Douglas Brinkley - Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening

As I sit at my office desk at home in Austin, Texas, my bookshelves are packed with conservation histories. But across the room, I see arresting images on TV of California firefighters at Yosemite struggling to prevent some of the worlds oldest giant sequoias from burning. Amid the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, John Muirs hallowed Mariposa Grove, with its 200-foot trees, is right now in the path of the 4,200-acre Washburn Fire and swathed in columns of menacing white smoke. The big trees, as Muir called them, could normally withstand fire due to their thick, moist bark. Now, with warmer annual temperatures and sustained droughts, their bark is thinner, drier, and less able to keep the giant sequoias protected when theyre threatened.

Human-caused climate change is now everywhere, evident even in the bark of two-thousand-year-old trees. Massive wildfires have become so routine around Yosemite that visitors arriving at all four entrances are greeted by the charred reminders of the ongoing catastrophe. What California is experiencing isnt a series of freak global-warming events, and Yosemite isnt an anomaly. This is the new normal, courtesy of our nationsindeed, the worldsaddiction to fossil fuels. Here in Austin, its a brutal 110 Fahrenheit (about 43 Celsius)while I sit inside, hiding in air-conditioned comfort from the weather, from nature, from my typically active life outdoors. Triple-digit heat has led to poor air quality, which exacerbates my asthma.

Writing Silent Spring Revolution during these drastic years of climate danger has been a long, affecting adventure, but one that buoyed my spirits over our current predicament. Exactly sixty years ago, Rachel Carsons Silent Spring exposed the dangers of pesticides, turned environmentalism into a public health crusade, and helped galvanize a whole new generation of green activists. During the Long Sixties (19601973), this Silent Spring generation inspired three presidents to heroic environmental action and moved Americans of all stripes to stand up to protect the only planet we have from defilement.

Although it doesnt constitute a major part of this narrative, I document how John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all dealt with climate change. The burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming, as greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere contain the suns heat, raising global average temperatures and fueling vicious weather events, including record-shattering heat. Both JFK and LBJ knew about the climate threat, courtesy of high CO2 emissions, but at the time it seemed like a distant problem. White House adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan went so far as to write President Richard Nixon a memo in 1969 about the carbon dioxide problem, warning that the heated planet could cause ice caps to melt and oceans to rise. Goodbye, New York, Moynihan wrote. Goodbye, Washington, for that matter. We have no data on Seattle.

My journey to write Silent Spring Revolution began with my book The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009), which I envisioned as the first of three volumes linking US presidential history (one of my fortes) to three waves of twentieth-century environmental progress and policy: Theodore Roosevelt (19011909); Franklin D. Roosevelt (19331945); and the Long Sixties triumvirate of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In The Wilderness Warrior, I described how our twenty-sixth president preserved over 234 million acres of wild America between 1901 and 1909. In Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (2016), I documented the progressive second wave, in which Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, Audubon Societyinspired Eleanor Roosevelt, and the US Forest Services intrepid mountaineer Bob Marshall acted on FDRs enthusiasm for preserving treasured landscapes in every state.

Sandwiched in between, I wrote The Quiet World: Saving AlaskasWilderness Kingdom 18791960 (2011), which focused on the storehouse of natural resources situated in the Last Frontier and chronicled the guardians, from John Muir to Dwight Eisenhower, who campaigned to forever protect the wondrous paradise from Glacier Bay to the Arctic Range. These days the Greenland ice sheet is vanishing much faster than projected, which adds to the rising sea level. Alaskas Arctic coastline is exposed to more sunshine, which causes intense warming, leading to unprecedented melting of blue-green glaciers and sprawling ice fields. The wild Alaska of The Quiet World, where over 60 percent of our national parks are located, is vanishing. The threatened polar bear has become the symbol for climate change awareness. How will Ursus maritimus survive in perpetuity if its Arctic habitat disappears?

Of all the many books I have written since earning my PhD from Georgetown University back in 1989, I consider these histories, taken together, to be a true cornerstone of my work, merging my presidential history focus with a deep-seated passion for national parks, ecology, and wildlife. (I am not including an additional title of mine from 2006The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Coastbecause it is as much a story of political and civic crises as it is a tale of environmental upheaval.)

Silent Spring Revolution, then, completes what I have envisioned as a presidential trilogy, detailing how, after the radioactive shock of Hiroshima, a network of conscientious postwar anti-nuclear and protoenvironmental activists launched a reform-minded revolution and how three very different presidents drove a cascade of remarkable green reform measures into American public law.

During that era, trust in the federal government was sky-high before the Vietnam War brought it crashing down. When Kennedy was in office, three-quarters of the public expressed faith in the government; it is down to 18 percent today. Decades of anti-government zealotry, however, have taken a toll, among other things, on US environmental protection funding. Most of the give-and-take backstories of regulatory laws passed by Congress in the Long Sixtiesrecounted in these pageswere bipartisan initiatives. Democrats and Republicans boldly united to save the Great American Outdoors from further desecration.

Take, for example, the Clean Air Act of 1970, which passed the House by 374 to 1 and the Senate by 74 to 0. Likewise, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed by a 355 to 4 vote in Congress and a 92 to 0 vote in the Senate. Thats roughly the way visionary environmental laws were enacted throughout the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years. A lot of wrangling, frustration, and tireless negotiating eventually led to the introduction of well-reasoned bills on Capitol Hill, which were passed under the stalwart leadership of such conservationists as Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-Washington) and Thomas Kuchel (R-California).