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Earth Week 1970: A shift in the wind (Updated)

In today's Earth Day stories in the Daily News there was not room to include all the interesting local history generated in conversation with 1970 Earth Week Project Director Ed Furia. After my interview Mr. Furia sent along this narrative of a process we had talked about briefly, namely the Earth Week Committee's attempt to obtain specific information about who in Philadelphia was polluting, how much, and what pollutants.

In today's Earth Day stories in the Daily News there was not room to include all the interesting local history generated in conversation with 1970 Earth Week Project Director Ed Furia. After my interview Mr. Furia sent along this narrative of a process we had talked about  briefly, namely the Earth Week Committee's attempt to obtain specific information about who in Philadelphia was polluting, how much, and what pollutants. The story illustrates the shift that occurred (certainly spurred by the work of the Committee) as environmentalism grew from a fringe concern to a mainstream idea in the spring of 1970. By the time you read this the story will likely have been added to the earthweek.us site, but we're excerpting it here as an adjunct to today's in-paper coverage.

It then became clear that the individual industrial members of the Chamber had for decades relied on the proprietary data argument to hide their pollution data and require the City not to release it, and so long as the companies, themselves declined to release such data on their own, the City could continue to maintain that stance.

It was obvious that we had to get the City or the Chamber members or both to "blink."

The method we employed to make that happen was to promise (threaten?) to expose the fact that the companies, the City public health officials or both, had been hiding critical information about public health from the people. I personally called the mayor's office and said that the City's stance protecting polluters and preventing the public from knowing what how they were being poisoned by industrial pollution amounted to the City being a co-conspirator, which I at first implied, then flatly stated I would expose in the press. At first, the mayor hid behind the proprietary industrial information argument, but as the days went by, it was clear that this argument would at some point no longer fly. Then we had a breakthrough. Faced with the prospect of getting on the right side of Earth Week by disclosing the information we wanted or face the fury of a public that was getting more and more committed to environmental protection every day, industrial members of the Chamber soon started contacting us and disclosing the data we wanted. Within days the City relented and agreed to release all of the pollution data we wanted, which, after all, was now no longer being treated as secret by the companies.

I would have to say that that moment—when we realized we would get from the City and the polluters, themselves, specific data as to who was putting what pollution where—was the most important moment during the entire four month Earth Week initiative. Armed with such data, we knew denial would not longer be a viable strategy for the City or the polluters.

We then decided to publicize the pollution data by holding a large public technical symposium where the pollution data along with potential abatement measures could be presented and discussed by experts. To this end, we appointed Dr. Nicholas Zill, from the University City Science Center at Penn, to organize the symposia and recruit scientists from area universities to participate. Once the symposia preparations got underway, we were even able to involve technical experts in charge of monitoring and dealing with pollution from inside the companies.

The week-long Earth Week Technical Symposium on the Delaware Valley Environment, which we held the week before Earth Week, was a tremendous success, and its proceedings became part of a several-hundred-page publication that the Committee issued soon after Earth Week.

UPDATE 4/22: As Earth Day is now here, also check out Ed Furia's dramatic story of infiltrating the Chamber of Commerce meeting where local businesses were preparing to "go negative" in a big way against the burgeoning project, and how he and Chairman Austan Librach managed to turn them around. About this episode, Furia adds in an Earth to Philly exclusive:

If you look at Thacher Longstreth's official obit, it mentions that his having been raised a Quaker is at the heart of his early support of Earth Day.

I didn't know that he was a Quaker, but that makes sense and explains why he embraced our proposal so fully. I'm betting he never liked the idea of the defensive Sunday Supplement and was wishing that he would be able to support Earth Day.

This I know: we would not have gotten the Chamber to come through with the money, nor disgorge the pollution data had it not been for the active support that Thacher provided from inside.