when camping in the snow when John Muir of the Sierra Club in Yosemite. He'd bring John Burroughs, a big naturalist of the, let's call it circa 1900 America. They went all over Yellowstone together and corresponded. And, and it's unusual guys being a president, Theodore Roosevelt, that when he wasn't, when he said natural resource management is the number one job of a president and put conservation as number one. We haven't really had that since. We document about 234 million acres of public lands were saved by Theodore Roosevelt. How would TR save 234 million acres? What are the mechanisms for that? Well, as you probably know, a national park has to go to Congress. So once that Roosevelt did, like Crater Lake in Oregon, or Mesa Verde in Colorado, or Wind Cave in South Dakota, went to Congress, they got passed and moved to the Senate and became a national park. But Roosevelt is important because in 1906, there was a very elastic piece of legislation called the Antiquities Act. And it's only this law, I can read it, elastic because John Lacey who authored the language, the aim, the spirit of the Antiquities Act was to save dinosaur bones and to save Native American pottery shards and pottery. Why? Because European museums were, well in Stockholm and Munich, Paris, London, were coming to the American West and grabbing all this stuff. Booty for their museums. So elastic piece, and the big word here is science, for scientific reasons a president to declare an area, federal property belonging to the American people. It put it in, in human language. It said if you find a T Rex on land, it belongs to all of us. It's part of our natural history and of this landscape. And boom, it would get, you know, sequestered off like an archeological dig site. The spirit of it was for an acre, or six acres, maybe 16 acres. Roosevelt was livid that the Senate wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc, asbestos, and copper.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And he famously went to the Grand Canyon stood looking out at the abyss and said, do not touch it, God has made it. You will only mar it. Leave the Grand Canyon alone. They refused. Instead of giving up on the Grand Canyon, he ended up taking that Antiquities Act and applying it till it's a million acres with a presidential proclamation, executive order. Everybody immediately screamed bloody hell that people like how can you do that? And he said, well, I have the power as president. It says for scientific purposes, Show me a better place to study erosion than the Grand Canyon. This was considered BS, and he got sued and it went through our federal court system and he wins.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And once you have that mechanism, it allows a president like Barack Obama, who, you know, to start when the Republicans didn't want to do business with Obama, he could use the Antiquities Act saving places, monuments Obama did, like the San Juan Islands of Washington. Or he started using it for history sites. Stonewall for LGBTQ in New York, Obama did. Cesar Chavez as a United Farmworkers site out in California, Buffalo Soldier Charles Young in Huron, Ohio, Obama's saved it as a National Monument. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad sites, plus large landscapes like Bear's Ear in Utah, which also got booted into the forest. But Roosevelt created this Antiquities Act mechanism. And he also created the US Forest Service. When I did those family trips, all you guys can pull up on your phone a map, just put national parks in America and they're nearly all in the West done by Theodore Roosevelt. He did 100 and like 15 one day. And, and then in addition to the National Forests, which the National Park Service is an interior and the Forest Service, it's a Department of Agriculture. He then got worried in Florida there was a feathers war. Women that are here tonight, today, to hear me would have come to an event 100 years, let's just say 1900 again. You would have come with a bonnet for a public talk and probably had an ornamental feather from a dead bird.  And the ornamental feathers were being murdered and butchered in Florida because birds go on their rookeries of, let's just say off the coast of, you know, Jacksonville or Vero Beach, and they congregate. They have their eggs. They're waiting for them to hatch. They flap a lot. They don't leave because that's where they're defending. No raccoons get out there. You know there aren't, the predators are minimal, except for human beings with automatic weapons. And feather mafias would come to those rookeries and just slaughter all the birds, steal the eggs, the next generation, pick only the beautiful ornamental feathers and leave the carcasses to rot. Theodore Roosevelt was presented with this going on in the Indian River in Florida. He had his lawyer in, the White House lawyer, personal lawyer, two lawyers and Roosevelt. He asked the lawyers, what can I do? What if I declare an entire part of Florida a bird reservation? And they said, well, I'm not sure that that's legal. You don't have that... He said, I so declare it. It becomes the birthplace of US Fish and Wildlife. If you go to Pelican Island, Florida today to walk on the Boardwalk and their planks. You all own 550 national wildlife refugests, starting with TR's in Florida. He then did the first 51 and now today we're at 550. One of TR's in Alaska, the Yukon Delta, is the size of West Virginia. And the key to the Roosevelt bird reservations, were it came for species survival first. It was global in a new way of animal protection. But that is what I call the first wave. It's a progressive era, the first wave of conservation but for simplifying them for our use here let's just call it the first environmental movement and the federal governments get involved in environmental movement in this really serious way. The second wave is the progressive era, the Great Depression. FDR worshiped Theodore Roosevelt. Do you realize resume-wise with Franklin Roosevelt... You know, TR had been, you know, went to Harvard. FDR went to Harvard, you know, TR. That might be being mean. I'm sorry.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

TR um, TR, but you had both from New York. TR went to Harvard. FDR with to Harvard. TR was a state legislator in Albany. FDR was state legislator in Albany. You know, FDR was, or TR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Theodore Roosevelt was Governor of New York. FDR was Governor of New York. You know, Theodore Roosevelt loved big Navies and conservation. FDR loved the Navy and conservation. Theodore Roosevelt had a niece named Eleanor Roosevelt. FDR marries her. And you know, so you're looking at Theodore and Roosevelts on the realm of conservation and the environment and they're really large players because FDR his whole life when he'd fill out occupation, he'd write tree farmer.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

