Environmental Groove
Earth Day is quintessentially 1970s
You can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about something catastrophic on the topic of climate change and the environment. Yes, we humans have caused scary disaster scenarios due to industrialized pollution and poor choices. Yes, the world can at times feels apocalyptic. The feelings of apathy, guilt, and hopelessness about the earth can be overwhelming, but they are ones that have been around for the last fifty years or so.
Today is Earth Day, and what better way to bring Boogie Shoes into the flow than to discuss the origins of the modern environmental movement and some of its major pop culture moments. Some of the coolest, hippest songs and movies came from the flourishing environmental activism of the 1970s. This time ultimately shaped our modern behaviors and morals as we continue on our never-ending quest for a healthy planet. In order to enact bold change, there needed to be political will, but also an infusion of “cool” to ensure people got the memo.
Regardless about your feelings on Elon Musk, he decided to market the original Tesla as a vehicle for the extremely affluent and hip instead of focusing on the sustainable aspect, and honestly I think it worked. In the 1970s, there was also a simmering of activism from spheres of influence that propelled environmentalism to the forefront of the cultural conversation.
After almost 100 years of industrialization, two World Wars, and the invention of post-war consumerism, mid-century society was facing the consequences of pollution. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about the dangers of pesticide use, and years later, in the 1970s, people were finally warming to the idea of banning DDT. Fuel standards for cars were archaic and the exhaust from leaded-gasoline powered vehicles were smogging up the skies with noxious fumes. Nuclear tests were scaring people, and the amount people littered and dumped into natural waterways was torrential to human health. The earth of the 1970s was a polluted, toxic mess, and honestly a lot more visceral than it is today. You could actually feel, see, and smell the chemicals and waste.
Much like the vibe of the last decade, in the 1970s, a vocal contingent of young people were upset with prior generations’ inaction and disinterest in the environment. Young people were disgusted with the nuclear “duck-and-cover” drills of their school days, and sick of all the pollution. So after some planning and a political push from Sen. Gaylord Nelson from the state of Wisconsin, Earth Day was established as a celebratory day of activism and performance on April 22nd, 1970.
The first Earth Day in 1970 feels very similar to our marches to end climate change. They were all about spectacle and attention-grabbing. Students at the University of Michigan put a 1959 Ford sedan on trial and convicted the car for the murder of the American public and traffic jams. Afterwards, the cast of the hippie musical Hair performed, as did celebrity folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. In New York City, which was the most widely covered in the press, thousands of people marched to bring environmental awareness. A group of Columbia University students organized and volunteered for the response, and actually convinced the conservative mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, to shutdown Fifth Avenue for the protest.
In July of 1970, President Nixon signed into law the Clean Air Act which created the Environmental Protection Agency and established air quality standards.
Finally, there seemed to some winds of change in the air. With the increased visibility of Earth activism, and public recognition of the growing environmental issues, pop culture followed suit.
This catalyst of all this earth-friendly content was the notorious “Crying Indian” ad. I know, that racist moniker makes me cringe, but that literal name of the famous 1971 Public Service Announcement. Keep America Beautiful is the non-profit organization that funded the ad, and they were one of the most visible environmentally focused charities at the time. They had major corporate funders, especially the tobacco industry, and spent mightily on anti-littering campaigns and started the trend of blaming consumer behavior for environmental issues. The ad does a great job of telling this story, and while Keep America Beautiful’s mission-driven ethics are nominal at best, they actually did created a big impact on consumer behavior. The ad actually got people to change the way people disposed of their waste, and it also inspired people to begin recycling as well.
This newfound sense of community activism and earthly inspiration swiftly captivated Hollywood and inspired some major films with social undercurrents and youthful idiosyncrasies.
One such film, Brewster McCloud, is not a social problem movie, and it’s not an environmental masterpiece, but it is a movie that takes cues from the environmental movement. It’s a modern re-telling of the Greek tale of Icarus, a boy who flies close to the sun but is told through the eyes of an adolescent boy living in the Houston Astrodome as a fallout shelter. The world is not post-apocalyptic, but it is dangerous and chaotic, an uniquely 1970s. Bud Cort’s titular Brewster McCloud attempts to build himself a set of wings and fly, all while a string of bird-themed murders occurs in Houston. It’s a strange story, and Brewster McCloud’s insistence on building these wings and flying are juxtaposed with the killings of racist or morally corrupt Houstonian figures.
The blind ambition of this young man, paired with his desire to go against nature in an industrialized setting distinctly echoes the challenges young people felt during the high point of the environmental movement. Growing up on an industrialized planet, and reviling morally corrupt authority figures who are morally corrupt polluters, where else can one gain inspiration and fly away? Brewster McCloud was an avatar for an entire generation of young activists and iconoclasts seeking an escape.
