Earth Day is extra special this year because it marks the 40th year anniversary of the global event that was launched to bring increased awareness about our planet Earth and our impact on it. I wanted to sit down with my good friend Dan Noble, who I refer to as the “Father of Green in San Diego” and ask him a few questions. He was here in 1970 and organized the first local celebration at Grossmont College. He has continued on in the movement and is a well respected leader in sustainability here in San Diego. He is a real local treasure. To begin with I wanted to find out from Dan what that first Earth Day in San Diego was like...
DN: “The event was a “teach in,” and grew out of our “Ecology Club” that I chaired as an outgrowth of our Biology class. In the class, we were given Barry Commoner’s book “Science & Survival” as a companion text to our classic Biology text book. So the dialogue then was that our actual survival, much less “sustainability” (a word that wasn’t generally used then) was very much in question.
At that first Earth Day, we had tables with literature that surprisingly even got criticized from students who saw us “wasting paper” even for environmental education purposes! We had speeches, music, lectures, and “happenings.” These were a take off on the “Love-In’s” that many of us participated in like the “Summer of Love” (1967) in San Francisco and the anti-war marches, especially the one, also in San Francisco, in 1969 which had “Ecology Contingents” along with the “Woman’s Rights”, the “Black Power”, the “Civil Rights”, and the “Gay & Lesbian Rights” contingents all involved. These social movements were all precursors to that first Earth Day and definitely shaped the culture of it.
Also, at the Earth Day “Teach In” that evening, I made a personal life commitment to forge a career in environmental protection, as did a lot of my cohorts (we might of called ourselves “comrades”!). So just like with democracy, there are fundamental principles that we were discovering and attempting to live back then as we are continuing to do to this day. One of the examples that I remember and sometimes return to even now is 1970 National Earth Day Chairman, Denis Hayes’s, introduction of “Declaration of InterDependence” signings . Apparently it was a re-write of Will Durant’s Declaration from 1945. The one from Earth Day 1970 was first published, I believe, by the Whole Earth Catalog, which was very popular by all us Hippies in that day. It can still be found as the “Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence”. And Green Peace adopted it and updated it in 1976. Read these documents, they will amaze you, and show the social thread dating back to before World War II!
I transferred to UCSD, after our first Earth Day (summer of 1970) and majored in Biology, Chemistry and minored in Philosophy… I also got married (I’m still married to Lynn, and we will be celebrating our 40 anniversary this year too!) The house I bought in March 1969, two bedrooms on 3 acres in Jamul for 15k, a place we called the “Jamal House” and served as a college “commune” complete with organic gardens, chickens, goats, fruit trees and plenty of dogs, cats and even fleas tragically burned to the ground shortly after our transfer to UCSD, in what was called the Pine Valley Fire of Sept. 1970. So that environmental disaster was a very personal one. Yet… life goes on, right?! My wife and I remark to this day on the intensity of our lives from 1968 to 1970, when we were just 18-20 years old! Whew! Those are just some of my memories surrounding the first Earth Day!”
DPW: Wow, I think I really would have loved that time in history with all of that social activism! I then wanted to know from Dan after forty years of being involved with the environment and now more broadly the sustainability movement, what are his thoughts on our progress as a community since 1970?
DN: “I honestly thought we would be much further along than we are! I had no idea, in my 20’s, that our evolution and development toward a sustainable economy, just like we are seeing with democracy, would be a multi-generational process. Who would have thought we would still be attempting to support the formation of new democratic societies and governments 240 years after the formation of our own!?
Can the transition to a sustainable economy transition faster? I still pray daily that it can … and it will, likely owing to all our acceleration of consciousness evolution, in large part itself owing to our internet communication abilities! But I also expected that if we didn’t change, that we would have “hit the environmental wall” by now! For those who were active back then, the Club of Rome report “Limits to Growth”, 1972, predicted the end of civilization as we know it, if we didn’t radically change our ways. Fortunately, that has not occurred. The environment has been much more resilient than any of us thought at the time.
And while I taught about “peak oil” and creating a “circular economy”, and “industrial ecology” in my high school Environmental Studies classes in the 1970’s and early 1980’s (as a science teacher in Eugene, OR), there has not been sufficient resource shortages and price growth of virgin resources (oil, timber, coal, metals, landfill dumping fees, etc.), to be an economic driver of our envisioned “cradle-to-cradle” economy. Also, the formation of the EPA has protected the environment significantly in terms of air, water and solids pollution… so those are some clear successes.
However, some things have, and are occurring that we didn’t fully predict or appreciate 40 years ago (e.g. global warming, species extinctions, plastic ocean and soil pollution, etc.). What we (our publication and company, Environmental Business Journal )came to appreciate, by studying the growth and leveling off of the “environmental industry”, (the direct outcome of the 1972 environmental regulations, i.e. the National Environmental Protection Act and the formation of the US EPA), is that the EPA was set up to “protect the environment”, but NOT to envision and build a “sustainable economy!”
Kind of a big “duh” when you think about it … right?!
So ever since the Brundtland Commission Report from 1987, which first defined “sustainable development,” responding to the challenges of international economic development, we have been working to define not only “what does that mean?,” but also, “how we do that?” The Clinton Administration had the first, and only, US Government sponsored conference titled “Sustainable America” in 1999, in Detroit, MI. And it was co-chaired by Al Gore, and half of the Clinton cabinet was there! I was there representing our Environmental Business Journal, and had an opportunity to talk directly with Ray Anderson , Amory Lovins , Bill McDonough , to name a few, as well as listen to many speeches and discussions between the cabinet and these and many other sustainability activists, authors and business leaders. I thought we’d be “off to the races” regarding implementing a new sustainable economy once Al Gore was elected. But, oops, we got a Texas Oil Man for president instead!
Most recently in San Diego, a number of local groups have been responding to the call and promise of sustainability, as you know, Dawn, since we’ve both been involved in some of them, e.g. the Sustainability Alliance of Southern California, the San Diego Sustainability Partnership and certainly the US Green Building Councils, the fastest growing association in the U.S. in the new millennium! So I’m now feeling we’re at a transition and tipping point, especially with sustainable minded leaders at the state and national levels.”
DPW: It is true, San Diego is finally taken real steps towards sustainability and is even taking the lead on many fronts including solar and other Clean Tech development. It is really exciting to be a part of it! Finally I asked Dan what his vision for what our relationship with the Earth will look like ten years from now at the 50th year anniversary of Earth Day?
