Where do you go when you need someone to rally 200 million
people? An ex-President, perhaps, or a former dictator? Whenever
the environmental movement needs someone to gather the troops
worldwide, it turns to a tall, understated activist who rides
his bicycle to work, wears flannel shirts and has a unique
ability to herd the masses toward a common goal. His name is
Denis Hayes, but you can call him Mr. Earth Day. He helped launch the
first one in April 1970, turned it into a global festival for
Earth Day 1990 and is looking ahead to the biggest eco-event he
can imagine: Earth Day 2000.
Hayes, 54, didn't set out to be an environmentalist. He grew up
in Camas, Wash., a small paper-mill town where the air stank from
sulfur fumes. Like most other people there, he loved the outdoor
life, but his concern over the damage the mills were doing to his
beloved forest was tempered by the realization that the industry
was also his dad's employer. Not until his undergraduate days at
Stanford in the '60s did he become a rabble rouser, and then his
target was not pollution but war: he helped lead more than 1,000
students in a campus takeover of a weapons-research lab.
The activist settled down and entered Harvard Law School with an
eye to influencing public policy, but a fateful assignment his
first semester changed his life. Required to be an intern in a
government office, Hayes got hired by Gaylord Nelson, then a liberal
U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, to organize a series
of teach-ins across the country to call attention to the
environment. Energized by the memories of the ravaged forests of
his youth, he dropped out of Harvard and devoted his time to
organizing rallies, street demonstrations and trash cleanups. It
all culminated with the first Earth Day, when 20 million people
put on the biggest show of flower power the country had seen.
Except for its radical fringes, environmentalism moved into the
political mainstream, and so did Hayes. By the time he was 35, he
was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to head the Solar Energy
Research Institute in Colorado, and clean power became his
passion. After finding the time to finish his law degree at
Stanford in 1985, Hayes was drawn back onto the environmental
front lines by groups looking forward to the 20th anniversary of
the first Earth Day. The threat of global warming caused by the
burning of fossil fuels had thrust the environment back into the
headlines, and it was time to make Earth Day 1990 a global
happening. Hayes didn't disappoint. Spurred on by his
organizational efforts, nature lovers staged spectacular events
around the world, from a 500-mile human chain across France to a
gathering of 35,000 in Tokyo Bay. In all, 200 million people paid
homage to the planet.
In 1993, Hayes began running the Bullitt Foundation, an endowment
in Seattle that funds green projects in the Pacific Northwest.
But the coming of the new millennium brought another test: take
Earth Day to new heights in 2000. Besides the rallies, concerts,
seminars and TV shows, Hayes plans to use a magic wand he didn't
have in 1970 or 1990: the Internet. Through e-mail, websites and
live Web events, Earth Day participants will be globally linked
as never before. "Earth Day is for the environment what Martin
Luther King Day is for civil rights," Hayes says. "We know what
to do. But can we summon the political will and courage to make
it happen?"
