Activists who launched the environmental movement

Meet the young activists who launched the environmental movement

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/04/18/1149385/meet-the-young-activists-who-launched.html

04/18/10

From a cadre of mostly young activists who organized the first Earth
Day was born an environmental movement that continues to influence
society. Meet a few who were present at the creation.

DENIS HAYES

The Wisconsin native grew up in Camas, Wash., and dropped out of
college in 1964 to travel the world. He later graduated from
Stanford, where he was president of the student body and an anti-war
activist. In 1969, Sen. Gaylord Nelson hired him as the national
coordinator of Earth Day. President Jimmy Carter later named him
director of the Solar Energy Research Institute. When Ronald Reagan
was elected, Hayes returned to Stanford, finished law school and went
into practice. In 1988, Hayes left the law firm and began raising
money and organizing a worldwide Earth Day event for 1990. Today he
heads Seattle's Bullitt Foundation for environmental sustainability
and chairs the Earth Day Network.

SEN. GAYLORD NELSON

Gaylord Nelson served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in World War
II. He came home to Clear Lake, Wis., where he was elected to the
state Senate and then Wisconsin governor. He went to the U.S. Senate
in 1963. In September 1969, Nelson proposed a nationwide grassroots
demonstration - "a teach-in" - for the environment. He set up a
national office in Washington, D.C., and hired Denis Hayes to be
national coordinator. After Earth Day's big success, Nelson led
efforts in Congress to pass the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act,
the Endangered Species Act and the other landmark legislation that is
the foundation for U.S. environmental protection. He left the Senate
in 1981, continuing his environmental leadership as counselor for The
Wilderness Society. He died in 2005 at 89.

MARILYN LAURIE

Marilyn Laurie was an unemployed mother of two children when she
became one of the five organizers of Earth Day in New York in 1969.
When it was over, she took a job as AT&T's first environmental
program director. In her roles with AT&T, she convinced AT&T
executives to recycle, conserve energy and to become a national
leader in environmental management. She rose to vice president of
public relations by 1987. Today she's a consultant and active in the
environmental movement.

ARTURO SANDOVAL

Arturo Sandoval was already a Hispanic leader when he joined Hayes to
work on Earth Day. After Earth Day, Sandoval continued his civil
rights and peace activism. He was drafted, refused induction and
sentenced to three years in prison in the early 1970s. His sentence
was suspended for public service work. After a career in journalism,
he began consulting and set up the Center of Southwest Culture to
help indigenous and Latino communities in the U.S. Southwest and
Mexico become stronger and more sustainable. The Center has raised
more than $14 million toward this effort. More recently he was worked
with The Wilderness Society to bring Hispanic communities and
environmentalists together to protect places they both love.

RANDAL O'TOOLE

Randal O'Toole was invited to help organize Earth Day as a high
school senior in Portland, Ore. It was a defining moment. Instead of
becoming an architect, O'Toole decided he wanted to be a forester. In
forestry school at Oregon State University, O'Toole took an economics
class and went on to get his graduate degree in economics. As a
member of the Ralph Nader-inspired Oregon State Public Interest Group
in the 1980s, O'Toole used economics to help stop the harvest of
old-growth timber in national forests. Armed with O'Toole's
forest-by-forest analyses, environmentalists showed many timber sales
cost the government more than they made. O'Toole's free-market values
led him away from other environmentalists: He opposes "smart growth,"
efforts to fight sprawl with top-down government land-use planning,
preferring to empower communities to protect their own values. He is
a fellow with the conservative Cato Institute.

RICHARD CIZIK

Richard Cizik was a sophomore at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash.,
when he led a campus campaign to save trees the administration wanted
to cut down. In 1973, his senior year, be became a Christian. He
joined the staff of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1980
to become a lobbyist for the Moral Majority as it was gaining power
in Washington D.C. He rose to become vice president for governmental
affairs and one of the most powerful Christian lobbyists in the
Capitol. He stepped down from the association in 2008 and today is
forming a new organization to address environmental and global poverty.

KENT CONRAD

Kent Conrad knew Denis Hayes at Stanford; when Hayes became
coordinator of Earth Day, he hired Conrad to help. Conrad became the
expert on the ancient addressograph machine, which was used to send
mass mailings before computers. After Earth Day he returned to North
Dakota; he served as tax commissioner before being elected to the
U.S. Senate in 1986. Today, he chairs the Senate Budget Committee.

BILL MAUK

Bill Mauk grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, and went to the University of
Southern California. As student body president, he met Denis Hayes,
who was Stanford's student body president. He joined Hayes'
idealistic young Washington staff organizing the first Earth Day.
Afterwards Mauk finished graduate school, got a law degree and came
to Boise to practice law. He served on the board of the Idaho
Conservation League in the mid-1970s, but did not stay involved in
environmental issues. He ran for U.S. Senate in 1998 as a Democrat
and later chaired the Idaho Democratic Party.

TIA NELSON

Nelson's daughter worked 17 years for the Nature Conservancy on
climate-change issues. In 2004 she returned to Wisconsin to serve as
executive secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands,
managing 78,000 acres of forests and trust funds worth more than $600 million.

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