Earth Day and Election Day

Denis Hayes¹

Three decades after the first Earth Day, companies can no longer dump poison into our rivers with impunity. Urban air quality has improved dramatically. The bald eagle has come back from the brink of extinction.

Millions of Americans have bought fuel-efficient automobiles, purchased healthy homes, altered their diets, recycled their garbage, chosen professional careers, and even planned their family size on the basis of environmental values.

Many of us have changed the way we make everyday decisions and are increasingly aware of the far-reaching impact of our consumer and lifestyle choices.

However, what Americans don't do for the environment may ultimately overpower everything else. We don't vote for it.

Increasingly, we don't vote at all. In the 2002 elections, fewer than 46 percent of eligible voters turned out. Ironically, and tragically, those who have the most to gain from the ballot box - poor people, minorities, and youth - have the worst voting records of all.

This is a far different climate than when I came of age in the 1960s.

In those years, Martin Luther King and his courageous followers marched from Selma to Birmingham, at enormous personal peril, for the right to vote.

In 1968, my friends and I canvassed our precincts and crisscrossed the country for Robert Kennedy and "Clean Gene" McCarthy, who both promised to end the war.

Electoral politics was central to our vision of American progress.

We argued that someone who was old enough to die at war was old enough to vote for peace, and in 1971 won passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18.

Of course, we marched and protested and organized giant rallies. But our strategic goal was to mobilize political support.

In 1968, the youth of America forced President Lyndon Johnson not to run for reelection.

Immediately after the first Earth Day, my 20-something friends on the national staff and I launched the first "Dirty Dozen" campaign. That fall, we defeated 7 of the 12 most anti-environmental members of Congress, including the Chairman of the House Public Works Committee.

The vote is the great American equalizer. Bill Gates and the average 23-year-old have vastly different purchasing power in the marketplace. They have vastly different access to politicians and the media.

But at the ballot box - where Americans decide between war and peace, between tax cuts for the rich and health care for the poor, between a healthy environment and a few more bucks for Exxon - the richest American and the rest of us each have exactly one vote.

Yet a majority of eligible voters - people for whom civil rights leaders and women's suffrage leaders and the American Founders took extraordinary risks - didn't bother to show up for the last election.

Because America's young people - with a far better environmental education than any previous generation - didn't vote, America now has a President who proudly stands alone among global leaders in opposing action to avoid climate change. (The vote against America at Bonn was an unprecedented 160 to 1.)

By any criterion, George Bush is leading the most robustly anti-environmental Administration in the last hundred years.

Republican Congressional leaders have placed the chairmanship of most key committees in the hands of anti-environmental zealots.

The current anti-environmental jihad, disguised with Orwellian names like the "Clear Skies Initiative" and the "Healthy Forests Initiative," has been vastly more successful than James Watt's strident efforts to roll back the clock in the 1980s. Today, virtually all the environmental triumphs of the past three decades - victories that dramatically boosted public health and protected wild places - are under attack.

It is time for those who care about the environment to honor the vision of Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, and take advantage of their legacy. The people who are willing to take to the streets to express their anger and frustration with international policy must also take to the voting booths to protect the security of the environment.

Next year, most college Earth Day events will, for the first time, focus attention on voter registration and voter education. Because the most important day for the environment in 2004 will not be Earth Day - but Election Day.

You may think you are out marching for peace or justice or the environment. But if you aren't voting, you are just taking a walk.

¹Denis Hayes was National Coordinator of the first Earth Day and currently chairs Earth Day Network.