Man Behind Earth Day Says Individual Actions Can Turn Environmental Tide

Denis Hayes--the man who 20 years ago organized Earth Day--was eating breakfast at a mid-Wilshire hotel recently when his thoughts turned to the forests of western Czechoslovakia.

“You drive through the hills and every conifer--and 90% of the trees are conifers--is dead. You drive through and see black stumps. It’s an agrarian Dresden,” Hayes said of the area devastated by air pollution.

Amid the clinking of coffee cups and the muffled sounds of RTD buses belching black diesel smoke outside, Hayes spoke intently. He was determined. For 20 years, he has been fighting to spare the environment from man’s repeated insults. And on this day he was trying to rally enthusiasm for Earth Day, 1990.

Tall, lean and slightly balding, Hayes first took up the cudgels as an environmental activist in 1970, dropping out of Harvard Law School at the suggestion of Gaylord Nelson, then a Democratic U.S. senator from Wisconsin and the man credited with conceiving the idea of an Earth Day. It proved a dramatic success.

On that single day--April 22, 1970--an estimated 20 million Americans joined in teach-ins, rallies, speeches and demonstrations that left their imprint on the nation. In short order, Congress enacted a raft of regulations to protect the environment.

Hayes followed up with his own crusade.

He was a major force in persuading the Carter Administration to step up funding for solar energy research and development and served for a time under Carter as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado.

He was a guest scholar at the Smithsonian Institution and a senior fellow at the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, an environmental policy organization. He headed the Illinois State Energy office and wrote more than 100 papers and books, including a book on solar power that was translated into six languages.

In 1979, he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Medal, the nation’s highest public service honor to someone under the age of 35.

Now, Hayes is at it again. This time the battle is a global one--a war aimed at saving the planet from environmental calamities not even imagined by most people 20 years ago.

At 45, a successful San Francisco attorney (with a law degree from Stanford University), Hayes has enlisted environmental groups and other organizations in no fewer than 140 nations to join in a worldwide observance of Earth Day 1990 that will culminate on Sunday.

Called a national hero by David Brower--the elder statesman of the American environmental movement--Hayes seems deceptively quiet and soft-spoken for an environmental warrior. At times he seems part prophet, part promoter but always the environmentalist.

He warns of the consequences the world faces unless humans change their ways. He laments the fact that the world spends $1 trillion annually on defense. “That is spending it on the wrong stuff, spending it on the wrong threats,” he says.

To spread the message, Hayes spends as much time on the road these days as he does in Palo Alto, at Earth Day 1990 headquarters. When he’s not enlisting governments and private groups to support Earth Day, he’s immersed in an unending string of interviews promoting the event.

Though it all, he does not lose sight of his primary purpose: To sound the alert that more--much more--needs to be done to clean up the environment.

“Are we better off for having done all that we did (since 1970) than if we hadn’t done it?” he asks. “The answer is manifestly yes. There are safer streams, for example.

“But the second part of the question is: Are we as a planet in better shape than we were 20 years ago? Again, the answer is manifestly clear, but in the opposite direction.”

Technological solutions to such worldwide problems as global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation and acid rain are desperately needed, he said. But, Hayes is quick to add, long-term success with the environment will depend more on individual actions than technology.

His belief in the importance of individual actions stems from ethics Hayes adopted when he was a boy growing up near the spectacular Columbia River Gorge in the state of Washington.

Hayes wears natural-fiber clothing and drives an economy car. He has replaced all the conventional light bulbs in his house with energy-efficient florescent bulbs. He’d like to see others do the same.

“To a great extent, this country’s environmentalism has consisted of people sending off contributions to distant, remote organizations . . . to a mercenary army,” Hayes said. “We pay them to fight our battles. That’s very important and necessary, but it’s not everything.

“What I’d like to have out of this Earth Day,” he said, “is a large and growing segment of society that is prepared to change their lives and let the world adjust to that changed reality.”