ABSTRACT
O n February 3, just months before Earth Day 1970, Rep. Marion Fuller Brown stood before the Maine legislature and lashed out at the “exploiters and abusers of the public air, water and land” who now laid siege to Maine's premier nature icon, its rockbound coast. In language soon to become familiar all across America, she insisted that an unspoiled environment was “one of our inherent freedoms,” a right she would defend in the seventies as others had fought for civil rights in the sixties. On the opposite coast Oregon Governor Tom McCall voiced a similar concern that developers from California, a state already “filled up” with people, smog, and concrete, were headed north like a “ominous band of human locusts … even now zooming in on what's left of … our remarkable farmlands, mountains, forests, and coasts.”
