The dozen bearded, unbathed men argued furiously in the cramped galley of the halibut boat. The debate that had brewed for days came to a head, and each man lunged for the tape recorder microphone and the Wakefield King Crab hat that conferred the right to speak. Do they turn back for home, or do they brave stormy seas to anchor off an Aleutian Island, where a five megaton nuke awaited?

A poster of Richard Nixon, darts in his nose, looked on as Robert Hunter donned the Wakefield King Crab hat and argued to forge ahead. In the month the ill-equipped old boat had tossed in the North Pacific, he and other journalists aboard had raised international alarm over the U.S.’s plan to detonate the bomb on Amchitka Island, sitting on one of the most geologically unstable faults on the planet. (Just seven years earlier, Alaska had been devastated by the Good Friday Earthquake.)

They had to do more than raise awareness. They had to raise the collective consciousness, Hunter argued. They could anchor just outside the buffer zone, maybe motor a skiff ashore and put their bodies on the line. Whether they force America to back down or die in the trying, they would have set a “mind bomb” that would awaken humanity to the damage it was doing to the planet.

Hunter tended to frame the mission in New Age, almost mystic terms. He ordained shipmates ministers in the “Church of Ecology” all “in the spirit of Merry Prankster-type mindfuck, you understand.” He christened them “Warriors of the Rainbow.”

It might have been too much for the others around the table. To most, this was a PR battle they had won: look at the TV coverage. Even a few Coast Guard crew were moved to smuggle a supportive note to them. Besides, the U.S. kept delaying the blast and winter was coming. The boat turned back for Vancouver.

Hunter was crushed. Had he clowned around too much? Failed to make his point?

The underground nuclear bomb detonated a few weeks later, November 6, 1971. The worst fears were not realized: There were no leaks; the Earth’s tectonic plates held.

But a thousand otters washed ashore, their eardrums burst.

Hunter recalled that in the planning of the Amchitka voyage, “Somebody flashed two fingers as we were leaving the church basement and said, ‘Peace!” (Canadian ecologist) Bill (Darnell) said, ‘Let’s make it a Green Peace.’ And we all went Ommmmmmmm.” The chartered halibut boat, the Phyllis Cormack, was christened Greenpeace.

Hunter, who had worked his way up from copy boy to columnist at the Vancouver Sun, won a spot on the boat on the strength of his recently published book, Storming of the Mind. It called on ecologists “to heed Marshall McLuhan’s advice: take over the control towers of the mass communications system and deliver new images that will liberate people from their primitive tribal mindsets, creating a new global consciousness.”

He invented the term “mind-bombing”: “Instead of storming the Bastille, we’re storming the minds of millions of people. Instead of lobbing bullets and bombs, we’re lobbing mind bombs, revolutionary images that will explode in people’s heads.”

The Phyllis Cormack/Greenpeace was a Canadian vessel, so all the U.S. could do was monitor its voyage (the U.S. observed maritime law in those days). Hunter described a morning in which a Coast Guard Hercules surveillance plane buzzed them and a side door opened for a cameraman to shoot. The journalists aboard the boat returned fire.

“They took pictures of us for the record and we took pictures of them for the record, and it was a war between two motion picture studios making two completely different movies with completely different bad guys. It was a McLuhan-type war, a war of the icons, a public relations struggle,” Hunter recounted.

The voyage was mind-altering for Hunter, and he sought to bring his crewmates along on the trip. He read them passages from a book of purported indigenous legends compiled by a California naturalist and an Alaskan native, Warriors of the Rainbow.

“In it was a core legend that predicted a time when the Natives would be almost completely wiped out by the white man, and the forests would be chopped down and the water and the skies poisoned. At that time the Natives would rediscover their spirits and teach the white man how to live in the world without wrecking it. They would become Warriors of the Rainbow,” he wrote.

He thought he was making progress with his crewmates. “In a leaping flash of Group Mind understanding, we all connect with the idea that all life is interwoven, including us. We are all one. It is pure Zen thought coming out of pure Western technological thought – ecology is just the latest surge of science. For one moment, East and West come into phase, the great dichotomies breaking down, the void coming alive like an all-creating flame.”

But then the decision to abort. On its way home, the moody crew received an invitation from the Kwakiutl tribe to stop at Alert Bay, British Columbia. In a ceremony in the tribe’s Big House, under the “great wooden wings of the totems” that held the roof, they danced a dance to free them of their egos and were made honorary Brothers of the Kwakiutl. “Here I was … fresh (so to speak) from having seen abandoned whaling stations on the bone-strewn shores of the North Pacific islands, the ocean and sky almost empty, nuclear bombs being tested whose shock waves killed mammals en masse. … I was a changeling.”

He saw in his mates’ faces that, “’There might be something to this Rainbow Warrior thing after all.’ Maybe, if nothing else, we white-folk environmentalists and anti-nukers needed a defining myth.”

Greenpeace ships ever since have sailed under a Kwakiutl symbol of the Rainbow Warrior—graciously blessed by the tribe years later, after Hunter became aware he had appropriated it without permission.

“Bob Hunter and I find a seal 20 feet before the monstrous scarlet bow of the Arctic Endeavor. We hold our position with our backs to the ship.

A crewman yells, ‘You better move, boys, the old man isn’t one to think twice about running you into the ice.’ Bob yells back, ‘Tell the old bastard to do what he likes.’

The ship backs away. We think we’ve won this round. Then the Arctic Endeavor plunges forward, picking up speed. Still we look ahead. We feel her coming. We hear her coming. The vibrations tingle the soles of our feet. The ice trembles and cracks. Blocks of chunky ice tumble forward before the bow and nudge our feet.

The crewman on the ice screams to the ship’s bridge, ‘Stop her, cap, stop her. The stupid asses ain’t moving.’

The engines are cut and reversed. The ship slowly grinds to a halt, five feet behind our backs. I pick up the baby whitecoat to move it to safety.”

— Paul Watson interview in the Toronto Star, March 4, 1977

By the mid-‘70s, Hunter and Paul Watson had become TV icons of the Greenpeace movement, known for zipping a Zodiac inflatable boat between whales and explosive harpoons. They teamed up again to harass Norwegian and Canadian hunters who clubbed baby harp seals to harvest their white coats.