There was also a slurry of science-fiction fare like Soylent Green and Silent Running that gave audiences a horrific vision of the future. 1973’s Soylent Green actually takes place in 2022, where overpopulation and environmental disaster has desecrated the food supply, the earth’s natural resources, and income equality. The Soylent Corporation that controls the food supply has run out of its main ingredient, algae, and a plot to substitute this with a nihilist alternative exposes the sinister undercurrents of a planet driven by capitalism. Almost all environmental films of the time were unafraid to say what charities like Keep America Beautiful would not: that corporations are to blame for our planet’s degradation.
In Silent Running, similarly, all plant life on Earth has become extinct. There is also a conspiracy to destroy the Earth’s resources and a lone botanist becomes our hero. This film also features hastily made corporate solutions to a planet in decline, and shows a similar sinister corporate entity wreaking havoc on our characters who only want to preserve what’s left of Earth’s natural wonders. The activism of Earth Day and on-going social movements stoked the distrust of audiences who continued to appreciate and watch these fight-the-system movies.
On a more reflective note, other artists took the message of the movement and translated them into timely ballads of mourning and loss. Songwriters like Joni Mitchell captured the feelings of unease over the state of the world in an eloquent fashion. She released the song “Big Yellow Taxi” in April of 1970, right in time for the first Earth Day. She notably sings that they “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” and the song has been covered by Counting Crows and numerous other artists over the years. Mitchell was actually inspired to write the song after a trip to Hawaii where she assumed the island of Oahu would be less industrialized. It shook her to her core to see somewhere as natural and lush as Hawaii encountering the same issues she saw in her native Canada, and also near her home in Los Angeles— she had something to say.
Similarly, towards the end of the decade, actor and activist Jane Fonda starred in and promoted the 1979 nuclear disaster thriller The China Syndrome. The film also leans heavily into the theme of corporate conspiracy and distrust, with a story of a cover-up of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. The events leading up to the "accident" in The China Syndrome are based on truth and became a flashpoint for a generation reeling from “duck and cover” drills and The Cold War. Fonda was inspired to sign on to the film based on her individual activism and the growing push for denuclearization. The most timely, and eerie quality of The China Syndrome was its theatrical release on March 16, 1979, which was twelve days before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania. It gave the film even more resonance from a political perspective and provided more fuel for the environmental movement and Earth Days into the 1980s.
On the other side of the spectrum, I would be missing an opportunity if I didn’t reference the string of 1970s B-movie environmental horror films popular in the decade. While these may not have featured the same activism or reflection of Joni Mitchell or The China Syndrome, these exploitation films are indicators of just how commodified and widespread the environmental movement became. I’m not going to get into the weeds on these, but the sheer volume of animal-led horror films is astonishing in hindsight. The most famous is obviously the classic Jaws (1977,) but there were others released before and after that were majorly successful with young audiences looking for exploitation-style adventure with an environmental twist. Almost all of these movies contain a chemically enhanced animal or a science experiment that went wrong, and now this supercharged creature takes revenge by attacking humans. In Tentacles, it’s a giant octopus. In Orca, a whale. In Piranha, it’s killer fish. And in Frogs, it’s you guessed it, frogs!
In contemporary times, the song remains the same: young people are generally at the forefront of protests and climate action, and pop culture is attempting to reflect the mood, no matter how commodified or fragmented our culture becomes. Yet except for the outlandish fun of disaster movies like San Andreas or Geostorm, nowadays, the environmental movement of today feels a lot bleaker.
I was reminded of this when watching the television show Minx on HBO Max. It’s set in 1972, the year that DDT was banned in the United States, a whole ten years after Silent Spring was published. The mention of DDT over several episodes as a hot topic of the day fascinated me— especially because people joked about it! It all felt so light and airy, and obviously of major social concern, but with a levity, we seldom get when discussing today’s issues. The show itself is light-hearted in tone, but it was refreshing to see themes of environmentalism brought into conversation with both a serious conviction, but also optimism toward a better future. 1972 was by most accounts, a scarier, more serious time in The United States than today, but people got together and worked it out.
I think it’s important to remember how far we’ve come. Think about the smog over 1970s Los Angeles - it was filled with lead gasoline! People were literally ingesting toxic lead for decades until unleaded gasoline was invented in the 1980s. Or the fact that people would throw an entire bag of trash on the ground and not consciously think about it. We’ve phased out 99% of ozone-depleting substances and the holes have repaired themselves in record time. Not to mention three separate vaccines were developed, effectively ending or at least bringing a swift resolution to the COVID-19 pandemic. For all the horrors out there, I always want to point to the positives, and how we’ve gotten here. Things have improved, and if we overcome some of these environmental challenges in the past, we should continue to do so in the future.
Happy Earth Day!
For Further Enjoyment:
Top Tracks-
CBS News from 1970 : The First Earth Day
Keep America Beautiful Public Service Announcement (1970)
B-Sides-
Trailer for Soylent Green (1973)
The Nice Guys Interview with Shane Black: L.A. Smog
Great post. My late father was an artist and conservationist. I’m currently creating NFTs of one of his last sculptures called Molten Earth which is a warning and protest about manmade climate change. It seems a shame that 50 years after those protests we are much closer to making the planet uninhabitable even though we knew the risks we were taking.