If asked, many baby boomers would probably say that the most important day in history during their lifetimes was November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. That event transformed America in many ways, bringing the happy-go-lucky 50s to a dark close, perhaps paving the way for the Viet Nam War, but also bringing in a president who, unlike Kennedy, was able to persuade Congress to pass several vital civil rights laws.
For me, however, the most important day was another 22: April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day or, as it was called then, the National Environmental Teach-In. This day transformed America from one that was divided on environmental issues to one in which everyone, from teachers and politicians to oil and timber companies, were expected to pledge allegiance to environmental protection first before taking any other position on the issues. The results include recycling, locavores, and a consensus of thousands of scientists who aren’t climatologists on global climate change even though scientists had previously been conditioned to not express strong opinions on issues outside their areas of expertise.
As well as affecting our country in general, the teach-in had a huge effect on my life. I wanted to be an architect, and I spent the long drives my family took to Arizona each Christmas reading books on modern architects: Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Le Corbusier, and most importantly Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Taliesin West I visited on one of our Arizona trips.
I learned from those books that Wright wasn’t as admired by his fellow professionals as by Americans in general, but I gladly joined his admirers despite thinking of becoming a professional. I sensed there was something that separated his architecture from that of Europeans like van der Rohe and Corbusier. One reason other architects didn’t like him is that he was quite arrogant, but another was that he was considered to be a bit behind the times, not adopting all of the strictures of the modern school. Years later, the post-modernists also rejected most of those strictures, yet Wright would have been as contemptuous of their use of pre-modern designs — such as making the top of a skyscraper look like a piece of Chippendale furniture — rather than developing their own original ones.
I was intrigued by what Wright called “organic architecture,” which fit the building into the landscape. Unlike the one-size fits all buildings of the modernists (and post-modernists, beaux artists, and most other architectural movements), Wrights buildings on the prairie didn’t look like his buildings in the desert, and his buildings in Chicago didn’t look like his buildings in Los Angeles. I aspired to be like Wright and even considered going to the Taliesen school he founded, which was still being run by his widow.
The Environmental Teach-In changed that. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson had decided to hold the environmental teach-in on April 22, and reports indicate that 20 million people participated — nearly one out of every ten Americans — at 2,000 colleges and 10,000 high schools.
I had started my high school career at Portland’s Grant High, which was easy walking distance from my home. But this school was traditionally organized, with seven periods in a day, and I wanted something else. Portland Public Schools in the 1960s offered several alternative schools. One was completely freeform, based on Summerhill. That didn’t sound structured enough for me. One was focused on vocational arts, which didn’t interest me.
Two others were more-or-less college prep schools. Instead of seven periods, these schools had 22, each about 20 minutes long. Classes would be two, three, or four periods long, and students often had one or two periods between classes for study and socializing. One of the schools, Marshall, was five miles from my home, but to get there I’d have to take a bus four miles downtown, change buses, then take another bus six miles to the school. The other school, Jackson, was ten miles from home, but the bus that went a block from my home happened to terminate at Jackson’s front door. Today, I would choose Marshall and bicycle there, but I didn’t become a real cyclist until college, so in 1968 I picked Jackson.
Freed by the new type of school schedule, I became something of an activist. I marched in anti-war protests, debated civil rights with fellow students, some of whom were unabashed racists, and challenged school officials about such things as dress codes. By 1969, the war seemed to be winding down and Congress had passed important civil rights legislation, so when I read in Newsweek that the environment would be the next great issue, I made it my own.
Fellow students and I started an environmental group in my high school. We wrote letters to the Oregonian and government officials decrying urban sprawl. I and a classmate or two attended hearings and meetings about the environment.
When the teach-in rolled around, my friends and I turned it into a week-long affair, inviting officials with various environmental agencies as well as politicians to speak. I personally welcomed all of the speakers, including two future mayors of Portland and two future governors of Oregon. When the week was over, I no longer wanted to be an architect: instead, I was going to save the environment. Since about half of Oregon’s environment consisted of forests, I applied to go to the Oregon State University School of Forestry.