Daring an ice cutter was, “the sort of thing only done in combat, the kind of thing that binds guys together for life, long after the war is over,” Hunter later wrote. “At one point, we clasped hands, which is how we would have died if the ship hadn’t stopped.”

But whereas Watson wanted to save whales and baby seals, Hunter wanted to raise global consciousness.

Hunter, as leader of Greenpeace, preached nonviolent resistance. As he wrote in his book, The Enemies of Anarchy, violence, “diverts us from the real struggle, which is to attain a higher level of consciousness.”

But Watson chafed at the limitations. “I saw plenty of whales die when I was with Greenpeace,” he said. “And I was forced to watch frustrated and helpless as the whales screamed in agony and died in their own blood.”

Watson’s criticism of Greenpeace tactics wore thin. The board voted him out of the organization. In protest, Hunter resigned.

It is a testament to their friendship that Hunter mortgaged his house to help Watson buy a minesweeper he could ram into Pacific whaling vessels. It was the first in a line of Sea Shepherds that would be the scourge of whalers, gill netters, and poachers around the world.

After leaving Greenpeace, Hunter returned to journalism and his cabin in the woods outside Vancouver, “brooding darkly over my failings as a leader, a man, and a sentient being.”

But Watson lured him back into the fray.

In the summer of 1990, Hunter lashed himself to a winch on the bow of Watson’s Sea Shepherd II, Sony Handy Cam aimed at a Japanese drift netting ship that Watson intended to ram.

“All along, in the Olden Days, I had bought into passivism. It was a tactical thing, to be honest: outnumbered and outgunned, what are you going to do?

“But Paul had gone ahead and armed himself. And rather than agonizing any longer (as I had for years) over the correctness, over the moral and political correctness, of putting a big steel-tipped boot to some mass-biocide jerk’s head, I was savouring every second, urging Watson on.

“Fuck Gandhi! Let’s clobber these bastards.”

— Bob Hunter, Red Blood: One (Mostly) White guy’s Encounters With the Native World

Net-hauling equipment was damaged on two ships, and the third ship in the fleet fled, leaving its 40-mile-long net drifting in the Pacific, north of Hawaii. The “curtain of death” would entangle and kill any creature that tried to swim through it. Watson’s crew tied heavy metal machine parts to the net and sank it.

The captain of one of the Japanese drift netters demanded over the radio why “Greenpeace” had rammed his ship. “Because you’re killing too many dolphins, whales, and birds, and you’re taking too many fish. And you insulted us by calling us Greenpeace.”

Mind-bombing had doused consumers’ desire for white seal fur coats, and had forced a moratorium on whaling and drift-netting. Governments quit detonating nukes, passed environmental protection laws, and designated a day a year as Earth Day.

But consciousness had not been raised. It still was OK to exploit the planet, but be more careful. And if you leave the exploitation door ajar, the next thing you know baby seals are clubbed after their white fur begins to molt; drift nets are replaced with bottom-trawling nets that scrape the seabed bare; whale hunting is illegal except within territorial waters; greenhouse gas permits are traded like baseball cards.

We made the wrong turn.

Hunter had envisioned an all-encompassing change, a global consciousness, “that can think in terms of wholes instead of parts, that can see the world as a single life system vibrant in the vastness of the cosmos.” A world in which the divine is perceived “in every drop of rain,” in which death was seen as a process “of going back into the Earth to nourish Her and to go on being, in however transmuted form.”

Maybe his life story made him especially attuned to interconnectedness. The Warriors of the Rainbow book that “fell off the shelf” as he packed for the Amchitka voyage had been given him by an “Orthodox Jewish gypsy dulcimer maker” who said, “Here. This is for you. It will reveal a path that will affect your life.”

As a teenager, a Huron stranger saved him from freezing to death on a solo camping trip. Upon his mother’s death, his uncle revealed that her grandmother was Huron.

After he left Greenpeace, a member of the Kwakiutl tribe called him out of the blue and gave him a PR job for a different tribe. The two would team up to write an indigenous view of Canadian history, called Occupied Canada.

He found himself one night in the Canadian Rockies at a powwow, in deep conversation with a Metís “Earth Healer.”

“Alice’s eyes glint redly as she reminded me that all life is part of the one Life Force, grown from the same shift in chemistry during the planet’s infancy.” Even the rocks of the Earth are alive; “we can learn to soak up energy from them.”

“And I think how my Huron saviour showed me how to put my sleeping bag down in the ashes of a fire on the glacial moraine, and that’s what kept me alive as the temperature dropped. And that’s why I am here.”

They were participating in a powwow at a critical juncture in Canada’s reckoning with the legacy of colonization. The Charlottetown Accords, a bureaucratic marriage of indigenous and colonizer governments, were up for a vote. For the men who debated whether to join or fight, Alice reframed the issue: “the Earth is in trouble, the land is in trouble, and what needs to happen here on Turtle Island is a balancing.” Aggressive development and worry-about-it-later mentality had to be balanced by a “receptive, allowing, surrendering energy.”

The medicine man moderator shut her down: “Those who want to learn about feminist issues can attend the workshop.”

The powwow ended without resolution. The accords went down in defeat, and Canada’s reckoning continues to this day. And Hunter drew a dismal lesson from the experience: “We came to the pass on the Sacred Mountain, a place where we were supposed to meet our destinies, and there was nothing there except new and ancient struggles of power, strategic interests, ideologies, cabals, decadence, lust.”

This summer, Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are protesting renewed whaling in Icelandic waters. The owner of the last commercial whaling company in Iceland wants to kill 400 whales, even though he no longer has a market in Japan for them; even though Iceland’s veterinarians say the whales suffer for minutes or hours after being harpooned.

Iceland’s lawmakers have a plan: a whaling ban. But it can’t go into effect until the whaling company’s license expires in 2029.

Bob Hunter died of cancer in 2005. As inventive as he was in dreaming up mind bombs—spraying green dye on whitecoat seals, for example—it was his message of interconnectedness we should absorb. It’s not a question of saving “the environment,” but one of joining with the ecology of Earth.

Even in his teens, that is what Bob Hunter tried to do—commune with nature. Having survived that solo camping trip in the Ontario woods, thanks to the Huron stranger, he hiked back to the road: “Except for this strange frozen canal of asphalt winding through the forest, this could be any moment in the last few million years. That’s what I sought! To get out of my moment in time. To feel timelessness, or at least get a sense of what it might be like to experience existence in terms of epochs and eras and ages, instead of insignificant hours and days.”