His passion was scientific forestry, including working with the great Gifford Pitchow who TR had worked with on the utilitarian use of resources. But FDR, avid birdwatcher, I mean, and when he got struck with polio, Franklin Roosevelt and couldn't walk, nobody wanted to be near him. Because he was a polio. You were afraid to sit by him because you'd get the virus. You know, you saw what we did in COVID with masks. Well imagine you're a guy, you're sitting next to somebody with polio. So this famous guy, 1920 Franklin Roosevelt was on the vice presidential ticket of James Cox as the VP for the Democrats. 1920 in Ohio's interesting because two Ohioans, vying for President, Warren Harding versus James Cox, FDR was the handsome VP you know this. And then a year later, he was at a Boy Scout Jamboree, because TR did Boy Scouts, and went swimming with inner city kids in a pond at Bear Mountain, along the Hudson River. Contracted a, some kind of polio borne virus and it manifested itself a couple of days later, migraine headaches, sweating. He could not move the lower half of his body and he would be infirm and handicapped for the rest of his life. He went back to his home there in Hyde Park on the Hudson River in New York and nobody would visit. Guy was just VP candidate for president. Nobody wanted to be with the polio. He was written off. The only guy who hung out with him was Maunsell Crosby, the head of Ornithology in New York State. And they went together birdwatching through the Everglades, and, and would do the bird checklist of how many they saw. And he found he ended up buying a resort for people with polio, thermal waters in Warm Streams, Georgia, where he could be with other people with the virus. He in the 1920s in a wheelchair his big nonprofit thing was pushing for State Park movement. And lo and behold, due to the Great Depression he is he comes back. FDR gives a big speech. And suddenly with the depression and Hoover, he goes, runs for governor, he wins in '19, and wins in 1928. Two terms, he's to be governor. Wins in '28. I mean, two years runs again in '30, wins. In 1932 he runs on the New Deal for president. And his big thing he's going to do is the Civilian Conservation Corps, thinking unemployed men from the Great Depression, there was also women and a group called the She-She-She. But it was much smaller in scale. With that said, there's incredible new scholarship going on the She-She-She. But um, and they would plant trees. Do you realize from 1933 to 1942, the CCC and She-She-She and a couple other groups planted nearly 3 billion trees?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Billion. Ohio used to be a hardwood forest, everything. I just flew into Columbus. You to see it all. That used to be thick, forest where I grew up around Toledo is the Black Swamp and used to be a natural rural Nirvana, teaming wildlife everywhere. I mean, Lake Erie, they were one of the great fisheries of the world and the like. And not only that, Roosevelt as president, oversees the establishment, and it's hard to get your mind around 3 billion of anything, 3 billion trees. But he keeps a progenitor of 800 state parks. And in fact, on D-day, June, and on so many national parks we don't have time for, and on D-Day, June 6th, 1944 that massive invasion of Normandy. Do you realize where Roosevelt was June 4th and 5th? Birdwatching in Charlottesville, looking for new species. He wanted to be out of Washington so he couldn't be detected to be nervous or something. Then he got back into DC and he kept his whole itinerary, didn't cancel meetings because he didn't want to give away the invasion. You know what he spent the afternoon while our soldiers were invading Normandy, you know what FDR was doing? Sitting with maps of Big Bend National Park, he had, got established that day, with Amin Carter and others to have a big national park on the Texas Mexico border. And FDR aimed to create a massive two nation park along the entire Rio Grande where you're dealing with immigration and walls and all to date, Roosevelt envisioned it as an ecosystem to share be shared by Mexico and the United States. The point is these Roosevelts are really at, they've done a few things wrong. We can deal with those issues of it, but from a point of view of thinking about environment, there are, these are two great progressive eras. The third wave, my book, "Silent Spring Revolutions," the third wave. I thought the third wave was 1960 to 1973. I wanted it to be. My book wouldn't have been as fat. I thought I'd begin with John F. Kennedy running for president and Ansel Adams, great photographer and Nancy Newlaw bought out a book called, "This is the American Earth," and a great novelist Wallace Stegner wrote, "This Wilderness Letter," and the Democratic Party plan for the first time was talking about clean air and clean water and if I thought I'd begin with '60. My early determination held correct to end it in '73. 1973 December, do you realize the Endangered Species Act that saves the bald eagle, California condor, alligator, manatee, on and on the great Endangered Species Act do you know when it passed the Senate? 92 to nothing. That's how bipartisan environment became in. And in '73, that was it. Because Watergate consumed Nixon and the Arab oil embargo occurred. There became cries for energy independence, the Arab oil embargo meant gasoline prices came up in the United States. And there became a counter revolution on the right, that created groups like the American Enterprise Institute, you know, the Heritage Foundation, the, you know, all of these kinds of freedom caucuses the Koch brothers Industries, Scapee brothers. There became extraction industry, oil, gas, people wanting to destroy the Silent Spring revolution of Rachel Carson and others. So I was going '60 to '73. And I realized without a Roosevelt, who wrote about the environment in nature all the time, in one way or another the true story began in 1945.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And the first thing to realize about that third wave was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dropping of the bombs by Truman, who incidentally was not a conservation or environmental President at all or in any meaningful way. But when Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs drop, everybody cheers. Most Americans, war's over VJ Day, we're coming home. One time in world history due to one country having a nuclear monopoly, USA. 1945 to '49 only country in the world with the bomb. And so most people were celebratory. It showed American can doism. It showed the Manhattan Project paid off, you know, but there were some people deeply concerned about the atomic bomb. And they are mixed group. Oh, one that surprised the hell out of me was John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy. Went crazy when he found out Hiroshima was bombed and was trying to go see Truman. Said do not drop another bomb on a civilian population. We're going to have, we're going to be, America will be morally judged forever as evil for doing such a thing. Many Catholics came. There was a movement, some bishops, to say no more Hiroshima. Stop.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice was climbing a mountain in his home state of Washington and was livid when we used the bomb. He was almost the vice president instead of Truman. And he said it would have been a different world because if FDR had picked me and not Truman, and he was the runner up, it would have been President Douglas, I never would have dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But also in that mix was a man named Norman Cousins who ran the Saturday Literary Review. And it was a big deal in its day, guys, Saturday Literary Review was very read. Cousins was the first major writer to be like David Remnick of the New Yorker now or something. And suddenly right after Hiroshima, Nagasaki writing an essay called Is Man Obsolete, and said the atomic bomb is going to lead to the doom of humanity.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And, and then, Rachel Carson, key figure in my book, was very worried about the nuclear bombs. Now, Rachel Carson was from Springdale, Pennsylvania. She grew up along the Allegheny River. She was very disheartened that her childhood playground, the river, was polluted beyond redemption from glue factories, untreated sewage. Here was this spectacular river contaminated, but she continued to find joy in the natural world. She would write journals, she was an avid birder. She'd write about the love secret lives of animals. She wrote as a young woman for St. Nicholas magazine and got her essays published. She went to a school, Chatham College for Women, which is Chatham University today, outside of Pittsburgh. And there met a professor who noticed Rachel's great writing ability, and also love of biology, zoology, studying species, and convinced Rachel her genius would be to marry both, writing and being a naturalist. The Thoreau tradition with Darwin tradition, if you like. And she wanted to see the ocean she never did until she graduated from college. She got a scholarship to Woods Hole in Massachusetts, which is right near Hyannis port where the Kennedy compound is. And Woods Hole was the Carnegie Hall and Harvard of ocean studies, particularly species and ocean conservation. She went there and fell in love and because of that a red brick building filled with every book of marine life ever made, ever printed, maps, files on all every creature of the sea, and she knew she had a calling. And her first big interest were migratory eels. But she was amazed that an eel in a Pennsylvania River had made a journey from Africa. Everybody writes about bird migration, what about these eel migrations? And then she went and did an advanced degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins. She started writing for the Baltimore Sun, columns on the natural world during World War II she got hired to work at U.S. Fish and Wildlife doing radio broadcasts and she started in, she embedded with a scientist at a place called Patuxent. Does anybody here know what Patuxent is?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