Sometimes I wonder my career choice made any difference in the end. After all, I’ve spent more than half of my career working on urban planning concepts (which are usually taught in architecture schools), siding firmly with Frank Lloyd Wright’s view that most people are better off and prefer living in low-density suburbs, not the high-density cities advocated by European architects such as Le Corbusier.
On the other hand, my two decades of work as a forester taught me many valuable lessons about the fallibilities of government planners. My work also had a significant effect on America’s forests, most of it stemming from what I consider to be my most important contribution to the research literature. But that will be covered many chapters from now.
In the meantime, it is clear that the Environmental Teach-In had a huge influence on the nation. Many of the things the environmentalists taught are now taken for granted, at least in voting behavior if not in day-to-day life: transit is good, cars are bad; recycling is good, trash disposal is bad; electricity is good, fossil fuels are bad; small families are good, overpopulation is bad.
Of course, I’ve come to question a lot of these things. I still believe there are important environmental problems, such as endangered species and toxic pollutants. But many of the things that I thought were problems, such as overpopulation, turned out to be less so, and the tools I now propose to solve the problems that remain are quite different from the ones I proposed fifty years ago.
Next Week: The Vatican of Sawlog Forestry
I was 12 on the first Earth Day. Children are easily caught up propaganda and so I was, convinced that the Earth was going to be uninhabitable in ten year’s time.
Predictions of Armageddon is a form of child abuse. The eco-disaster purveyors–then and now–snatch children’s future away from them, leading them to parrot their propaganda with no consideration of how that propoganda will effect the kids’ mental health.
How many kids in the early-70s, after being assualted daily with predictions of the world ending, decided to take drugs or have unprotected sex or engage in some other risky behavior because, Shit, the world won’t be around in ten years anyway, so fuck it ?
History repeats, with AOC and her Green Leap Forward and we’ve got 12 seconds to save the planet so we need to move to full communism or we’re all gonna’ die a horrible fiery death!
It’s disgusting.
The problem with modern architecture is it’s universal application. Vernacular has died out. It doesn’t matter where you go, Hawaii, Africa, Scandanavia, New York or the desert or Chicago it all looks pretty much the same. The major campaign of the Modernists’ Century long war on Sensibility and practicality has been to shit-can all design gestures that might convey charm or grace or beauty in our built world. In favor of a universally accepted Ugliness. Many of those who teach are precisely the ones who couldn’t make a living at architecture if they tried…..Vernacular architecture wasn’t just an aesthetic, it was a response adaptation of the climate and environment. Whatever resources you had available are what you built with. Concrete and steel allowed us to build the impossible everywhere regardless of environmental performance. Glass box skyscrapers in desert cities meant air conditioning had to run practically 24 hours a day because they became giant greenhouses. Cities like Dubai and Las Vegas and Phoenix are cities that ignore the reality of physics. If or when oil prices realign to their pre-2008 levels eventually the cost of doing things in desert cities will skyrocket from a standpoint of energy realities. No I’m not bustling about peak oil but the price of energy heavily reflects how cities function and if the price of energy in Las Vegas skyrockets; especially a city that requires energy to do everything; they import everything food, water, electricity, materials. But those cities will die out when their water runs out so the lawns, the palm trees and tropical gardens will inevitably die with it, further browning these cities into dead ruins. We cant have solar in the desert, apparently it’s too hard to capture energy in a place that gets 300 days of daily sunshine. They have thousands of acres of parking lots that do nothing but absorb solar energy all day long. It would seem…….almost idiotic we couldn’t think to cover lots with solar panels to both keep the cars cool and power the city.
Their next attempt is to slather nature on urban confines. But many beautiful cities do the job without extensive greening, Paris, Rome, Venice. The fact is if architects are no longer capable of designing a building that can visually compete with a patch of grass or a palm tree; they’ve failed as adults.
Architects solved the issue of living in Hot climate, humid climates, cold climates with remarkably low energy consumption and using surrounding materials in an aesthetically pleasing way centuries to millennia ago. Today’s architects are so inept that survey’s show 70% of them cant draft or draw, they are truly scraping the bottom of the intellectual toilet.