Betsy & me attended the first Earth Day in Philadelphia 1970.

 

The big attractions, what are now called “the WOW factor” by community planners were the events at the Ben Franklin Parkway, the buildings surrounding it such as the Art Museum, Rodin Museum and further down what is now called Kelly Drive with Boathouse Row. (I rowed for a while at the Fairmont Club) and the largest municipal park in the USA, Fairmont Park.

The first event was “Earth Week, April 16-22”.  

It was very exciting to live in the Art Museum Area at that time. I think that “Earth Week” was a turning point and after that event there was a sort of rocket like climb in people wanting to live and play in the “Art Museum Area”.

Below is the video “Earth Day 1970 CBS News Special Report with Walter Cronkite”. At the time Philadelphia was incredibly polluted. 

The Delaware River had a repulsive odor. 

The Delaware was known as one of the dirtiest rivers on earth by ship captains because fires started from the friction of the ship's bow in the polluted water when they steamed up the Delaware.

The air was so dirty that people including me, when I came back from a run on East River Drive, were sick enough to throw up and nearly pass out from breathing the air. On that same day there were reports of high school football teams collapsing on the practice fields around the Middle Atlantic States.

The Clean Water Act made possible the Delaware River Waterfront where you can put your boat in upstream and go to dinner in Philadelphia. 

April 10, 17, and 24 for guided “Wonder Walks” along the Delaware River at Pier 68 and Pier 70 from 5 pm to 7 pm. 

"DRWC will host a weekly series of guided nature walks along the Delaware River in partnership with the Land Health Institute. These two-hour “Wonder Walks” will take place every Thursday beginning April 10, offering guests an immersive exploration of the Waterfront’s evolving natural landscape. Each walk will highlight a different theme—from native plants and wildlife to birds and insects and the cultural and ecological history surrounding the area’s former industrial piers.'

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“Sen. Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine and the bill’s principal sponsor, had emphasized during the initial vote that the Senate’s Committee on Public Works had spent two years studying the nation’s Federal Water Pollution Control Program, only to conclude that the national effort to abate and control water pollution was “inadequate in every vital aspect.”

One example: A 1969 report by the Government Accountability Office found that of 80 industrial plants with state permits to discharge waste within a 170-mile reach of the Mississippi River, 28 of the plants disclosed no information at all on the amount of waste they were discharging, according to “Clean Water Act: Thirty Year Retrospective.”  

In the initial vote before the Senate on the bill, Muskie had said:

“(T)oday, the rivers of this country serve as little more than sewers to the seas. Wastes from cities and towns, from farms and forests, from mining and manufacturing, foul the streams, poison the estuaries, threaten the life of the ocean depths. The danger to health, the environmental damage, the economic loss can be anywhere.

“Just a ten-minute walk from this Chamber, the Potomac River is a hazard to health. The Georgetown Gap in the District of Columbia’s sewer pipelines allows 15 million gallons of raw sewage to pour into the river every day.

“A Federal biologist, speaking of mercury, says he can find no chemical potentially worse for man. Mercury is toxic. It is cumulative. It is persistent. While the biologist speaks, a factory discharges into the Detroit River a daily dose of 10 to 20 pounds of mercury.

“In a single day, 10 million fish die in a Florida bay. It is not the first fish kill in the bay, and it is known that wastes are dumped into its waters, but the cause of death is given as a lack of oxygen in the bay.

“An oil spill releases more than 700 tons of fuel oil into the waters off the Massachusetts coast. Later, scientists using a dredge find that more than 90 percent of the organisms brought up from the bottom in the area of the spill are dead or dying.

“In 1969, the Council on Environmental Quality reports, nearly a fourth of this country’s shellfish crop could not be harvested. The men and women who make their living from the shellfish crop suffered an economic loss of more than $60 million.”

The morning after Nixon’s veto, Muskie reiterated the comments he’d made when the Senate had first passed the Act. “Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make life possible on this planet? Can we afford life itself?”

“Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our Nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them,” Muskie said.

Only two hours after the president vetoed the Act, the Senate voted 52-12 to override, with 17 of the votes in favor coming from Republicans.

The House followed, voting 247 to 23 to override — more than ten to one — with 96 of the yes votes from Republicans.

In 2003, Ruckelshaus, Nixon’s EPA administrator, wrote that two-thirds of the nation’s waters were then safe for fishing and swimming.

“Of course, this means that a third of rivers and streams are not safe for fishing and swimming,” he wrote.

He continued, “(W)e all are part of the problem, and we all must be part of the solution. It is to this challenge that the nation must rise.”

With the current administration’s move to upend the Clean Water Act, that challenge now lies with us.”

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