January 1969, Santa Barbara, California: an offshore drilling rig operated by Union Oil blows. The intense upward pressure of surging natural gas explodes the soft ocean floor around the rig and thick oil oozes to the surface, coating everything it meets. Like much of Southern California, Santa Barbara is an old Spanish mission town that was rebuilt in the Spanish Colonial and Mission revival styles in the 1920s. Its main adjective is beauty: beautiful people; beautiful beaches; beautiful sunshine. Seals, sea lions, cormorants, and pelicans patrol the bluest water. An oil spill can have disastrous material consequences for workers, habitats, and, but the true initial strength of the spill is visual. You couldn’t have built a better theatre for a spill than Santa Barbara in 1969. All of a sudden, that sparkling California water is a vast black sludge, striking the shore and leaving oil stains behind when it recedes. The pelicans dive into the water. If they come up, beak full of oil, it will be difficult for them to fly again. There’s a Homeric quality to the disaster: the vastness of the ocean seemingly transfigured into a new substance.
That 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara did leave a scar on the American environmentalist’s psyche. It would be incomplete to attribute the eruption of landmark environmental legislation to the Santa Barbara oil spill, but the event did push along the organizing that led to the establishment of Earth Day in 1970. In quick succession, President Richard Nixon signed NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. And following 1989’s Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, Congress quickly passed the Oil Pollution Act (OPA), which set out guidelines for future oil spill preparedness and established a clear liability policy. This is an essay that thinks about how environmental crises and activism exist in the American imaginary, and how this imagination has guided “mainstream” activism.
Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who is often credited with founding Earth Day as a series of Environmental Teach-ins in the aftermath of the Santa Barbara oil spill, had his finger on this pulse. Consider his address to an audience in Denver on the first Earth Day. He argues that so-called environmental problems are broader than issues of pollution: “Environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is housing that is not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.” Environmental health, from the start, implies a broader question than the tyranny of the oil spill – even then, Nelson pushed for a holistic conception of what the environment might mean. And even so, his movement, his holiday, are still narrated today in the shadow of a catastrophic oil spill.
Yale, like other schools, also had a post-Santa Barbara Earth Day teach-in. Senator Ted Kennedy delivered a speech at the Yale Political Union. In fact, Yale’s Earth Day buzz went beyond that over other schools, as the Yale Daily News coverage from 1970 points out: “While most of the nation will be observing a solitary ‘Earth Day’ April 22, New Haven environmental groups have planned a full ‘Earth Week’ of activities.” A number of groups, including the “Spring Environmental Offensive,” the “Environmental Action Group,” and, most crucially, “Zero Population Growth,” organized most of the week.
Zero Population Growth (ZPG) is a curious relic of this era of environmental organizing. The group, which argued for widespread access to family planning, birth control, and abortion in addition to general environmental advocacy, was founded in 1968 by Richard Bowers, a lawyer from Old Mystic, Charles Remington, an entomology professor at Yale, and Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb emphasized the potential problems of overpopulation. Yale’s chapter was one of the first, and it seems to have immediately taken on a prominent role in campus environmental organizing. In fact, for such a niche organization, ZPG as a whole was stunningly popular – by 1971, there were 26,000 members nationwide.
That aside, something was meaningfully different about Yale’s 1970 Earth Day celebration – and not merely the “full ‘Earth Week’ of activities.” Rather, Ted Kennedy’s visit was interrupted and overshadowed by the real crisis of the day: The Black Panther trial. April 22, the day of Kennedy’s speech, was also the first day of a student strike in support of the New Haven Nine, a suite of Black Panther Party-affiliated defendants indicted in the murder of Alex Rackley. The trial, especially the broad indictment (only two were accused of the murder itself) was viewed as a tactic of state repression. Classes were suspended for the week leading up to May Day 1970, when the Panthers held a rally in New Haven.
That the Panthers upstaged Earth Week in 1970 is a lesson in politicization. Yes, the struggle for racial justice in the United States was older than the environmental movement, but the BPP was founded in 1966, only two years before ZPG. But Earth Week was easy to support, and already institutionalized to a degree. Sitting Senator Ted Kennedy spoke, and the events scheduled consisted mostly of “multi-media presentations” and panel discussions about the threat of overpopulation, a panel discussion on abortion, and another panel discussion on pollution.
Though these topics were “political,” at least insofar as they operated in the realm of policy solutions and were framed by the American political system (see, again, Senator Kennedy), Earth Week was not politicized. By contrast, the Black Panther trial was politicized – thousands of people gathered in Ingalls Rink for speeches, high school students rallied at the courthouse, Yale students agreed to strike from classes and support incoming protestors. It was politicized, in short, because state action met organized resistance. One way to think of politicization in this sense is as the preparedness of people to act beyond their everyday routine in support of a political cause.