SOURCES:

I discovered Robert Hunter while researching my novel Mission: Butterfly. I admired a hippie gonzo journalist who found a way to break out of the mainstream and make a difference. He plays a small role in the novel. I read The Greenpeace to Amchitka, his account of the first “Greenpeace” voyage that his editor rejected but was published 30 years later.

It’s too bad that Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy’s Encounters With the Native World is out of print. I read a library copy, then broke my Bezos boycott to buy a used copy. It is a funny, classic gonzo journalism account of his escapades that resonates today.

Warriors of the Rainbow, the compilation of indigenous legends, and Hunter’s The Enemies of Anarchy are available on Internet Archive.

A video of Watson’s and Hunter’s ramming of Japanese drift netters is posted on the Sea Shepherd Society’s website.

Photos and information were gleaned from the Greenpeace website, especially from a remembrance of Hunter by journalist Rex Weyler.

Every couple of weeks, I’m reminded why I keep my subscription to Newspapers.com up to date.

NOTE: I boycott Amazon, so all book links take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of every purchase is shared with independent bookstores.

On the morning of March 17, 1973, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales took the Denver police chief through his Crusade For Justice headquarters. See? No guns. No bombs.

They walked outside, past the blood-stained concrete where a Crusade member had been shot and killed by police. Down the block to survey the massive hole blown in one of the Crusade’s buildings. City officials kept everyone away. Too dangerous. It was torn down before the cause of the blast was determined.

“Suspected cache of dynamite” would be the phrase used by newspaper accounts that day and forevermore.

Gonzales said he was manhandled by police when he arrived early that morning. The shooting had stopped, but an angry crowd had gathered. He learned quickly that Luis “Junior” Martinez was dead. He was devastated. He’d known Junior since the boy started bringing his North High Black Berets to all the Crusade marches. He grew into a gifted dancer and taught students in the Crusade’s Ballet Chicano Aztlán. He was only 20.

Another rising young leader, Ernesto Vigil, was shot in the back. He should be in the hospital, but the cops hauled him to jail from the ER, accusing him of firing on officers. Did Ernesto know Junior was dead? They were buddies, had survived that god-awful riot in LA together.

A young man somehow survived the blast that took out the wall and roof of his apartment. Police said they “smelled” dynamite, but wouldn’t let him or anyone else close enough to investigate.

I was finishing my junior year in high school that spring, licensed to drive, and free to party. There was a night when the police chased us from house to house, park to field in what we came to call the “Mobile Kegger.” Just white Catholic boy hijinks.

I don’t remember taking much notice of the St. Patrick’s Day shootout at the Crusade for Justice. If I did, I’m sure I didn’t have much sympathy for the Crusade’s side of the story. The media had made clear they were a dangerous, militant bunch. I have an early memory of being stomach-churningly scared while helping my Auntie Joyce set up chairs for an event in the Crusade meeting hall. The frightening media narrative had wormed all the way down to 10-year-old me.

I certainly don’t recall reading that three of the four Crusade members accused of assaulting police that night were acquitted at trial.

Corky Gonzales wasn’t always the villain. He got good press when he was a rising star in the pro boxing ring in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and then when he delivered brown votes to Democratic candidates in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It began to sour when he broke from the Democratic Party because a mayor reneged on his promise to create an independent police review board. The mayor fired him from his city post in 1965, and 1,000 people showed up at City Hall to protest. “This meeting is only the spark of a crusade for justice, which we are going to carry into every city in Colorado,” Gonzales told them.

His speeches fired people up, especially the young, who were fed up with schools that belittled their culture, with police who harassed them, with a Vietnam draft that seemed rigged against them, and with a Civil Rights movement that paid them little attention. Gonzales bottled all that frustration, put it in context of a centuries-old struggle, and issued a stirring call to action in—of all things—a poem.

“There are no revolutions without poets,” Corky Gonzales once wrote. His epic poem “Yo Soy Joaquín” was a revolution starter. When he published it in 1967, it was reprinted in Chicano media across the country. It was tacked to telephone poles in the barrio. It was performed dramatically in film and on stage.

Yo soy Joaquín,

perdido en un mundo de confusión:

I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,

caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,

confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,

suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.

My fathers have lost the economic battle

and won the struggle of cultural survival.

And now! I must choose between the paradox of

victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,

or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,

sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.

The poem has the sweat, the punch, and the howl of the boxing ring. It packs tight, vivid scenes to speed through the history of the Aztecs, the Conquistadors, the mestizo, and the Mexican freedom fighter.

Juaquín is a reflection of Gonzales himself, a man who knew he and his people deserved more than the Anglos were dishing out. A man who worked through the system, found it corrupt, and set out on a principled path. A man who had seen too many police beatings and vowed to make it stop.

Gonzales’ villainous portrayal began with his arrest on the steps of Denver West High School in 1969.

About 150 Chicano students, including one of his daughters, Nita, gathered at the door to demand a sit-down with the principal to discuss bias in curriculum and school policy, and a social studies teacher who disparaged what Chicanos ate and how they dressed. Gonzales was there to egg them on or guide them, depending on your point of view.

He became enraged when a phalanx of cops shoved the kids down the steps, one dragging Nita by the arm. Gonzales pulled Nita away from the cop, and then he was swarmed and cuffed. The West High Blowout had begun.

“I saw young people running in all directions and people screaming,” Gonzales testified later. “Little girls slammed against cars and dragged by the hair.” A police helicopter hovered overhead. Helmeted cops sprayed Mace liberally, even into the paddy wagon where teens sat cuffed.

The police asked the City Council for authority to make more arrests in such protests. The Denver Post editorial board accused Gonzales of “Hispanic racism.” The school district vowed to update its history curriculum and transfer the racist teacher to another school.

The affair receded to the back pages, and there was little fanfare months later when Gonzales and all but one of the other protesters were acquitted by juries. TV news footage shown at trial contradicted the police story.

The week after the blowout, Gonzales held the first of his annual Chicano Youth Liberation Conferences, each attracting thousands of high school students and young adults from throughout the Southwest. Here, they learned that American history did not begin at Jamestown. They learned to dance, sing, and play the music of their people. This is where Gonzales’ Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was born.