It's a good thing to know. It's FDR created it. It's in Maryland. It's where US Fish and Wildlife test water ecosystems and species. Meaning you, if there's a new chemical some company here is manufacturing in Columbus. They'll get it and they're going to test it at Patuxent on how does it affect fish, birds, insects, humans, and how does it affect flora and fauna, that new chemical?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Um and she with working with Patuxent, realized how horrible after Hiroshima nuclear fallout was, that it was a game changer of poisoning the air. And another so called Miracle of World War II, you know, was when FDR went from being Doctor New Deal to Doctor Win the War. We greenlined everything. He was unregulated. We got to beat the fascists. There was no regulation of something if it could contribute to the war effort, greenlight it.  And we greenlit DDT. Now DDT, if you were alive, was a miracle. In the sense that if you were Kennedy who served in the Pacific or Johnson who was in the service in the Pacific or Nixon, zillion others, you would get sprayed down with DDT. It would kill ticks, lice, mosquitos, prevented malarial diseases. A man I write about called Barry Commoner, a brilliant scientist, public scientist genius, ended up running programs at Washington University in St. Louis and later in Brooklyn. But he would devise the spraying mechanism of how you can aerial spray an island, say Guam and kill all the insects. Carson got the Patuxent work and the scientists were like, this is going to destroy the eggs of birds and it's potentially lethal to humans, and they had reams of data. She tried to write an article, a warning, Paul Revere article, right after Hiroshima that now DDT has to be investigated for Reader's Digest and they killer her article. But she had all that insight.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And she went on to her career as a writer. She wrote three books about the seas, three ocean books. If you care, I don't know if you guys know what Library of America is, but it's the classics. They have black dust jackets, and it's like classic titles. All three you can get in one volume, I highly recommend you look at Rachel Carson's book Sea Trilogy. Nobody's written about ocean life, sea shore life, with the scientific exactitude and poetic flourishes combined abridging parties. And these weren't minor bestsellers, like three weeks on the list. I mean, she'd be 46 weeks best seller and she became almost a household name, Rachel Carson. On oceans. You know, people found her demure, the ocean scientist and she would spend much of it, she lived and worked in government and got out to write her books. But she stood. So keep these two strands in mind: anti-nuclear tests. From 1945 Hiroshima to 1992 when Clinton and Bush ran for president, we managed to, the United States detonated 1,054 nuclear weapons testing. We were blowing them up willy nilly at that. Atmospheric testing after atmospheric testing and it wasn't just people getting sick, that were Mexican Americans, or people over the border or poor white farmers, or Navajo although all those groups got sick. It would blow far and wide. We were being, it was being detected as far as the east coast. And, and so there became a movement not only to ban DDT, but to ban the bomb testing. Rachel Carson is part of both.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And that ban the bomb testing got a lot of people and one of the big ones who also was against testing of nuclear weapons, and that was Rachel Carson's hero, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who was in Africa, taking care of people with leprosy. He's controversial because as a colonialist, paternalist scientists some of his medical work. But he won the Nobel, on Radio Oslo and denounced nuclear testing of Russia and the United States. Coretta Scott King became a leader of the anti-nuclear testing movement scene with Norman Cousins who founded it. Martin Luther King Jr. said this, but he said it in many iterations, what good does it do for us to integrate a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, if the milk we're drinking is contaminated with Strontium-90?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

It makes no sense that basically public health and it affects everybody. And so it became a movement to stop nuclear tests. Now, a big thing happens on these fronts, and the late 50s. Nobody of the, most of the people in the back probably, don't any of you guys back there remember Dr. Benjamin Spock? No reason you should. There's only so much bandwidth that we have. But the people up here remember Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was a pediatrician. He sold a zillion copies of a baby book. If you're going to have a baby you would read Spock's how to take care of your baby. Well his sister, Marjorie Spock lived in New York, had a farm and Marjorie Spock wanted to grow all of her produce organic.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

