Ann Arbor’s Connections to Earth Day

Students gather for a rally during Michigan’s 1970 Teach-In on the Environment in Ann Arbor. The largest and most visible event organized to celebrate the first Earth Day, the five-day event drew an estimated 50,000 participants and included 125 seminars, speeches, workshops, panels, debates, forums, rallies, demonstrations, films, field trips, and concerts. Photo and facts from the School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan.

By Odile Hugonot Haber

April 2020

The first Earth Day was created by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and took place on April 22, 1970, not long after 14,000 people came into the Chrisler arena in Ann Arbor for the University of Michigan’s first “Teach-In on the Environment” on March 11, 1970.

The University of Michigan event was organized by six graduate students, and it was so popular that many people could not get in, so organizers set up sound amplification outside. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief introduction, then the biologist Barry Commoner started his keynote speech. At first, he was quite moved because he had never spoken to such a large audience before and called it “the world’s largest seminar on ecology.”

He began: “What a wonderful thing you have done! At a time when the whole country has begun to ask why, in the wealthiest, the most scientifically advanced nation in the history of man, the heavens reek, the waters below are foul, children die in infancy, and we and the world which is our home are threatened with  nuclear annihilation.” He made the point more than once that “We are in a crisis of survival.” Pollution was already quite visible at the time, and Earth Day was indeed started as a matter of survival 50 years ago.

According to Adam Rome’s book, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, the original environmentalists thought the environmental crisis was a grim challenge but also realized it could present a great opportunity for consciousness raising, and for people to change their habits and practices. Already there was an emerging consciousness about the state of our planet.
 
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was the first to sound the alarm. Carson had become worried about the effects of pesticide use and wrote a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1962 which were turned into the book. This was called a “watershed moment” for the ecological movement.
 
In 1969, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson came up with the idea of a national day to focus on the environment after he witnessed the ravages of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Nelson was hoping to capture the vibrant youth who had been active in the anti-war movement and redirect their activist energy to an environmental movement.
 
Even before this, intellectuals in the 1950s, such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, had begun to advocate for a new liberalism. They saw that a surge of many new material goods in the US marketplace had a downside. “Earth Day also convinced many Americans that the pollution, sprawls, fall-out,..were not separate issues,” writes Adam Rome, and this called for a new consciousness.
 
Rome explains that the Ann Arbor event had many ripple effects and other teach-ins sprouted up all over the country and internationally.
 
He shows how, after an annual Earth Day was called for, “tens of thousands of people made Earth Day happen on universities, and college campuses, at schools and in cities and towns.” Buttons saying: “Give Earth a chance” proliferated everywhere and “many found the experience to be exhilarating and life-changing.”
 
Vance Packard, a best-selling social critic of the time, saw that the great unmet challenges involved the provision of public goods. He was quoted as saying, “A person can’t go down to the store and order a new park. A park requires a unified effort and gets you into voting, and public spending and maybe soak-the-rich taxes.”

Ann Arbor’s Citizens Mobilize for Community Common

In the late 1990’s, public land in Ann Arbor city center was going to be sold to a private contractor for a convention center. Citizens for many years had expressed the need for a park in the center of the city. The land was valuable, and the city had planned a convention center at first, but then it proved to be not financially sound. The convention center was set aside, but then the city continued to plan with out-of-town contractors to have a huge building constructed there as an “iconic” building. The city secretly put in underground parking, four floors deep, so contractors could be lured to build on the public land.
 
The building that was planned was huge, and its construction spoiled the character of Ann Arbor as a charming “tree town” that was easy to live in. Officials in City Hall had planned the building of some new, very tall buildings around the edge of the city. So not only was the city leadership neglecting to build a central park in the heart of our city, but they were proposing urban skyscrapers. The citizens were alarmed by these sudden developments; they felt overwhelmed, offended, and shocked.
 
In November 2015, a group called “The Ann Arbor Committee for the Community Commons” initiated a petition to amend the city charter and designate this public land as “a community commons” which would include a central park with a small civic center, public building,  and a playground. A hundred people or so started collecting signatures to get a “park in the center of the city.” The petition to amend the city charter was signed by 6,000+ citizens.  Because 200 people had signed twice, the city refused it and the petition had to be redone, but finally the second petition with 8,000+ signatures was accepted in June 2018 by the city clerk. It was listed on the ballot in June and was voted on November 6, 2018—and it won.
 
The resolution became part of the city charter, and the citizens did indeed get a park. By organizing and advocating, the people got their commons, and did the opposite of the Joni Mitchell lyric—they unpaved the parking lot and put up paradise! A city commission was formed, and they hosted a few open public events to entice the citizens to get involved with ideas and suggestions to create “the Park” and “the Commons.”

New Book Offers Ideas about ‘Commoning’
 
What can cities do to respond to the new demands of citizens as commoners? What institutional adaptations would facilitate such a role? Those of us who are looking for answers can find some in a new book by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons.
 
They write: “Commons are living social systems through which people address their shared problems”; and “It is about sharing, and bringing into being the durable social systems for producing shareable things and activities.” They affirm: “The very act of commoning as it expands and registers on a larger culture, catalyzes new political and economic possibilities.” (Free, Fair and Alive, 14-15). Because any idea of the commons is about people, relations, and social structures, the commons is indeed a transformative perspective.

In short, the common includes our lands, our planet, and the fact that we have finite resources and land use. As Silvia Federici defines it in Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons: “The commons means shared property, in the form of a shared natural or social wealth-lands, waters, forests, system of knowledge, capacity for care-to be used by all commoners, without any distinctions, but which are not for sale.”

The commons is the principle on which life brought us to this planet, it represents nature and natural evolution. It’s our shared inheritance. The deterioration of the environment is visible, and we will all suffer with the drastic changes that are now accelerating. As the environment is in crisis due to climate change, many millions of people will be affected and we are realizing that what affects one person somewhere, affects all of us everywhere. Our land is our inheritance and we need to care for it, and support all the beings on it, as we are all part of the bio-concentric web of life.
 
These thoughts move us forward to a new level of collective consciousness, in which we will need to develop the values of caring, helping each other, and facilitating collective actions for survival. This movement is now developing all over the earth, leading to visions of new economies, and new infrastructures that will facilitate these multifaceted collective developments.
 
The most advanced proponents have called for Earth Regeneration, and a network called "Regenerative Communities Network" operates as a living laboratory for the design of bioregional economies. They are joined by a multitude of small non-governmental organizations working to offer solutions.
 
The center of the city, the community commons, is one dot in a line of forward advancements that are needed for our cities and towns to advance life on earth and support visionary developments to protect and safeguard citizens as well as all nonhuman life on earth. We must have the resilience and the courage to move forward into uncharted territories.

Further Reading:

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, by Peter Linebaugh

Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard, by Peter Linebaugh

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, by Kate Raworth