Aztlán was a place on the map: The Mexican border before it lost the war with the United States in 1848. Gonzales made it a metaphor for the culture that was lost to European conquest, one that must be reasserted. A “nation” of Aztlán might include the unlikely reclamation of land stolen in violation of a treaty, but mostly it envisioned a unified people who return to the ideals of family and communal sharing of resources.

Gonzales put 21-year-old Manuel Martinez in front of the media to explain. Martinez, one of those arrested and acquitted in the West High Blowout, had become notorious for the brilliant portrayals of Aztlán he painted on walls throughout the city. “Our people are as deeply rooted in this land as any tree … Nationalism is humanism and all these things lead to liberation.”

A Denver Post editorial columnist marveled at young Chicanos’ embrace of Gonzales’ “Yo Soy Joaquín” and his vision of a nation of Aztlán. “His heroes in the poem tend to be warlike, hence it is doubtful whether contemporary Hispanos can draw many lessons of practical value,” he sniffed.

The media covered--and the FBI fretted--over Gonzales’ support of activists in New Mexico who occupied federal lands, asserting rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Little was written about the daily work of “nation building” going on at Crusade headquarters in Denver: providing assistance in housing, jobs, and social services; supporting performance groups, and running a bookstore and art gallery.

Of the Crusade’s many projects, the one that consumed the most resources and would last the longest was its K-12 school, Escuela Tlatelolco. Classes were taught in Spanish and English, with a Chicano-influenced curriculum heavy on the arts.

As the public portrayal of Gonzales grew more sinister, J. Edgar Hoover put him on his Rabble Rousers Index. “There seems to be no question that his activities pose a threat to the internal security of the United States,” a Feb. 9, 1968, memo states. A foot-thick stack of redacted FBI reports reveals a years-long push from Washington to keep tabs on Gonzales and the Crusade, even though the Denver office often reported back that there was no there there.

The FBI memos acquired under the Freedom of Information Act also show that two days before the St. Patrick’s Day shootout, the FBI issued a bulletin to its Western field offices to be on the lookout for activists traveling to support the Native American occupation of Wounded Knee. The Crusade was mentioned in the memo, which concluded: “The object is to make lawful arrests as far from Wounded Knee, South Dakota, as possible.”

Crusade members had a feeling they were being watched when Gonzales was arrested in 1970 at the Chicano Moratorium Against the War in Los Angeles. Three were killed in that melee, including a Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times who was shot in the head by a teargas cannister fired from a launcher.

Gonzales was scheduled to speak to the 30,000 in attendance when the LA Sheriff declared an unlawful assembly and started lobbing teargas at the stage and then into the buses that protesters tried to flee in. The Crusade delegation piled onto a flatbed truck to escape. A police helicopter tracked them until they were stopped at a roadblock.

“Look for Corky. He’s the one with the mustache,” they heard the cops say. That description scarcely narrowed the field of suspects, but they finally found Gonzales in the cab. There was a gun under the seat and $370 in cash in his pocket. The money was for the group’s travel expenses, but police suspected robbery.

Gonzales was convicted of a gun violation and served 29 days in jail. It was the only time Gonzales was ever convicted of a crime, despite his many arrests by the Denver police.

The Crusade was ever on the Denver police’s prime suspect list, especially when several bombs turned up in the early ‘70s. Thirty-eight Denver school buses were destroyed. Dynamite was tossed or mailed to businesses, politicians, and police. White supremacists were emergent, opposed to busing and the Civil Rights movement. But still, the Crusade was the first thing police thought of. Ironically, the only bombs that actually exploded killed Chicanos.

Two Crusade members faced bombing charges and won acquittals at trial. A third was acquitted of state charges when the defense cut the police informant’s story to shreds, but was convicted of a federal explosives charge.

The bombings and attempted bombings have never been solved, including two car bombs that killed six Chicano activists in Boulder in 1974. In that case, the authorities figured there was nothing to solve. Denver District Attorney Dale Tooley summed up their thinking: “The gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” he wrote in his memoir, “apparently could not tell red wires from green ones.”

Gonzales fought against the narrative when the Connecticut State Police and the FBI issued all points bulletins in 1976, claiming he and the American Indian Movement were armed with M16s and rocket launchers and planned to “kill a cop a day.” The report was fabricated, as documents released under the Freedom of Information Act would later reveal.

Gonzales, whose Crusade was bleeding money to fend off the bombing charges, sued the Connecticut police for damages. “I believe we are sliding backwards,” he said in a deposition. “I don’t think (the memo) was used so much to stop, to stop my credibility, but I think it was used to have me assassinated, in a sense, murdered by proxy.”

The judge threw the case out, saying the defendants had governmental immunity.

With its image in tatters, the Crusade lost human and financial support to a growing list of government and nonprofit groups that were taking on Chicano causes. Gonzales took to criticizing Chicano leaders—even Federico Peña, the city’s first Chicano mayor—as being sellouts, “Tied to the umbilical cord of the establishment, capitalism, and the two-party system.”

Refusing to take grants from the government, the Crusade struggled to keep its day care center, ballet, legal defense, newspaper, social services, and prisoner rights programs afloat. Newspapers began to refer to him as the “militant civil rights leader of the ‘60s,” even as he led efforts in the ‘80s to build health and recreation centers in the Chicano community, to rename city parks to reflect their neighborhood culture, to allow Spanish to be spoken in schools and the public, and to demilitarize the police.

In the end, Escuela Tlatelolco was all that survived, with Gonzales’ daughter Nita Gonzales as principal. Even that fell prey to the “umbilical cord of the establishment.” In a last-gasp effort to keep it afloat, Nita Gonzales accepted Denver Public Schools’ money in 2004 and “almost lost our soul.” When the district pulled the funds in 2016, they lost the school. It closed the next year.

The police, the FBI, and the mainstream media made the wrong turn. They propagated a narrative of violence that buried the vision of Aztlán. Culture became a battlefield. Spanish deemed un-American. Sixty-one percent of Coloradans voted in 1988 to make English the state’s “official language.” Police brutality continues, with the city paying millions in settlements in the George Floyd protests alone. The Denver school district in 2024 admitted that Chicano students are not getting an equal education.