He was a big believer in the organic farming movement. And lo and behold, here she's running an organic farm in Suffolk County, New York mosquito control. And the US Department of Agriculture would take planes in blanket spray all of Long Island. And she now doesn't have an organic farm anymore. And she sues and it works its way to the Supreme Court. And it's a celebrated case. Now whatever you think of the case, you can see if you're a lawyer, of a legal mind, it's pretty interesting, you know, where, what, what do we own? We're going to circle the myths above. And you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's fascinating legal history. But she loses. That they're allowed to continue to spray the DDT except William O. Douglas writes a brilliant dissent that gets widely distributed, and says she has an American constitutional right to be an organic farmer. They cannot take that right away from her. And why aren't these chemicals being investigated? Why isn't the science coming out? Etc. Douglas when he writes that just had a big home run in conservation. He wouldn't want in a road that was going 186 miles from Georgetown and Washington DC, the CNO canal, Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland. They're going to build a highway, a roadway. And he said it needs to be saved as a walking, hiking path because of its scenic, historical and recreational benefits. Douglas hiked the entire 186 miles. The Washington Post was for the freeway but then he ended up convincing them to be against it. People joined Douglas's March. And lo and behold, even Eisenhower paradoxically said we're going to save it. He wins a big win. Douglas got drunk on that one. He went hiking for days. The hiked the Olympic Peninsula to stop a road with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and won. He went to Kentucky to stop building of a dam on a beautiful gorge and won. He went to Arkansas where the gorgeous Buffalo River flows and people were putting barbed wire across the river to entangle kayakers and canoers and Douglas said it needs to be an undamaged, free and pristine river and won. With no EPA. The EPA is not created until 1970. There is no Clean Air Act. There is no Clean Water Act. There is no federal sewage mandates. Douglas's supreme court office became a clearing house for environmental activists. Group, we're talking about Ohio conservation efforts of sustainable program here at Ohio State could have gotten Douglas their packet of info. Stuff would happen. He was great figure, Douglas. But meanwhile, Carson loved Marjorie Spock, and Spock gave Carson all the legal work, all of the stuff that the Supreme Court case and then Carson had all the old DDT material from government. And then she still had insiders who knew what was really going on at Patuxent with DDT and other chemicals. And in the late 50s, she sits down to write the book that changed the world, Silent Spring, which comes out in 1962. Right when she started writing she found that she had breast cancer, went through chemotherapy, other treatments and Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, but her verdict was bleak. She knew she was going to die soon. She lost all of her hair, had to wear a wig. She was running against the clock, writing in Silver Spring Maryland at her little house in up along Rock Rim Coast of Maine on the ocean where she would do marine collecting. And her book when she finished the manuscript she let Bill read it. And he said I'll sell the hell out of this book and we're going to go after. Douglas from the Supreme Court actually wrote a letter that said to a professor friend, I am going to go under to bend the law in favor of the environment and against the corporation. That kind of raw language can get you thrown off the Supreme Court. But that's how he was playing it now he have the ammunition of Silent Spring. And Carson loved John F. Kennedy. She campaigned for him. Jackie Kennedy knew her. Bobby Kennedy, RFK, went hiking all over with Douglas. Justice Douglas took Bobby Kennedy all through Siberia hiking. In fact, Bobby got 104 fever and almost died burning up with fever. And Douglas put on his backpack and said well Bobby, I'm going to have to leave you here. This is where our roads part. Hardcore Darwin survival of the fittest. Ethel Kennedy told me Bobby never held it against Douglas but I wouldn't talk to him for years. I was so pissed he let my husband die in Siberia. He was going to go on with his hiking and leave him outside with no medical attention. And, and but Douglas now has great relations with Kennedy, JFK, the President and The New Yorker publishes, her excerpts and holy hell broke down. She wasn't just going after DDT. The entire chemical industry complex went haywire because it was a gateway in the book if you go to regulate DDT you're going to regulate everything. And it's a slippery slope to people not dumping toxins into rivers, burial sites. You're going to you're inviting federal intrusion into the world of chemical companies. And Kennedy to his credit at a podium, at a press conference when asked about it, when The New Yorker pieces came out, he said I'd seen Miss Carson's work and research and we're going to have a panel, a scientific Blue-Ribbon Panel, look into it. They hired the best scientists you can find in the 1980s, you know, Harvard types. And they found after their review that Carson was correct, that it really was this horrible for, that the bald eagle was going to go extinct, that shells were being thinned, that it was creating all sorts of fertility issues from species on and on. But it doesn't get banned, DDT, even though the Kennedy report came out. From '62 when the book came out, it doesn't get banned until 1972. And when Richard Nixon chose to ban DDT, even though he didn't want to, he got cornered because the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the EPA, a Republican from Indiana was an honest man. Ruckelshaus said when he became head of the EPA, he looked at all the evidence and said, out of here. And if I'm going to run EPA, it's obvious this stuff's toxic. Well, the other thing Kennedy had in common with Carson was a love of the sea. I will ask all of you here. What's your Walden Pond? What place in the natural world do you love most? Where have you had a spiritual revelation? It could be your grandmother's farm. It could be a state park, somewhere in Florida or the desert or it could be just sitting along the riverbank here meditating in Columbus. But there's probably some place that touched you. And that question is like, what's your Walden? What's a place you would want to see protected or that you really felt the value of nature in your life? Kennedy loved Cape Cod and the ocean. He had a horrible back. He had Addison's disease, but when he went sailing and in that wilderness of the Atlantic, and all of its charms and beauty and magic, he was in his element. We call it blue mind. There are some people that only feel comfortable, you know, by water features. That's why so many people want to be by a lake, be by a river. They feel whole when they're connected to water. Lyndon Johnson's Walden who I write about is the Pedernales River in Texas in the hill country at his ranch. Nixon didn't really have it. But, I'll be talking about him in a minute. But there's some good things to say about him, as well as things you could imagine. But the Kennedys start fighting for seashore preservation. They did a big one, guys, Cape Cod National Seashore. Henry David Thoreau beyond writing Walden, and wrote a book called Cape Cod. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. And Kennedy did an amazing thing of getting Cape Cod pushed through because Cape Cod National Seashore is unique in the sense that cities like Provincetown, Truro, Wellesley are surrounded by protected zones in a very smart way that allows restaurants and parking and culture and housing but also is intertwined with incredible planning areas to protect the great dunes of the Cape and the wildlife and flora, fauna of all kinds. He also did Padre Island, Texas, Gulf of Mexico. Look at a map. You want to see how large it is? No, no condos, no Jerseyization, no boardwalks. He did Point Reyes, California. That's Marin County, right up by San Francisco, beautiful country. These are expensive real estate, Cape Cod, Marin, Gulf, Texas. Meaning Jimmy Carter could go to save a million acres of the Brooks Range which is just rock. Nobody wants to build roads. There's nothing to get there. There's not gold, silver mining. But these seashores are tough to do. And Kennedy started fighting for all seashores and lakeshores. Combined Kennedy and Johnson I mentioned saved Fire Island National Seashore, in New York, Cape Lookout in North Carolina, Assateague in Virginia and Maryland, Cumberland Island in Georgia. I could go on and on. They went into the Midwest for the first time and said, why are there no special places saved on the Great Lakes? What is more beautiful than the Great Lakes region and yet we're saving all these western monuments and places? So they save Apostle Islands National Park up in Wisconsin, 22 islands. Pictured Rock on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Sleeping Bear Dunes by Traverse City, Michigan, Indiana Dunes by Chicago. There was the seashore and lake shore preservation movement that brought in a lot of great voices to it, like Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, the great environmental leader in Florida, like Carl Sandburg, the old poet from, you know, populous poet out of Chicago and North Carolina. And so there was a lot going on when Kennedy was president. He had the best Secretary of Interior. I know rankings, guys, are bogus in general, except when Ohio State's number one. But you know, it was, I'd say, Stewart Udall was probably the greatest Interior Secretary in Kennedy and Johnson's. During the 60s Harold Ickes of FDR was great. Jimmy Carter, who is very ill right now, his Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus of Idaho was a very significant figure. But at any rate, Kennedy's shot in Dallas, December '63, gone. Rachel Carson dies of cancer in '64. And the question is, will this revolution go forward? Why is this a revolution? Udall said Kennedy opened the door and all the greenies came running in. It's not that Kennedy burst it open and onward and he just gave a crack of access to David Brower of the Sierra Club or, or, you know, the Rachel Carson of the oceans. Gave them a home in the White House, Kennedy gone, Carson gone. There's a bigger, who's? Can Johnson do it? Is he really real? Well, Lyndon loved dams. He grew up on FDR building dams, dam dams, and many other dams were needed in great...Tennessee Valley Authority of FDR, Grand Coulee Dam up in Columbia River gave the rural electricity, hydropower. But it is also true that by 1963, it was just poor politics. Every district wanted, you know, $50 million for an unnecessary dam. And what was happening is all of our rivers were being dammed and we had no wild stretches of rivers anymore and because Johnston was such a pro dam guy, many environmentalists thought uh oh, what have we got with him. Well it turned out what we got is two for one. His wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was an ardent environmentalist. And I hope you all realize how important she was in stopping billboards, saving roads, as First Lady. She would go down the Rio Grande River on raft trips. She went whitewater rafting in Idaho. She fought to save Redwood groves. She's, Today we honor her with our National Wildflower Center because she believed states should plan and protect wildflowers. She was the real deal this Lady Bird Johnson on environment. And Lyndon Johnson had a more Western cowboy male rancher mentality, which was, I judge my neighbor on how they take care of their property.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

