ABSTRACT
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue was jammed, not with the usual taxis and delivery trucks, but with a huge, light-hearted throng of people that stretched from Forty-Third Street up sixteen blocks to Central Park. Tens of thousands packed Union Square; thousands more crowded into a block-long polyethylene “bubble” on Seventeenth Street, where they could breathe pure, filtered air. A favorite T-shirt sported a warning from the popular cartoon character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they is us!” Throughout the country, millions of students, environmental activists, and ordinary citizens attended teach-ins, listened to speeches, and took action. Wearing gas masks, some protestors buried automobiles in mock funerals to symbolize the end of the era of fossil fuels. Some dumped buckets of rotting fish onto the marble floors of electric utility and chemical companies. Others rolled up their sleeves and cleaned up beaches, painted park benches, swept debris from drainage ditches, pulled old
Washington, while the president scoffed at the idea of celebrating Mother Nature, some of his White House staffers had their pictures taken as they rolled up their sleeves to help clean up the Potomac River. Thousands on the national Mall sang along with folk troubadours Pete Singer and Phil Ochs, “all we are saying, is give earth a chance.”