But now that I understand it, I see sprouts of Aztlán today.

Mia Martinez Lopez is the principal of Denver’s West High School, where Spanish is freely spoken these days. Her father was among those arrested and acquitted of police assault charges at the 1969 West High School blowout. Now, Emanuel Martinez’s murals are commissioned by councils, featured in Chamber brochures, and hang in the Smithsonian.

Serena Gonzales Guttierez, Corky’s granddaughter, is a Denver City Councilwoman, currently leading an effort to decriminalize poverty.

Each summer, high schoolers from around the country come to Denver for arts and culture education, an echo of the original Chicano Youth Liberation Conference.

Gonzales told an interviewer in 1985: “I would say the movement’s not dead. I might say it’s resting. And the emergencies that come about will bring us together. And there will be a resurgence, a new renaissance in the Chicano movement.”

Gonzales remained in fighting shape until he suffered a heart attack while driving in 1987. A brain injury slowed him down. Diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2005, he checked himself out of the hospital and died days later, as he wished, among his friends and family.

SOURCES

Ernesto Vigil wrote a meticulously sourced and footnoted history, The Crusade For Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent. He also entrusted boxes full of FBI memos acquired under the Freedom of Information Act to the Denver Public Library. I spent many hours in the library’s Special Collections and Archives Department. He acknowledges in the book’s foreword that a grant from the Gonzales family enabled him to devote time to the research. His point of view as a participant in the Crusade’s history is obvious, but he provides documentation to support his facts.

Juan Haro, another Crusade leader, wrote The Ultimate Betrayal: An Autobiography, also found in DPL’s Special Collections and Archives Department. He was acquitted of one of the bombing attempts but convicted of a federal charge of possessing an explosive device. His lawyer, Stan Marks, told me he would have beaten the federal charge if the cops hadn’t hidden their informant’s rap sheet. Haro returned to Denver from prison, angry that the Crusade did not pay his legal bills. Marks said, “all I got was a tank of gas once a week at Haro’s gas station.” In his book, Haro says Gonzales had begun running the Crusade for his personal enrichment and that he was the one who set him up in the bomb plot. The book in DPL’s Special Collections includes an exchange of letters between lawyers for the Gonzales family and the book publisher. I could not tell whether the publisher acceded to demands to cease printing the book.

I’ve read “Yo Soy Joaquín” four or five times. It’s brilliant. I spent hours looking up Gonzales’ historical references, filling in the gaps in my education.

In 2000, Corky Gonzales compiled his essays, speeches, poems, and plays in Message to Aztlán. There, I found the depth of his vision, a welcome contrast to the combative quotes that made the newspapers.

I read hundreds of articles in DPL’s Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post archives. What wasn’t covered was interesting. For example, the papers did not cover testimony in the first three St. Patrick’s Day assault cases. But when Vigil’s case came, and the police were down 2 cases to 1, both newspapers covered every day of the trial to see if it would be a tie or a blowout. “Jury Acquits Vigil In 30 Seconds” was the Rocky Mountain News’ front page headline.

Daniel Salazar created a documentary, After Juaquín, which aired on local public television in 1985 and has since been uploaded to YouTube here. His interview with Gonzales at the end of the Crusade’s run portrays a man aware of his early impatience and at peace with what was accomplished.

I consulted The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.

Public domain / Office of Strategic Services

General Võ Nguyên Giáp was misty-eyed as his ragtag military band played the final bars of the Star Spangled Banner. He cast a sidelong glance at the Army officer standing next to him. The officer stood at rigid attention, saluting. He seemed suitably impressed.

Grinning broadly, he shook the American’s hand and said, “This is the first time in the history of Vietnam that our flag has been displayed in an international ceremony, and our national anthem played in honor of a foreign guest,” Giáp told Patti. “I will long remember this occasion.”

Army Major Archimedes Patti would long remember this day, too. With regret.

Patti had orders to keep his nose out of politics. That was a tall order here in Japanese-occupied Vietnam, August 1945. Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been leveled by atomic bombs just weeks earlier. The emperor had surrendered, but terms had not been settled. Patti’s small team landed in Hanoi to secure the release of Japanese-held POWs.

Several other agents of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) were conducting similar “mercy missions.” The one in China had gone badly. Patti’s counterpart had gotten mouthy with a communist patrol and was bayonetted and shot to death. He would someday be called the “first casualty of the Cold War” and a right-wing organization formed in his name, the John Birch Society.

Patti’s orders to stay out of politics were complicated by … politics. The French wanted in on this mission, but they were despised by the Vietnamese and barely tolerated by the Japanese. They forced the son-in-law of a former prime minister onto his team. And just as he got off the plane, the entitled Frenchman started to make trouble. He demanded a car. He wanted to be driven to the radio station to make an announcement of liberation. The Japanese commander, who was still making sense of Patti’s request to surrender, was irritated.

The whole thing got settled when the Frenchman was offered the opportunity to stay at the former French governor’s “palace.” Once there, the Japanese set a guard, and he hadn’t been seen around town since.

Patti and his team were given a villa formerly occupied by the French finance minister. It was at the gates that General Giáp had brought his welcoming committee.

A color guard marched by, bearing the flags of the United States, Soviet Union, China, and the new flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It was a symbol. A wish.

Giáp’s men had received a hero’s welcome when they marched uncontested into the city a few days earlier. The Japanese retreated to their camp, and a joyful citizenry banged pots, stripped the air-raid covers off streetlamps, and hung banners praising the Viet Minh. Many in Saigon had secretly supported the resistance guerrillas during the war and now counted on them to evict the French.

Patti met the Viet Minh’s leader, Hô Chì Minh, in a café on the China/Vietnam border four months earlier. The OSS’s French contacts within Vietnam were not reliable. Hô’s people had rescued and smuggled downed Allied pilots out of the country. They were communists, but as long as they provided good intel, Patti didn’t mind.

The 55-year-old Hô was deathly pale, emaciated, and smoked like a chimney. He spoke fluent English and French, having spent years working kitchens in Paris and New York. And he spoke a lot: About the famine that claimed a million or more lives, which he blamed on Japanese neglect; about French absentee landowners and merchants who improverished and mistreated laborers, and about onerous quotas on purchase of French alcohol and its licensing of the opium trade.

