2020-04-01 Smithsonian Magazine

Hail

to the

Earth

A homemade banner signals

the surprisingly broad appeal

of a new American movement

April 2020 | SMITHSONIAN 27

Photograph by

Mitch Feinberg

By

Adam Rome

E

ARLY IN 1970 at Lanphier High

School in Springfi eld, Illinois,

Raymond Bruzan turned his

class, Room 308, into the “En-

vironmental Action Center,” as

a sign on the door announced.

Now it was a place where the

24-year-old biology teacher and

his students could debate what

they could do to protest the nation’s polluted air and

water on the fi rst Earth Day, scheduled for April 22.

The young activists decided to stage a mock funer-

al procession in their school for the “dead” Earth that

awaited them if Americans didn’t stop poisoning the

environment. With a mix of mischief and solemni-

ty, they walked the halls bearing a casket that held a

plastic skeleton on loan from the biology storeroom.

Then Bruzan and 60 or 70 students set out for the Illi-

nois State Capitol, two miles away, where they would

present the lieutenant governor with antipollution

petitions signed by more than 1,000 people.

Bruzan, wearing a white dress shirt and a rep tie,

had arranged a police escort for the protest march-

ers, who carried signs that off ered plaintive pleas

and clever jibes: “Save Our Lakes.” “The End Could

Be Near.” “Isn’t It Nice to Get Up in the Morning and

Hear the Birds Cough?” A few students wore arm-

bands with the newly designed ecology symbol, an

“e” superimposed on an “o” to express the depen-

dence of all organisms on their environment. And

one student raised a green fl ag with white stripes

bearing the same symbol. Today the fl ag is an arti-

fact of a pivotal moment in America’s environmen-

tal consciousness.

Bruzan recalls that the mother of one of his stu-

dents sewed the 3- by 5-foot fl ag. The ecology sym-

bol had been created in October 1969 by the car-

toonist Ron Cobb of the Los Angeles Free Press, an

alternative newspaper. The symbol, intended for

protesters to rally around, also appeared in his 1970

collection Raw Sewage.

The homemade green-and-white fl ag in Spring-

fi eld showed that the environmental cause had

broad appeal. Lanphier High was in a work-

ing-class part of the city, the North End. According

to a 2014 history of the school, North Enders were

“the salt of the earth,” and among the clubs that

high-school girls could join were those for future

secretaries, nurses, teachers and homemakers.

FROM THE

SMITHSONIAN

NATIONAL

MUSEUM OF

AMERICAN

HISTORY

Adam Rome is author of The Genius of Earth

Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made

the First Green Generation.

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