I was reading J’s Blog at Live Journal and besides being upset that I have yet another blog to read every morning, I started remembering about an Environmental Adventurer that I met in 1970. J is writing an environmental SF adventure story (you can read some samples on his blog).

Earth Day was first held in 1970. At the time I felt it was an attempt to swing attention from the Vietnam war. The war held my interest because around that time I was #12 in the draft lottery and had been given a date to go down to Whitehall Street to get my physical. By 1970 I had lost several friends over there. I agreed in principle about the environmentalists, but I did not want the anti-war movement to lose impetus, even to a worthy cause.

The engineers at Cooper Union tended towards conservative attitudes (not the misfits and hippies called group 6; we were identified as those not expected to make it through the first year.) However when a man drove up in an original Land Rover (not the plastic crap they make today) and started telling his stories, we were all impressed.

First off, when this guy (whose name I don’t think I ever knew) showed up, he had this amazing tricked out Land Rover. It had been modified heavily. It had a snorkel for the carburetor and was completely waterproof so that he could ride it under water if he wanted. It had fold down seats that became beds. Remember that Detroit had a deal with the motel industry to not make vehicles that you could comfortably sleep in. He had replaced the original bumpers with steel plate and he had reinforced the fenders and doors so it could not be damaged in an accident. He had re-engineered the car to correct all the stupid things that the automobile industry does to create planned obsolescence.

He spoke to us about the environment and how industry was actively lying to us. The were poisoning us while playing lip service to the weak environmental laws. He pulled up in front of the school one day, stood on the car and started talking. Soon there was a crowd of Cooper Union and NYU students listening to his incredible stories.

One story he told was about the Con Ed power plants. On smog alert days they were not allowed to burn high sulfur oil and were supposed to only burn natural gas. On one such day he had a helicopter lower him into a Con Ed smokestack to take readings and pictures. He had a fireproof suit, but he almost died of the heat and his instruments melted and the sulfuric acid in the smoke etched the lenses on the camera so he never got the pictures.

Another story was about the Florida manufacturers of synthetic fertilizers. They were fighting tooth and nail against pollution laws and had planted orange groves around their plant to prove that their emissions did not hurt the environment. This guy took the cool Land Rover, which had a winch in the front and lowered himself into a lake with just enough of the car exposed so he could take pictures. After a few weeks of camping in the car, the trees began to die and then one night he photographed crews going into the groves and digging up the dead trees and replacing them with new full grown healthy trees.

Now I always took these stories with a grain of salt. The guy seemed to be a bullshit artist. I wanted to believe him and I did get to ride in that incredible Land Rover. I guess that I was preoccupied with the War and didn’t want to give him any credence. I wonder what happened to him? More important, I’d love to find a 60s Land Rover in someone’s garage and buy it for a few hundred bucks.

Earth Days are still just a media event where politicians give speeches that are semantically empty of information. It still saps energy from the current crisis. I am an environmentalist, but I believe that it is a matter of science, and that politicians just talk about it. We need strong science based laws, but I don’t think that marching on May Day will make much difference.