This is not enlightened environmentalism, Lyndon Johnson. But on the other hand, you know, he got it and he liked Theodore Roosevelt, and he liked the idea particularly of American beauty, saving American places. But Linden had no international, never saw the Earth is one pulsing biological organ, you know, organism. He was very chauvinistic about its American protection. But LBJ went on and did the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in '68, saving stretches of rivers all over our country that are protected today and our heirlooms. He created the National Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail our National Trail System, LBJ. He, with Udall, fought for some key components of our national beauty, canyon lands in Utah National Park, North Cascades up there by Seattle, huge wilderness National Park, Johnson. Redwoods in California, Johnson. I could go on. He also did national historic sites, saving of homes and buildings that whenever you see one of those plaques on a building of national historic significance, it's that history consciousness coming out of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson. The Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts were the beginning of looking and Johnson on many books and things that would read very well to all of you today. Why are we dumping all of our garbage, soot, poisons where poor people of color are? Which we were and are. Johnson was identifying it, pushing through Clean Water Acts, so but we don't honor Johnson as a environmental conservation president because of Vietnam. Meaning how do you justify okay, I'm saving a beautiful river in Arkansas while I'm going to use agent orange and kill the entire jungle of Vietnam. That's what where he gets into issues and hasn't been honored, so on one hand, he's not as great as FDR, or TR. And then when he did do well, his wife is the progenitor of much of it. And yet he did do a lot, but it gets lost in the Vietnam narrative. Okay. But we were lucky that we were winning at this point the pesticide campaign. I'm writing right now. I recently was talking about a baseball player, Hank Aaron, and I was hesitating whether I'd be able to write on him a moment ago. I'm writing the definitive, hopefully, biography of Cesar Chavez and the farmworker's movement and I'm going out March 1, 2, and 3, interviewing Chavez's brothers and sisters who are very senior, and Chavez deserves a lot of credit for the environmental justice. I don't know if any of you have had environmental justice courses, or follow what that it's all about. Many people beginning in the 1980s, in Warren County, North Carolina and others, but it really begins with the farmworkers and Chavez. They were the first to ban pesticides, the United Farmworkers, and DDT. They were the first to actually refuse to work land that had DDT. And so he's part of the environmental justice movement and rural agricultural workers being poisoned. Martin Luther King gets killed at the Memphis sanitation strike. You know, garbage work. There were fish kills all over going on in American rivers. I interviewed Ralph Nader. Some of you may know, or may not, for my book. But you know, Nader, some people, Nader told me there's only one question all of you guys should ask. I said really, one question? And he said, really, there's just, it all boils down to all of our problems. And he said, why shouldn't every river and lake in the United States be swimmable?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

