20 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020prologue
EARTH DAYUNIVERSITYOF^ MIC
HI
GAN^judge and turned the trial over to the assembled
crowd, who delivered a guilty verdict. The car
was sentenced to death. Bystanders smashed it
to pieces with sledgehammers.
The automobile wa s a common target for
such stunts at environmental teach-ins that
year. At a rally in February at San José State
University , student-activists bought and then
buried a new car; at Indiana’s DePauw Univer-
sity on Earth Day, one student arrived on cam-
pus on horseback with a sign that read “Ban
the automobile.”
But the mock trial in Michigan was a bold
move in a state whose economy was still very
much tied to the auto industry. In 1970, for-
ty-two percent of Americans employed in the
manufacture of automobiles and equipment
called Michigan home. Ralph Nader, author of the land-
mark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In
Dangers of the American Automobile, which would
help force the auto industry to transform its safety
standards, told audiences in Ann Arbor that corpora-
tions, not consumers, were responsible for the pollu-
tion from automobiles. Signifi cantly, the rally wasn’t
attended only by college kids, so often accused of be-
ing unfamiliar with the real world. Industry leaders
attended, and Walter Reuther, president of the United
Auto Workers, was on hand to demand environmen-
tal reforms from car companies. The UAW donated
$2,000 to the national Earth Day teach-in.
“If you ask me, ‘Can we solve [ecological crises]
within the framework of business-as-usual?’ Myanswer is no,” Reuther said in an interview at the
teach-in. “We’ve got to create new instruments, new
institutions; we’ve got to develop new approaches
and new concepts to deal with these new problems.”
Reuther was adamant that cleaning up cars
didn’t have to cost autoworkers jobs. “Because in-
dustry has for so long polluted the environment of
the plants in which we work and has now created
an environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions
in the communities in which we live, the UAW will
insist on discussing the implications of this crisis at
the bargaining table,” he said at the UAW’s annualconvention in Atlantic City in April of that year.
Indeed, pollution had fi nally become a national
concern: In 1970, levels of common air pollutants
were about 73 percent higher than they are today ,
and the automobile was the main culprit. “Nobody
was talking about climate change at that time,” says
Doug Scott, then a graduate student in the School of
Natural Resources and co-chair of the group that or-
ganized the university’s teach-in. “But there was just
a general perception that the freeways packed with
one driver per car pouring out leaded gasoline was
not a good thing.”
Nobody expected the trial stunt alone to change
policy. But the guerrilla theater was a way for the
young generation to make a memorable point. “We
tended not to reject ideas,” Scott says. “Someone,
and I couldn’t tell you who, decided that an awfully
good way to get this going would be to take sledge-
hammers to a gas guzzler.”
The teach-in helped shape the lives of some of
the student activists. Doug Scott went on to lobby
Congress on behalf of nonprofi t advocacy organiza-
tions such as the Wilderness Society and the Sierra
Club; one of his most notable achievements, he says ,
was helping pass the Alaska National Interest Lands
Conservation Act of 1980, which more than doubled
the size of America’s national park system.
And a few months after the teach-in, the UAW
joined environmental groups including Environ-
mental Action and the Sierra Club in signing a res-
olution calling on Congress to make air pollution
standards strict enough to force auto companies
to phase out the internal combustion engine.A program for
the March 1970
event at the
University of
Michigan.dWATCH a video of the Michigan teach-in and the car’s
demise at Smithsonianmag.com/cartrialTHE UAW WILL INSIST ON
DISCUSSING THE IMPLICATIONS
OF THIS CRISIS AT THE
BARGAINING TABLE.