Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 521rioration of environmentalism and environmental policy. In many ways,
Downs was spot on in his assessment. The initial outrage among middle-class
suburbanites alarmed by nuclear waste and DDT eventually dissipated. The
federal government never really carried out dramatic policy changes nor did
it implement systemic changes to industrial pollution. Eventually, conservative
values of deregulation and the free expansion of global capitalism over-
whelmed federal environmental protection through regulation.
Nevertheless, environmental activists have consistently challenged that
status quo since the 1970s, suggesting the Downs was not completely accurate
in his assessment. While there are multiple environmental activist groups, we
will focus briefly on just a few. Musicians United for Safe Energy [MUSE]
formed in 1979 by prominent artists Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie
Raitt, Harvey Wasserman, and John Hall. MUSE organized a serious of con-
certs at New York’s Madison Square Garden during September 1979. These
“No Nukes” concerts raised awareness of the harmful affects of nuclear
energy after the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Dauphin County,
Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979 that released cancer-causing radioactive gases
into the environment. The concerts were extremely popular and included
performances from Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Bruce Springsteen and the E
Street Band, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, The Doobie Brothers,
Gil Scott-Heron, and Tom Petty. On September 23, 1979, MUSE held a rally
at the Battery Park City landfill in New York; nearly 200,000 people attended.
An album and film, both titled No Nukes was released in 1980. Thirty-two
years later, a MUSE benefit concert to raise money for a Japanese tsunami and
nuclear disaster relief was held in Mountain View, California on August 7,
2011 and included Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, David
Crosby, Jason Mraz, Tom Morello, and others.
The Earth First! movement emerged in 1979 and was officially co-founded
by activist Dave Foreman, ex-Yippie Mike Roselle, Wyoming Wilderness
Society members Howie Wolke and Bart Koehler, and Bureau of Land
Management employee Ron Kezar on April 4, 1980. Carson’s Silent Spring
and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book published in 1975 that
told stories of how environmental activists sabotaged machines and broke laws
to preserve wilderness and the ecosystem, inspired this radical environmental
group. Earth First! pledged “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!”
and spoke out against mainstream environmentalists. Their radical vision