And when did we give up our right to have clean rivers and lakes? When did we look at the river here and say it's okay that you can't go in the water. When did that happen? How did that happen? He said if you follow that, if you clean all the rivers and all the lakes, you would see so many problems start getting solved. But no, it'll allow the chemical companies' phosphates, etc., just to be dumped, agricultural runoff. Because we're not monitoring. Now that's idealistic to keep rivers and lakes clean, but growing up in Ohio along the Maumee River, my mom used to yell at me you can't eat that bass fish you caught. It's got poison. And it almost became you forget about it, like yeah, you can't eat it, you can't swim in it. You can't, why? That's what Nader was saying. Why wouldn't you? Why can't we? Why aren't we demanding it as people? The Native American, Indigenous people in the '60s and '70s really got their message of land and water stewardship home. I write about many of those crusades, but the uranium mining and things that went on tribal lands is just heinous. I try to document that the best I can. And you might ask, well, okay, oh, by '68 and I write, you know, one of the other things Lyndon Johnston did was the Wilderness Act. The wilderness, he put aside 9.1 million acres of wilderness. Does anybody here know beyond the environmental historians, but to be honest, what is wilderness? It's an interesting question, because if you live in New York City, the wilderness might be the Catskills. You live in the Catskills, wilderness might be the Adirondacks. If you live in the Adirondacks, wilderness might be the Arctic Circle. And it's where you're at. So it's a very difficult designation, but Johnson did it, putting what he put 9.1 million acres, here's to a million acres where no roads are allowed.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Because if you don't build a road in 2 million acres, you're going to have no logging, no telephone wires, no intrusions, no porta-potties, no, no trucking, and it will stay pristine as much as it can with planes, overhead and satellites and, you know, smog or whatever. But it's, it's an it's an ideal, and we actualized it during that period of time. And it continues today. If you guys get a map, and start just punch in when you leave class wilderness with a capital W, you'll be amazed how much land was done in the '60s with that wilderness we have today. The problem with climate change is species aren't staying in that wilderness. They're migrating out of it and so now they need new wildlife corridors to connect one wilderness to another and there's a whole group of problems, but this didn't happen in the period. So here it is '68 Lyndon Johnson is not running for president and Richard Nixon wins the Republican nomination. And Nixon, who cares nothing about the environment, but at least ostensibly is the precedent of that...that's a big year in the environment, '68. Stewart Brand did the Whole Earth Catalog, Edward Abbey did Desert Solitaire, you know. These are like powerful crafts coming out, and environments being talked about. But Nixon did something smart. He asked himself, who is the Republican in environ that I know? It was a man named John Ehrlichman, who went to jail for Watergate from Seattle. But Ehrlichman went to UCLA law, moved back to Seattle and ran a law firm that was basically a litany law firm. If you are a wealthy community in Seattle, let's say or suburb, and an aluminum plant is going to be built near your house, wealthy people would gather together, and hire Ehrlichman's firm and sue not to get the Aluminum Company. Not in my backyard. It's funny, when you get people with money, they don't want to hear that. It's not a Democrat or Republican anymore. They unite. You know, that's what Ehrlichman did and he took, Nixon came to Seattle in early '62 and Ehrlichman took him out on a boating trip to see how pretty it was up there. And Nixon hires him to be his environmental voice. So on the campaign trail if a reporters said Mr. President, what are you going to do about Lake Erie Fish etc. Well, talk to John Ehrlichman. I didn't know till I did the book that Ehrlichman was this David Brower of a left-oriented radical that in some ways. The Sierra Club called Ehrlichman, a covert green in the White House, because whatever you thought about Ehrlichman, he did get it. He got the problems that the youth movement was talking about, that Rachel Carson, he understood it. How he navigated it, it could depend, but he wasn't, he was a very smart person. And so Nixon gets elected. Everybody's convinced it's going to be disastrous on environmental policy. Ehrlichman's there with him in the White House. And you know what happens only days Nixon's in the White House, days? Santa Barbara oil spill.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I know you guys have just had your horrible blowing up of a train and chemicals and the rest here in Ohio. Well, the spill was dramatic. Television news went color in 1967. Everything was black and white. Now the nightly news was in color. And early 69 January Nixon's job president in paradise, beautiful Santa Barbara showing birds stuck in goo and in, you know, black waves of oil and it was being brought to your living room. And Nixon sent his Interior Secretary Walter Hickel out there. And I'm telling you, Hickel was from Alaska, kind of populous, Republican. He gave Nixon some good advice. He got on the ground out in Santa Barbara and he was noticing the White House was starting to minimize the spill. It's not really that bad. Like you're getting here in Ohio, you know. And Hickel calls the President and says don't minimize. It's awful. Just tell the public, it's terrible. We've only been in eight days. We're not going to get blamed. It's the Johnson era oil lease deals, not ours for political cover. But it's just if you try to minimize you're going to become the enemy and Nixon listened to that. And then in the summer of '69, Ohio comes into play because the Cuyahoga River catches fire.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Other rivers had caught fire. The Rouge River had caught fire by Detroit. But they didn't get Time magazine coverage quite like Cuyahoga in Ohio. And Nixon was stunned because that, it occurred right when Neil Armstrong is going on the moon. And suddenly Time is giving this month's coverage to rivers on fire. And people were blaming Nixon, you're president. You know it would be Biden today if five rivers caught fire. What are you doing, Joe Biden? You know, that's just the way it is. And Nixon's like,  I'm not the dirty river guy. I've only been here months now these rivers are on fire. So he woke up. And then Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin who was the founder of Earth Day, the first Earth Day in 1970. He was, there were Vietnam protests going on, teach-ins and Nelson gets the idea at the center of Wisconsin, we're going to hold an environmental teach-in, and all the college campuses, Ohio. We were just talking. He was at Purdue, right. He just gave me a pen. He was at the first Earth Day at Purdue. But it was everywhere. And Nixon smells a rat. A first Earth Day's coming April 22 1970. And they're all going to blame me. Paranoid and also a very smart politician. And so he makes a deal with Ehrlichman. And he tells Ehrlichman, the environmental guy in the Nixon White House, look, I'll sign a far-reaching legislation as long as Ed Muskie, the Democratic senator of Maine, gets zero credit. Nixon, the man who kept an enemies list, hated Muskie more than anyone. Muskie was going daily on television or wherever he could find an audience denouncing Nixon's Vietnam policy and calling Nixon a polluter. He was running as Mr. Clean Air and Clean Water and Nixon was convinced it was going to be who ran against him, Muskie versus Nixon. So he tells Ehrlichman, I'll work with Scoop Jackson and there's no reason people. In the back there will notice Henry M. Jackson, a powerful senator from Washington, a Democrat, who was for the Vietnam War. Told Nixon, never criticized Nixon's war policy, yet was a conservation slash environmental Senator who would push for the North Cascades. And yes, you all know, Washington environments, pretty robust, salmon runs and you know. And so, he had a great staff. Scoop Jackson and Dingell, the Congressman Dingell of Michigan, cobbled together a document that is the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA. Do you know that the National Environmental Policy Act, it's signed by Nixon January 1, 1970, San Clemente California, in his Western White House, NEPA's a revolution like Silent Spring the book, because NEPA with Nixon going on along demands if you're building something, you've got to have an environmental impact statement.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

