Denis Hayes, Earth Day Network

Denis Hayes is chair of Earth Day Network. He was the national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970 and now earns his keep as president of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, Wash. He is also author of the new book The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair.

Long before dawn on Earth Day, I awake with a premonition of dread. I flip on CNN and watch the tapes of armed INS agents removing Elian from his home. So regardless of what happens today, Earth Day will be largely ignored. All the early morning television shows quickly cancel us from their schedules.

I look out the window at the rain, and remember I have to pump some public optimism into my weary bones. People will pick up my mood. It does not help at all that I've been averaging under three hours of sleep for the last several nights.

My daugher, Lisa, is my "handler" today. (A handler keeps you on schedule, stays in communications contact with the key site managers and the press secretary, and orders you to leave conversations that it might be rude for you to terminate yourself. Lisa takes some pleasure in this newfound authority. She hauls me to the Mall at 9:00 for a pep talk to the assembled volunteers who, as always, will bring so much of the good-natured magic that will make the event work. I talk about good results that are starting to drift in from Asia.

It's raining, but only lightly.

I race off to a breakfast sponsored by oneworldlive.com for the ED2K speakers, artists, celebrities, and Green Group members. I read everyone some excerpts from the sensational lead editorial in today's New York Times:

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the first Earth Day, there is much to celebrate and much to remind us of the unfinished business of protecting the planet. While the job of cleaning the water, air and land continues, the world must begin tackling the less visible threat of global warming, an issue largely unknown 30 years ago. This new threat is less immediate and less easily solved, and therefore will require an even stronger commitment in the years ahead. This is essentially the message of the organizers of Earth Day
2000. ...

Curbing [greenhouse] gases requires intensive energy conservation and the promotion of cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind power. The political and economic hurdles are substantial, both in this country and abroad. They can be overcome if the public is educated about the importance of this issue. The 30-year history of the Earth Day movement shows that when people are awakened to an environmental crisis, they will ultimately demand change in the way we live.

I finish with an upbeat pump about this year's international scope, and a stirring tribute to Gaylord Nelson. The room gives Gaylord a long standing ovation.

I speed over to the Mall in the Toyota Prius that I've been using to zoom around town for the last couple of days. I run into the CNN news team. They tell me that their camera man has been ordered to Miami. The only broadcast network remaining is C-Span, which covers us nonstop for five hours and then rebroadcasts it twice. RealNetworks is narrowcasting it continuously in web-based streaming media.

The rain has stopped, though it is still cold and wet. I spend some time discussing what's happening around the world with Al Gore, who has arrived uncharacteristically early. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, comes over and talks with real enthusiasm about the labor-environmental ties that emerged out of Seattle. I seek out some quiet time alone with Leonardo to talk about his speech, and we commiserate about the wild-assed irrationality of broadcast journalism.

And then we kick it all off.

A particularly great jam session for my age group features Carole King, David Crosby, and James Taylor, while Peter, Paul, and Mary tie it back to Earth Day's roots. Third Eye Blind, Monica, and Keb' Mo' show up for the kids. Clint Black sings to all the folks I grew up with in Camas, Wash.

Over breakfast, Clint had given me the lyrics to an awesome new song he'd just composed for Earth Day. It starts:

There's a world of tears that words won't wash away
Nor the footprints that run deeper each day
Mother Earth spins on borrowed time, showing more than her age
There's already too much hell to pay

Happy Earth Day, rebirth day, let's try something new
Stop doing the least we can do.

He sings it publicly for the first time from the stage, and the crowd goes crazy.

I duck over to NPR for a long interview with Steve Curwood and Alex Chadwick, part of it shared with Dan Reicher, the excellent Assistant Secretary of Energy for Efficiency and Renewable Energy. NPR gives Earth Day two hours of prime-time coverage, with great cuts from lots of folks, including Bill Nye the Science Guy. (I really have to send my donation to NPR.)

Back at the Mall, Bill Nye gets more autograph requests than most of the movie stars. (A half-dozen people request mine, too, but it's because they think I'm James Taylor. One even pulls out a 25-year-old 33-rpm record album of Taylor's and asks me to sign it -- causing my daughter to convulse with laugher. I tell the story to Taylor, who is even more baffled than I am.)

I won't recount the whole D.C. event. I must, though, say a word about crowd size. On a very cold, very wet Saturday, Earth Day filled up a massive portion of the Mall. The Park Service doesn't do crowd estimates anymore. But I've been to a lot of large events in my life, and I think I have a good sense of scale. I'd put the crowd size in the range of 150,000 at the start, growing to between 300,000 and 400,000 in mid-afternoon, and then scaling back. Because of lousy weather and turnover, more than that drifted through the event during the course of the day. More people were back in the display and exhibit areas, in and around the (dry, warm) tents, than by the stage where the C-Span camera was set up.

Considering (1) the weather, (2) that ED2K fell on the eve of Easter with Congress out of session, and (3) that the Washington Post gave us zero news coverage, our world-class outreach team built an awesome crowd. They got posters into thousands of store windows all over the region. They leafleted Metro stations day after day. (They also distributed free "Admission Tickets" as a gimmick through schools all over Washington. Several parents called asking where they could get tickets too! We explained that the Mall is a national park, and that they would be welcome whether or not they have "tickets.")

I kicked myself and cursed my stupidity for not hiring a couple of video crews to prepare our own video news release (VNR). It had seemed like a totally unnecessary expense. If we were big, the networks would carry us. That was simply wrong. We should have had a VNR with highlights from the stage, cameras roaming through the jam-packed exhibit tents, a quick helicopter crowd shot. We could have had our own 30-minute streaming permanent news summary on the web.

Instead, we put all our press effort into pitching our story to the media. It worked until the last minute. We had lots of coverage lined up.

Then the Elian snatch sucked all the oxygen out of the news tent. (The Pope got only 20 seconds of coverage today for Easter.)

So it goes.

I spent the early part of the evening at a party at the National Air and Space Museum sponsored by ICRE and the ISSO and a couple dozen cosponsors in honor of Earth Day. The rest of the evening I spent in a Dupont Circle bar with scores of Earth Day volunteers. Then I walked with my handler back to the hotel and cashed in my chips for the day. Tomorrow I'll start trying to get an inventory of what went on around the rest of the world.