“Besides the freedom to get drugged, to get drunk, and to pay taxes, the Indo-Chinese have no other freedom,” he said. “Are the Allies really fighting for world freedom and democracy as they solemnly said in their official declarations? Or do they fight simply to save French selfish colonial interests?”

Patti, speaking for himself, was fighting for freedom and democracy. But he couldn’t speak for those at higher pay grades. His OSS dossier indicated Hô had been pitching independence as far back as the end of World War II, to no avail. Will things be much different at the end of this world war?

The history lesson over, Hô quickly agreed to help the Allies. He hated the Japanese. A million or more Vietnamese starved to death under their occupation. He hated the French more, but first things first.

The deal was made, and the Allied brass were happy. The communists’ intelligence helped the Allies disrupt Japanese communication and supply lines in the final months of the war.

Patti noted that the marching honor guard wore mismatched uniforms, and many bore swords, axes, and the odd stolen Japanese rifle. But a few carried American M16s acquired from the special forces team that had trained them over the last few months.

He took stock of their general. Giáp was about his age, thirties. Small and swimming in a cream-colored suit with a loud plaid tie. Probably “liberated” from a French haberdashery during his troops’ marauding reclamation of the city. He looked affable today, but Patti had heard he could be fierce. “Snow-covered volcano,” the French called him. They had created him: His wife and her sister were killed in their prisons.

The French colonials in Hanoi irritated Patti. They insisted on calling Vietnamese “Annamites,” a pejorative that offended the Vietnamese. They blamed him for delaying the release of French POWs. But Hô held the keys and was understandably reluctant to unleash French soldiers onto the streets of Hanoi. His caution proved warranted: When Patti’s counterpart in Saigon, a British officer, released the French POWs there, they sacked the city.

Patti’s sympathies tilted toward the Viet Minh. His dispatches to OSS headquarters advocated for Vietnamese independence on a moral level: Hô’s demands were “few and simple[:] Namely limited independence, freedom from French rule, [and the] right to live as free people within [the] family of nations.” On a practical level: “From what I have seen, these people mean business. The French will have to deal with them. For that matter, we all will have to deal with them.”

On Sept. 2, he joined a throng in Ba Đình Square, where chants of “Độc lập! Độc lập!” (Independence! Independence!) stilled when Hô Chì Minh mounted the dais. He read the country’s Declaration of Independence, which began: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When Lieutenant Dan Phelan parachuted behind the lines to help train Giáp’s troops the previous May, he met Hô, “an awfully sweet guy.” Hô pestered Phelan for the exact words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. “I was a normal American. I couldn’t … but all he really wanted was the flavor of the thing. The more we discussed it, the more he actually seemed to know about it than I did.”

In August, Hô pressed Patti for the wording, then read his draft of the Vietnamese Declaration. He clearly had the wording down pat. “I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I was participating—however slightly—in the formulation of a political entity and did not want to create an impression of participation.”

Hô Chì Minh was playing his last cards.

The echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s words were not meant for the cheering crowd in Hanoi. Historians speculate they were meant to signal to Washington that there was common ground to explore.

But it was for naught. On the same day Hô was reading the Declaration in Ba Đình Square, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was accepting the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay and giving French General Philippe Leclerc the green light to invade Vietnam.

“Bring in troops, more troops, as many as you can.”

America had made the wrong turn.

On his last night in Hanoi, Patti had dinner with Giáp and Hô. He was moved by the emotion in their thanks and farewell. “At the same time, I knew they were taking advantage of this last evening to put themselves and their cause in the best possible light,” Patti wrote later. “They were isolated from the communist world, they were surrounded by self-interested powers, and the few Americans within their view were the only ones with whom there was a rapport. Americans were the ones who understood the difficulty of achieving and maintaining independence.”

Hô had written eight letters to President Truman, asking him to honor the promise of self-determination made in the Atlantic Charter. But the charter was not a treaty; just some principles jotted down by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was dead, and Truman was more concerned about rising communism than declining imperialism.

France was left to fight it out with the Viet Minh, though the United States footed 78 percent of the bill. When Giáp defeated the French, the hot potato was tossed to the United States. Having driven Hô into the arms of the Chinese and Soviet Union, the U.S. no longer saw Vietnam as a seeker of self-determination, but as a communist domino about to fall.

Thirty years and 2 million deaths after Giáp brought an honor guard to the Americans, he defeated them and won independence for Vietnam. The CIA finally allowed Patti to write his memoirs. He had spent the rest of his government service in emergency preparedness, out of the loop as the Vietnam War raged. So much so that the consultants who researched the Pentagon Papers didn’t interview him.

“Ho Chi Minh was on a silver platter in 1945,” he said in an interview. “We had him. He was willing to be a democratic republic, if nothing else. Socialist yes, but a democratic republic.”

Patti went looking to see what happened to the dozen or so reports he had sent to Washington. The OSS Chief of Registry, Julia McWilliams (better known as Julia Child), assured him she had forwarded them.

He found them in a dusty cabinet at the CIA.

Unopened.

Sources

It was agony to cut Archimedes Patti from my novel to true up the timeline. A World War II spy. A confidant of Hô Chì Minh. What if he and Robert McNamara had gotten together? This amputation is what gave me the idea to write this series of essays; his story had to be told. I don’t remember how I first heard about him, but I do know my first source was unedited interview footage from a 1981 PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television Story.” You can find an edited interview done for the Vietnam Reconsidered conference in 1983 here.

I have always admired Robert McNamara’s forthright acknowledgment of error in Vietnam. I re-read his In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

That sent me down some rabbit holes, but the most fruitful was The OSS and Hô Chì Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan by Dixee Bartholomew-Feis.

I got a glimpse of Vietnamese life in that time period through the excellent memoir The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family by Mai Elliott. She immigrated from Vietnam and became one of the researchers for the Pentagon Papers. Speaking of which, even though I was greatly incensed by Nixon’s attempted censorship, I never read the Pentagon Papers until now.

The wrong turns this series describes are all of a piece to me, and their contribution to the climate crisis is at the crux of my novel, Mission: Butterfly. Rubber and the Making of Vietnam by Michitake Aso recounts how rubber trees were transplanted from Brazil to Southeast Asia, and how damaging plantation agriculture and monoculture is to the earth.