You know how big that is? You want to see how that gave birth to environmental law? You know, if you're Starbucks and want to build something along the river, what's your environmental impact statement? You know, you're the federal government and you're wanting to build a national guard compound, what's the environmental impact? It almost by definition gives birth to environmental law. Because it's no longer if you guys are at Ohio State majoring in environmental science studies, it's not just a dream to work for the National Park Service or state you might get hired by a company working on environmental impact statements. Nixon did it. Nixon's State of the Union of 1978 was about a third on the environment. Earth Day came. Nixon thinks it's a pinko commie plot he's still paranoid about. But he decides to play his hand this way. I'll plant a tree on the White House with photo op with my wife. We're tree planting on Earth Day. That'll go out and he gave all of Interior Department the National Park Service etc. Fish and Wildlife the day off to take part in educating the public about nature and the Earth. Sounds reasonable. But he also has the FBI do illegal wiretaps and domestic surveillance on all these student groups. And the FBI blankets far and wide that what they were worried about, the FBI and Nixon, was that the funder of Earth Day the recent Earth Day shops in colleges suddenly you guys want to have quarters and Earth Day at different campuses because Walter Reuther was paying the bills, the head of the United Automobile Workers and Reuther dies days after Earth Day in a plane crash, odd was missing in a plane. But the point is Nixon now weathers Earth Day and the report came back in. It's hilarious the FBI and Pete McCloskey, Republican Congressmen, and Ehrlichman are laughing because they have to tell the boss Nixon, there was some there was some smooching and some fondling and some frisbee and some dogs were running and I smelled, we smelled some pot. That was it. Nixon gets reassured by that to the sense that he's thinking okay, well, I'm now getting some, I feel I'm getting street cred. I'm not the demon of all this stuff, and, and he creates the EPA in the summer of 1970. Nixon does. It opens its doors December 1970. Nixon goes and signs the Clean Air Act that we're living by today. He does Marine Mammal Protection Act. He does all sorts of bills to protect oceans. He takes military grounds, calls it legacy, places for wildlife to thrive. He creates things like with the Sierra Club, Nixon does the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California, Gateway National Recreation Area, in Jersey, New York a lot. But I mentioned where I began that in fact, by '73, you have the Endangered Species Act epic 92 to nothing Democrats, Republicans in fights with liberals mixed with even conservatives like Walt Disney, so conservative, in the mix all these people wanting to save the planet, and it dies after it. By '74 Gas inflation, petroleum at all kicks in and the revolution peters out. It has moments with Jimmy Carter, who is now sick as I said, who created Superfund sites for toxic waste and created, Carter he put aside 56 million acres of Alaska the size of California, for Alaska parklands. It's still in the mix. But by 1980 when Ronald Reagan wins, it's over, guys. All of the real fighting environmentalists, Frank Church of Idaho, Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota, George McGovern of South Dakota, these guys lose with Reagan sweeping the map. And from '80 to today, we have been looking for a fourth wave. It almost came the fourth wave with Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, climate change. The fourth wave is going to be climate driven, getting off of fossil fuels, but it's harder than the others. It's global. Got to have China and India and what do we do? Where's the leadership? And don't know if it's going to come from the federal government, you're not going to get 92 to nothing. The Republicans are trying to undo NEPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, let alone expand anything. So you guys are in the fourth wave. It's like this in the federal government. So it might be the brightest signs are individual state legislatures. Just in Rhode Island, who's taking the lead because they're about to lose all their shoreline. The climate reveled, they just destroyed little Rhode Island. They built the biggest wind farm offshore in the world. CVS, the pharmacy company’s headquartered there, it's the fifth largest company in the world, they're starting to maybe do away with plastics for their drugs. And also there's a lot of inner and they're trying to be a hotbed in Rhode Island of innovation at Brown University in places. California under Gavin Newsome is saying by 2035, no more fossil fuels is being sold in the state, no more vehicles that take fossil fuels being allowed. Same Washington State, meaning blue states might go ahead on their own. It's not the same as federal policy. But I think that's one of the areas to keep your eye on. And meanwhile, the fourth wave is Generation Z. Is young people. And Baby Boomers don't have to be criticized or beat up. We didn't do enough. But we did do the EPA and endangered species, clean air, clean water, you wouldn't be able to breathe in LA or Cleveland, the smallest amount. We made strides forward. But the pressure of going backwards and the global stress of us being only 6% of the world's population in America and using up 35% of the natural resources, it's unsustainable, as you all know. But I have no answer of where that fourth wave can kick in except the education that took place in the '60s. People do Earth Science, environmental law, ecology, you know. Greta's book coming out right now, it's like number one. You know, there still is a hunger going on there. And so you live in hope. I'll end by telling you I learned from this book with David Brower and other names I'm throwing at you, Rachel Carson, never lose hope that you can fix the problem. And they used to say in the '60s when that first Earth Day created songs like Marvin Gaye's Mercy media ecology, or Neil Young or Pete Seeger saved the Hudson River saying, well, have fun. That's a big lesson I took from that. Have fun saving the world. Laugh. Have parties. Enjoy it. You can't live like, oh doom day's here, get yourself sick over it. But get organized, get out there, group together and talk about things. If you can't dedicate your time to the environment, very few can. Do little things. He's riding his bike to school or something like I'm going to adopt a state park and just be a friend of a park and go to a couple meetings and do you know two hours of work dealing with nature. If enough people start percolating like that, when the moment hits in history, there'll be an informed and educated public ready to demand that we get off of fossil fuels and prioritize climate change as the existential threat of our time. Thank you all.

 

Bart Elmore 

Questions, in one little thing we wouldn't mind, I promise you, we're not going to mass mail you emails, we just, if you would sign in as you leave, it helps us with the stuff and the department. I also realize that we were so excited introducing everybody, I know most folks, I'm Bart Elmore, environmental historian. Nice to have everyone here and for folks on Zoom, we'll also try and get your questions. We have about 15 minutes here. So we'll start in this room and then see if we can get to some of the Zoom questions. Yeah, John.

 

John Brooke 

I'm John Broke, environmental historian, still in this department. I was thinking about the fourth wave book all the way through. Particularly when I was waiting for you to make the shift from conservation to static poisoning. Okay, that's the key break 1945 to 1965, 70. So then, then I'm waiting for the fourth, fourth wave and okay, so you're doing you're doing Chavez. That's great. That's, that's an important, maybe that's the fourth book, but the fifth book, the fourth wave book, um, I really expected you to end in the last three or four minutes talking about the amazing Presidency of President Biden. Why isn't President Biden the equivalent to FDR, TR, and JFK, and LBJ? In other words, the Chips Act, the series of three bills, massive, gigantic amounts of money on the line, and more than was going to drive already, the private sector is booming. So I can see this amazing book, if you write it in the same tone, in the same frame, you know, this is this, you know, Americans acting but now Americans acting like a different thing. So let me let me just leave you with that.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I agree with you on your Biden assessment completely. The problem is, the crafting of a story is that we only are as good as our documents. I mean, that's why most environment people are like building kibitzers, and it's a journalist that's working that front. I'm looking in archives, so I know we don't have the Biden archives so it would be a polemic. It would be an important book, too, but we don't know he's so in mid-journey. I mean, he may be out in two years, and there'll be rollbacks of a lot of this stuff. So you don't get the clarity of what sticks and what doesn't stick. But I'm with you, in the sense of Biden has been very, very good on this and I'm in complete agreement, and I think he deserves more credit than he's been getting on it.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

So quick follow up. How long would it take before one can chop it up and write that book? In other words, it's an issue for the younger generation, right?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

He's, he's there two years, and it's thinking by the time you'd write it, it'd be three. And is he a one-term president or two-term president? But every day, we have great journalists and foreign journal articles out applying in the journalism world. But I try to avoid writing about contemporary figures now. I did it with the Hurricane Katrina book because I was living in New Orleans and everything got so impacted. But I would say it's more of an act of journalism than it is an act of history. What else? Yeah.