The Earth Week activities, and ZPG’s goals in general, reflect a certain managerial tendency in American environmental activism. By this I mean a tendency to think of environmental problems as ones that are best solved by bureaucratic implementation of policy proposals. Think of the operative metaphors in (roughly) contemporary climate discourse: we need to keep warming below 1.5ºC; the Green New Deal; carbon tax. And it makes sense: the organizing that arose in response to Santa Barbara and Exxon Valdez was immediately taken up by elected officials like Kennedy and Nelson. Policy for prevention and containment makes sense in the context of something like an oil spill or even the ozone hole. These are discrete disasters that can be circumscribed and managed: and two of the biggest spills in American history immediately soaked into the public consciousness and were followed by clear legislative victories. It is just that these fights are not similar in degree or in kind to the present climate crisis. Where the spill is an isolated event, the crisis is systemic, permeating every sphere of life in ways that traditional bureaucratic and technocratic approaches are unprepared to handle.
ZPG’s solution to resource depletion, in line with this managerial mindset, is the government ensuring access to abortion and birth control (admirable goals, both in pre-Roe 1970, and post-Dobbs 2025). Even today, it seems that climate activism remains political without being politicized. The solutions for excessive carbon emissions are pitched as cap and trade, tax incentives for renewable energy.
After the collapse of the Paris accords and the current administration’s deregulation, there has been an affective turn in climate discourse, especially on the right, from Trump’s “drill baby drill,” to Elon Musk’s fear-mongering about declining birth rates. Both of these, interestingly enough, seem to be direct responses to the oil-and-population-focused 70s-era environmental activism we have been discussing. In fact, the right writ large has proven to be quite politicized in the United States. The January 6th Capitol attacks are proof: nowhere is the left as prepared to respond as Trump’s right was then.
Even the wave of organizing that arose with the popularity of Greta Thunberg never succeeded in preparing people to be politicized against oil extraction. It targeted itself at governments, asking for legislative change – because that is where we’ve learned that climate action is taken. It is almost a truism by now that the Black Panthers were “not just violent,” they took care of their communities with healthcare and free food programs. But this is politicization: preparing the networks that can then take action when pressed. If one takes the ultimate goal of politicization to be legislative change, it is easy to say that the Panthers failed: they did not build a broad-spectrum consensus and enact policy changes. But the value of successful politicization is that it moves the horizon of action beyond the state by allowing people to not be passive in the face of state apathy or hostility.
All of this is not to say that there is no place for trying to bend the state apparatus into a tool for climate action. Less flashy but more successful initiatives, like the ones pushed by high schoolers who sued Montana for violating their right to a clean environment, are bubbling under the surface. Indigenous landback activism, which also looks to secure food sovereignty, is increasingly prominent, and is rapidly becoming a crucial approach to environmental activism. In 2020, the Supreme Court handed down a victory for indigenous landback activists when it decided to enforce an 1866 treaty in McGirt v. Oklahoma, effectively returning millions of acres in east Oklahoma to the Creek Nation.
This is what Nelson was gesturing at in 1970 when he spoke of the hungry child in a land of affluence. To think of the hungry child as a dimension of the climate crisis might be unintuitive, but it may be necessary for a proper conception of the crisis. Nelson, for all his senatorial clout, pointed beyond the immediate visual spectacle and toward politicization. What remains is for us to teach each other ways to survive and feed ourselves and stop oil extraction without recourse to bureaucratic channels – i.e., to build networks that can make demands of the state without being reliant on it for solutions.
Andreas Malm provocatively suggests something similar in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, presenting a case for climate sabotage (i.e. targeting infrastructure like logging machinery or pipelines that bring fuel to airports). But organized industrial sabotage is only one branch of what could be a widespread left-wing movement prepared to respond to climate destruction and to the hostility of the federal government to environmental issues. Such a movement might mean communities (blocks, neighborhoods, cities) forming closer ties by addressing those hungry children with the resources of many families instead of just one. One might imagine such community organizations becoming sites where people discuss their problems, educate each other, plant trees for each other, pool resources together to secure food and water and land, and establish cooling centers. Constant commitment to such community organizations might be able to politicize enough people to make demands on the state, or it might be able to organize sabotage in the face of a hostile government.
Importantly, all these possibilities grow out of the ability to feed the hungry child. Certainly, geographies of segregation and state repression stand in the way. But in many ways, the crisis of climate doomerism is a failure to escape the mode of thinking handed down from mainstream environmental activism, a mode of thinking that believes the only actor is the government. This failure is a failure of the imagination.