Sheldon Tsu, an agricultural economist, was one of the few non-military members of the American mission in the ‘50s. When I read his report on launching co-op farms in Vietnam, I was cheered to know there were some Americans truly helping the Vietnamese. I made him a fictionalized character in my novel.

If you want to follow me further down rabbit holes, here are some excellent books: Vietnam: Lotus In A Sea Of Fire was written by Thích Nhat Hanh in 1967 (he is a character in my novel). The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation is a gruesome account by Tran Bu Binh, who became a member of the Viet Minh. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon is 60 years old, but the techniques and scars of colonialism remain depressingly salient.

Articles in Scientific American gave me a sense of the excitement surrounding wartime technological innovation. Articles in The New York Times gave me a sense of how little Americans cared about what was happening in “Indo-China.”

NOTE: I boycott Amazon, so all book links take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of every purchase is shared with independent bookstores.

The Wrong Turn is an essay series about the people who saw it coming and said so. All of them were right. The essays grew out of my research for Mission: Butterfly, a climate-fiction novel set in mid-century America. New essays every other Tuesday.

Thomas Brosnihan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

She chose to make this last farewell at low tide. Their “fairy cave” would have emerged, the tidepools within waiting to be explored.

Poor Rachel, Dorothy thought. She had so wanted to comb this beach one last time.

She choked back a sob and hefted the plain cardboard box. Rachel’s brother had carelessly mailed it to her here in Maine. No note. Stepping carefully over the mossy rocks at the fairy cave’s opening, she dipped her hand into the ashes.

One last caress. Gritty and chalky.

Rachel Carson grew up on a farm in western Pennsylvania, but was drawn to the sea. The farm provided little income, but her mother made it a fertile laboratory for a curious girl. She sent her children out on the 64 acres to examine God’s creation and discover man’s “divine obligation” to conserve it.

Perhaps the seashell fossil young Rachel dug from a riverbank sparked the first question that would lead her to the ocean and its mysteries. But writing is what truly floated her boat. She was 10 when she published her first article in the St. Nicholas children’s magazine (joining F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.B. White among the magazine’s writing contest winners). She was 14 when she received her first check from the magazine. And she would pitch stories to newspapers, magazines, and book publishers ever after.

She had to hustle. Due to death and desertion, she became the primary provider for her mother and two nieces just as she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a master’s degree in zoology. It was 1932, the depths of the Great Depression.

She got a day job at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and earned $20 here and there selling articles to the Baltimore Sun. Fisheries’ news releases, government reports, brochures, and guides never read more clearly or sang more beautifully.

Her boss said one piece was too good for a fisheries brochure. “Send this one to the Atlantic,” he said. When the Atlantic Monthly published her essay “Undersea” in September 1937, the world was introduced to a whole new universe under the waves and to a writer of remarkable talent.

In the article, Carson pulled readers off the beach, through the shallow reefs, and out to the continental shelf and the yawning abyss. Along the way, she described peculiar creatures eating, living, and dying in bizarre ways. Scientific details were served up in delightfully digestible bites.

Readers in their armchairs had “seen” nothing like it. Jacques Cousteau had not yet invented the Aqua-Lung nor begun making underwater documentaries. Carson opened new territory to the popular imagination and awakened her readers to the interdependence of man and nature.

“Thus we see the parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them up until the gathering energy of the spring sun wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic activity,” she wrote. “Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”

A scientist with a poet’s pen. A woman breaking barriers. She would move the world.

Dorothy Freeman remembered Rachel’s delight upon discovering their fairy cave, its opening obscured by a curtain of roots and fern. Within, sea stars clung to rocks. Hermit crabs skittered between pools. A seafoam-green anemone’s tentacles waved in a gentle current from the cave’s dripping ceiling.

Rachel had her bucket and carefully lifted specimens for closer inspection back at her cottage. She returned them to the sea, of course. Dorothy chuckled at the memory of Rachel rescuing a lightning bug that kept diving into breaking waves, mistaking bioluminescence for a swarm of compatriots.

Dorothy turned from the cave and stepped carefully across slick, weathered rocks toward the lapping waves. The first handful of ashes scattered across Rachel’s precious tidepools; some appeared to melt into the rock as they soaked up seawater; others lingered a bit on the tidepool’s surface, before settling into the salt-and-pepper pebbles of the pool’s floor.

This is what Rachel wanted and what her brother tried to prevent. He had relented, burying half her ashes with their mother and sending the other half to her in the mail. Perhaps he was jealous of their relationship. Or perhaps he felt he knew better what was good for his sister.

Men.

The Atlantic Monthly article appeared under the byline “R. L. Carson,” at Carson’s insistence. As one of only two women scientists in the Bureau of Fisheries, she found that her reports were given more weight if the writer was presumed to be male. Her instinct would be confirmed over and over again, even when her books topped bestseller lists.

The “Undersea” article led to a trilogy of books about the ecosystems of the shore, the sea, and its depths. The Sea Around Us was a breakout hit, and reviewers routinely marveled that such a deep and serious book had been written by a “petite and pretty” woman. One who was unmarried, no less.

“She sometimes envied male writers who married because they had wives to take care of them, provide meals, and spare them from unnecessary interruptions,” her biographer, Linda Lear, wrote. Perhaps she never married precisely because no husband could see himself in that role.

Her books about the sea raised issues that were uncomfortable in an era when men blasted Pacific atolls to test the power of atomic bombs, when “progress” was marching faster and faster, heedless of consequences.

But her books also gave her a platform. At awards banquets and society luncheons, she spoke up for nature, becoming more and more vocal about man’s negative influences on it. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was a time of fearsome revelations: Of radioactive fallout, of harmful food additives, and of medications that caused hideous birth defects.

“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done,” she wrote to a friend.

An avid birdwatcher, Carson became alarmed by reports of disappearing bird species in the South, where post-war America was waging “war” on fire ants. DDT, developed during World War II to fight lice and insect-borne diseases among the troops, was declared a “miracle” chemical. The Department of Agriculture was mixing the stuff in oil and dumping it on entire neighborhoods from airplanes and roadside sprayers. The extermination of the “relentless rival of man” was hyped in a USDA video titled Fire Ant On Trial.

