"Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen": The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environmental Crisis

On January 28, 1969, Union Oil Company's Alpha Platform exploded six miles off the coast of southern California. Three million gallons of crude oil escaped into the Pacific Ocean before workers capped the leak eleven days later. Americans across the country watched televised images of thick waves of oil smothering pristine beaches and suffocating seabirds, dolphins, and sea lions. Six months later the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Ohio, providing further visual and visceral evidence of trouble beyond the political assassinations, urban riots, and intractable war in Vietnam that had shaken the nation. When the New York Times reported at the end of 1969 that "rising concern about the 'environmental crisis'" rivaled the Vietnam War as a central issue for college students, its editors put environmental crisis in quotation marks, suggesting that it had become a key phrase in public discourse. In addition to being fueled by oil spills and river fires, this sense of crisis derived from the loss of open space, reports of mercury and pesticides in food sources, and concerns about radioactive fallout. The "environmental crisis" found expression in newspaper editorials, television specials, academic conferences, educational films, shareholder reports, and a raft of depressingly titled books such as The Population Bomb, The Frail Ocean, The Last Landscape, Mankind May Never Make It!, and America the Raped, as well as in an influential essay published in Science, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." National Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes captured the country's mood on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when he stated that "things as we know them are falling apart." The environmental crisis called into question the meaning of material progress and the promise of modern American life.1