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Dear Progressive Reader,

April 22 is the fifty-third Earth Day. It was founded in 1970 as a way to address the looming environmental crisis on our planet—most of it created by humans. Today began with thousands of activists gathering ([link removed]) in London with the intent of building coalitions to address the looming climate catastrophe.

Attitudes toward the environment have evolved over the past decades, but the essence of the concerns has remained the same. In the early twentieth century, the conversation was around preservation and conservation. Our founder Robert M. La Follette wrote in March 1909, “These questions are not of this day only, or of this generation. They belong to all the future. Their consideration requires that high moral tone which regards the Earth as the home of a posterity to whom we owe a sacred duty. The idea will enoble any people upon which its real significance once more fully dawns.” In the early 1970s, attention was focused on pollution. As Tia Nelson wrote ([link removed]) for our April 2020 issue, her father, Senator Gaylord Nelson (Democrat of Wisconsin and a founder of Earth Day) said his goal was “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy.” Today,
concerns are focussed on the ticking clock that is the climate crisis. As Noam Chomsky notes ([link removed]) in our current issue, “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has recently been set to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has come to termination. The analysts who set the clock cited the two most salient reasons: the growing threat of nuclear war and the failure to take the required measures to prevent global heating from reaching a point where it will be too late.”

In 2018, as then-President Donald Trump and members of his party were questioning science itself, I wrote about ([link removed]) the 1970 issue of The Progressive magazine, a special volume devoted to the first Earth Day with articles by Denis Hayes, Barry Commoner, Ralph Nader, Paul Ehrlich, and many others. A reader recently contacted our office saying that he had just unearthed his copy of that historic and widely distributed issue. He said we should republish the words of Hal Borland that appeared within those pages. Borland wrote, “For years a handful of us have been warning that things were getting out of hand, but we were largely talking to a vacuum. The technologists, the industrial chemists, the public officials, and most of the general public, when they heard us at all, said, ‘Nonsense! Who cares about a little smog and smoke? They are signs of full employment. What does a little sewage and industrial waste matter in the rivers and lakes?
Water is water, isn't it? And what if the miracle pesticides do kill a few songbirds? We are prosperous, the most prosperous nation in the world, with the highest standard of living in history. That's what really matters.’ But finally even they began to choke on their own fumes and gag on their own water. And conservation became a popular cause.”

This week on our website, Jeff Abbott writes ([link removed]) about local efforts by Indigenous groups in Guatemala to clean their lakes and rivers, and ban plastic bags. Harvey Wasserman shines light ([link removed]) on the backpedaling of California Governor Gavin Newsom on nuclear issues, even as Germany shutters the last of its plants. Cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates ([link removed]) President Biden’s approval of a fossil fuel project in the Arctic, despite campaign promises of opposition. And Alvaro Sanchez of the Greenlining Institute and Olatunji Oboi Reed of Equiticity pen an op-ed ([link removed]) on the importance of local communities in the struggle
for climate justice. Plus, John Nichols interviews ([link removed]) the prime minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, on the ways that climate action has become mainstream in her country.

Elsewhere on progressive.org, Mike Ervin expresses concern ([link removed]) over the permanence of accessibility gains won over the past decades; Sarah Lahm reports on ([link removed]) the firing of a union organizer by Minnesota’s Planned Parenthood; Tanya Greene of Human Rights Watch looks at ([link removed]) a new anti-immigration law in Texas; and Glenn Daigon describes ([link removed]) a recent victory by school staff union members in Los Angeles.

On April 11, I had the opportunity to interview activist and author George Lakey. On tour with his eleventh book, an autobiography called Dancing with History ([link removed]) , Lakey says, “The stronger a movement becomes, the more interesting it becomes to other movements, as a coalition partner. We need to get to a point where our movements are in coalition with each other.” A recording of that interview is now available on YouTube at this link ([link removed]) .

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The new 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available. You can order one online ([link removed]) .

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