Carson, the scientist, dove into the research and interviewed chemists and physicians. Carson, the former government interpreter, worked her sources in the Department of Agriculture. Carson, the emerging celebrity, enlisted the powerful, including Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

The result was her magnum opus, Silent Spring, published in 1962. It opens:

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.

Indiscriminate spraying stilled the birds, poisoned the water, and probably caused cancer, Carson wrote. She connected dots as no one had before. She uncovered the seamy side of unchecked progress.

The intensity of the chemical industry’s criticism betrayed its vulnerability. A lawyer for the Velsicol Chemical Company threatened the publishers with a lawsuit. Carson, he wrote, might be part of “sinister forces” trying to “create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral.” Former Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson wondered, “Why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.” His conclusion: “probably a communist.”

Scientists on the payroll of DuPont, Monsanto, and the National Agricultural Chemicals Association belittled her master’s degree in zoology. They went on television to explain that modern food production was too important and complex to be addressed in a mass-market book. Public relations teams put together mass mailings, including a brochure for county agricultural extension agents titled “How To Answer Rachel Carson.”

But Silent Spring landed on a public that was becoming wary of “the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom,” as a New York Times editorial put it. There were congressional hearings and studies. Congress amended the law to prohibit use of insecticides before their safety had been tested.

But by then, Rachel Carson was dead.

Dorothy Freeman was one of the very few who knew that Rachel wrote Silent Spring in a race against cancer. In the 10 years she had known her, cancer had spread from her breast to her neck, to her bones, and to her liver. Massive doses of radiation weakened her. She went blind for a while. Her writing hand went numb.

But she kept her condition secret, even as she endured radio interviews, Congressional testimony, and banquet speeches. She feared her detractors would twist her illness into some kind of ulterior motive.

She had so much more to say. But her heart gave out on April 14, 1964, just eighteen months after Silent Spring was published.

Dorothy knew why it was so important to Rachel that her ashes be spread here at Sheepscot Bay, where they had spent summers together. Rachel had given her life, and now she would give her body to nature. As she had written in that Atlantic article long ago: “There descends into the depths a gentle, never-ending rain of the disintegrating particles of what once were living creatures of the sunlit surface.”

She no longer walked the sunlit surface, but Carson’s words lived on. The public was awakened to the link between “progress” and the brown clouds over cities, the polluted rivers catching fire, and the seabirds dying in oil slicks. The Ecology Movement was born. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, ushering in what became known as the “environmental decade.”

Carson’s friends in Congress, pushed by the growing environmental movement, strengthened restrictions on pesticides, passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter signed them into law.

In signing the bill that created the Environmental Protection Agency, Nixon proclaimed: “Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality, clean air, and clean water. These are part of the birthright of every American.”

But an economic downturn came—as they do—and industry saw its chance. Rising gas prices, high interest rates, stagnant wages: These were the result of government regulation. A former actor gave them the perfect line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and the country took a hard wrong turn.

The Superfund toxic waste cleanup program was the last environmental measure to pass before Reagan came to town. The measure required petroleum, chemical, and manufacturing companies to pay into a fund to clean up thousands of dumps that industries had used and abandoned over the previous decades.

Chemicals from the worst such dump in California, the Stringfellow Acid Pit, were oozing into waterways in the town of Glen Avon. Kids made toxic beards out of the frothy storm runoff. Then they started seeing double. The eager young scientists who hired on to the new Superfund program to solve such problems ran into an obstacle: Their new leader, Rita Lavelle, appointed to the job by Reagan. Lavelle, a former spokeswoman for Aerojet, one of the Stringfellow Pit’s toxic dumpers, thought it unfair that companies be held accountable for messes made by companies long ago. She made some calls to her old colleagues at Aerojet.

Lavelle’s boss was Reagan’s EPA Director Anne Gorsuch, a former Colorado state legislator who belonged to a group that called themselves the “House Crazies.” She supposedly walked into a petroleum industry luncheon once, lit up a Marlboro, and said, “I’m from EPA, and I’m here to help.”

She had a like-minded partner on the Cabinet, Interior Secretary James Watt. He opened the country’s coastal waters to oil drilling, eased restrictions on strip-mining, and opened federal lands to the coal companies.

It’s a testament to the ecology movement’s enduring power that Gorsuch’s collusion with industry and gutting of EPA staff got her into hot water with Congress. Similarly, Lavelle’s mishandling of Superfund landed her in jail for perjury before Congress.

Reagan cut them loose, but kept Watt. Until Watt described the diversity on his coal leasing review panel: “I have a Black. I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” Such language was politically fatal back then.

The Reagan Revolution changed government. Reagan had required all federal regulations to go through a “cost-benefit analysis.” That meant running everything by David Stockman, his budget director, who didn’t see much benefit in anything the government did. The scales have been tilted in industry’s favor ever since.

Reagan’s environmental legacy was entrenched in the courts. His judicial nominees were screened for their fealty to free enterprise. John Roberts, a young lawyer on the White House staff, would go on to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And in that role, he would author West Virginia v. EPA, a ruling that undercuts the EPA’s ability to fight climate change. Concurring in that ruling was Justice Neil Gorsuch, Anne’s son.

Dorothy Freeman, empty box in her hand, watched the waves carry her friend’s ashes out to sea. Chemistry and the divine had conspired to create life in those waters, Rachel had said. And it would forever do so, despite the “senseless, brutish things” man has done.

The question is, will we be there to enjoy it?

Sources

I read Carson’s Silent Spring just recently. It still resonates. The enemies of nature are the same, still short-sighted, still making the same justifications.

“Undersea,” her first article in the Atlantic Monthly, is truly beautiful. The Atlantic’s digital archive serves it up with the byline “Rachel Carson.” But a PDF of the original print version verifies it was published under the byline “R.L. Carson.” You can see it here.

Linda Lear’s Rachel Carson: Witness For Nature helped me grasp the roots of Carson’s passion, the obstacles she had to overcome, and the full depth of her influence on mid-century society and politics. As a writer, I found the publishing back stories fascinating.

I am old enough to see history repeating. As a newspaper reporter, I covered the “House Crazies” in the Colorado Legislature, and got out the popcorn when Anne Gorsuch was named to head the EPA. I refreshed my memory about the Reagan Administration’s DOGE-ing of the EPA by listening to a series on the topic broadcast in 2022 by the excellent NPR/WBUR program “Here & Now.” The series can be found here.