 

Audience Member

First of all, thank you for writing three books. They're really powerful. What do you think the future of national parks is? Would there be a movement to expand them or are we kind of at a holding point?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I think we're at a holding point. First of all, a lot of lands worth it, you know, have been preserved. The more controversial more difficult is a story of appropriation of native cultures and what are these parks looking at? And, you know, magazines like The Atlantic and others have been questioning, you know, some of the aspects of parks. For example, John Muir, the great promoter of the National Parks now that he's been really down listed at the Sierra Club because of Muir's comments on race, that in an era right now that we're living in, don't hold up. And, and so it's in this sort of transitional period. But the public loves the parks and I think it's bipartisan in the sense that things are changing. Each park is different, like go to Joshua Tree. You want clean energy, California desert, the wind farm is there and solar. But it's, the solar is sucking in the sun killing all the Joshua Trees. These things are complicated in and a world that's so heavy grappling with hyper industrialization, and the fact that climate is here, mega floods, mega droughts, you know, an age of massive extinction of species. And so, you know, it's doing, going to national parks right now, while important in our day, is still amazing for outdoor recreationists and the like, isn't tackling these big issues, you know, of energy consumption. And in that I think our park system is vibrant in what is still a major component of the US. It has more support from the public than a lot of federal programs do. Like the armed forces. Most people love the armed forces, our soldiers, men and women, most people love the parks. And yes, there's big fights, should guns be allowed in national parks, you know, as a second amendment issue, and there are all sorts of fights going on and by and large  we, we think of the Grand Canyon as our Taj Mahal. We think of the Tetons as our Louvre. We think of, you know, the Shenandoah Valley as Westminster Abbey, meaning these are parts of American pride that I think transcend the partisan divide to enough of a degree to keep it keep the system going. With that said, out in Utah people want the parks given back to Utah there. There are enemies of the Park Service's federal government overreach. Yeah. Um.

 

Audience Member

In your book and you indicated that you admire David Brower at the Sierra Club a lot. I'm wondering what your reaction is to the naming of Ben Jealous, to his role of Ben Jealous.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

He's now the new head of the Sierra Club and, and I think an extraordinarily enlightened choice. Brower though is amazing in his day. I mean, he was a, grew up in Berkeley became an Alpine hiker skier served in World War II with the groups like was the 10th Mountain Division came back, and started Brower as the publicist and took photographs I don't have time for it today. But a lot of things get saved by photography. Eleanor Roosevelt used to say if you want my husband to save a landscape bring him photos, and sure enough, time and again people would get a meeting and show photos and he would say well declare it a park. It was a different America back then. You could do big things like that and I think movies documentaries and all move people and so Brower was the real progenitor of emotionally attaching people to photography and motion pictures into a campaign to save something. So somebody did an incredible Lake Erie film and how it's dying and showed what it could be and we got it widely distributed and brilliantly made. Brower believed there was an advantage to win over recruits. And he created a book series and but he quit the Sierra Club in '68 and created a group called Friends of the Earth and other nonprofits because Broward bought by, let's call it '69, that we had to go global. That we did a lot in America that was really positive but without a look at global, the global issues of conservation of wildlife and forest and the rest and we were we were missing a step. Ron Dellums who was the congressman, from a big person, big group in environmental protection, was the birth in 1971 of the Black Caucus. And that really started. I use a funny crossover, Ron Dellums, considered a radical socialist congressman from Oakland was pushing for David Brower to win the Nobel Peace Prize in the Sierra Club. Different era guys. But I liked his message choice for now. But you know, we just started and we'll see what happens.

 

Jim Harris 

I teach the global environmental history course here. And we end the course with the environmental movement. And you've told so many awesome stories here. I look forward to reading the very fat book. But do you have a favorite story? Like if I could only assign let's say one chapter of your book in a six week course where we have one day on environmentalists? What's your favorite story you tell in the book? Do you think? It's hard question? Is it an unfair question?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I don't know. There's so many. But you know, I think you guys, some of you remember there used to be on television advertisement public services, Iron Eyes Cody. It was a Native American that was crying and looking at garbage in a river and the dirty river. It was a powerful public service announcement that went everywhere. Iron Eyes Cody because of this commercial got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Stars and all this and it was seen as the Native American or Indigenous people's connection to the youth counterculture environmental movement and all this. It turned out Iron Eyes Cody was Sicilian and not Native American and grew up in Louisiana. And he had worked with like John Wayne and people in some movies and was put, they turned him into a, in a minstrel like way, into this Native American spokesperson on keeping things clean. So you know, things like that are always shocking, you know, when you see when you know, see things like that. Also, I would say, you know, I had always heard overall about Lady Bird Johnson's love of the outdoors, but she wrote about it really well. And it was quite remarkable to me how, how well versed she was and my esteem for her rose. I was always with Eleanor Roosevelt impressed and I see what Ladybird Johnson some of you know, her Crusades were quite memorable.

 

Bart Elmore 

And just for time, I think we'll do one last question. And then if we have an intimate group we can come together and talk afterwards.

 

Audience Member

So I was going to ask you had mentioned how like, everybody has a Walden or like, a special piece of nature to them. I was just wondering like, maybe what your Walden is and what piqued your interest in environmental history?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

What was yours? Did you think of one?

 

Audience Member

I grew up on Lake Erie so mine was just like, there's like a beach. That's kind of like shut down but you can go, you can like hike to it.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Is it by Put-In-Bay?

 

Audience Member

No, it’s a, it's a small town. It's kind of hard to like, do you know Geneva on the Lake?

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Yes.

 

Audience Member

Yeah, it's Madison. It's like right next to it.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

That's great. How about a few more people, guys? Any of you in the back rows there have a Walden or a place that speaks to you?

 

Scott Levi 

Feel free to say Dulles Hall.

 

Audience Member

It's a bigger one. But Yosemite National Park.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

Yeah. Well, Yosemite, is just, well the interesting story is Yosemite, Kennedy went there. And they used to in Yosemite do a firefall. At night they'd shoot fire down the whole thing. It was a big controversy. Like why are you taking, bringing fire embers in a dry area, cascading down in a Disney effect with spotlights on it and oohs and ahhs and when Kennedy came to visit, you wanted to see that. But Ansel Adams, the great nature photographer from Yosemite boycotted, even though he loved Kennedy, because he wanted to make a message to get rid of that that ticky tacky personalization. And they did. But it's pretty hard, hard to beat Yosemite and I was worried this summer wildfires when you see what's going on out in Sequoia National Park and the greater you know, Yosemite Valley, etc. Who else just for fun? Yeah,

 

Audience Member

So I grew up in Columbus across the road from OSU's Don Scott Airport. Back in the days when the fences weren't very high. So we would just spend all Saturday in rubber galoshes tromping through the stream and Wendell Berry talks about the creek that you grew up in. That's the creek that I grew up in, was that stream that goes through OSU land over by the airport.

 

Douglas Brinkley 

I love Wendell Berry by the way. Yeah. You had your hand up, too.

 

Audience Member

Gibraltar Island, which is where Stone Lab is, which is, OSU's lab or whatever. I went on a school trip and it was just so beautiful.