Earth Day 1970 in Michigan began a month early — in mid-March on the U-M campus.
Michigan was one of the hotbeds of Earth Day action. At a five-day teach-in on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, in which an estimated 50,000 persons participated, Victor Yannacone, who in 1967 had filed Environmental Defense Fund lawsuits to stop the spraying of DDT and dieldrin, spoke on use of the courts to halt pollution. He told students, “This land is your land. It doesn’t belong to Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler…it doesn’t belong to any soulless corporation. It belongs to you and me.” A new student group called ENACT organized the week’s events, which included an “Environmental Scream-Out,” a tour of local pollution sites, music by popular singer Gordon Lightfoot and speeches by entertainer Arthur Godfrey, scientist Barry Commoner, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and Senators Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Edward Muskie of Maine.
Business Week magazine said the Ann Arbor event had attracted the greatest turnout of any teach-in to that date. Noting that President Richard Nixon and college administrators hoped environmental issues would turn students away from Vietnam War protests, the magazine fretted that it appeared “the struggle for clean air and water is producing as many radicals as the war. And if the rhetoric at Michigan is any guide, business will bear the brunt of criticism.”
Action took different forms on different campuses. Tom Bailey, a Marquette high school student, worked with students at Northern Michigan University to plan Earth Day activities. One was a “flush-in.” Students flushed fluorescent dye tablets down dorm toilets at a synchronized moment in an effort to prove that sewage was directly discharging into Lake Superior. Events like these not only attracted the attention of the press, but also gave future environmental professionals their first major public exposure. Bailey later worked for the state Department of Natural Resources, as had his father, and became executive director of the Little Traverse Conservancy. One of ENACT’s founders on the University of Michigan campus, John Turner, later became director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Doug Scott, a graduate student active in ENACT’s teach-in planning, moved on to the national staff of the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club.
The mood of grave concern in 1970 gripped some elders, too. Ralph MacMullan, the director of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, authored an article in Michigan Natural Resources, his agency’s magazine, entitled “Ten Years to Save Mankind.” Said MacMullan: “Nature is giving clear signals that it will not continue indefinitely to accept the garbage, the filth, the fumes that are the byproduct of this drive to the supersonic life.”
At a speech on Earth Day, Governor William Milliken talked of making Michigan “a model state” in the fight against pollution. Milliken was about to become the first governor in Michigan’s history to demonstrate leadership in the fight to protect the environment, fusing with the new public movement to enact landmark reforms.