Earth Day and a look back to 1970 in Denver

Denver Public Library had exactly one book about solar energy then. It had not been checked out in six years. How did Morey Wolfson create an event that drew 5,000 people?

by Steve Andrews

In 1970, if you told folks you were an environmentalist, you might get “say what?” thrown back at you. People didn’t know what the term meant. If you said you were a solar energy supporter, again you were likely to receive a blank stare. Take it from Morey Wolfson, the person who led the inaugural Earth Day event in Denver, 55 years ago this week.

During June of 1969, an oil slick on Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. In October, the nation’s first major oil spill from a drilling platform off the California coast at Santa Barbara caused extensive and sustained damage to the city’s famous beaches. These were but two of the latest and most prominent of a string of manmade environmental disasters. They led to increased but still disparate calls for action. Then Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson stepped up to the plate.

Senator Nelson, inspired by the student anti-Vietnam-war movement, wanted to tap that same protest energy to buttress the slowly emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution. Nelson was both committed to and at the very forefront of the movement. “I don’t think there is any other issue, viewed in its broadest sense, which is as critical to mankind, as the issue of the quality of the environment in which we live….Are we able [to tackle the issue]? Yes. Are we willing? That’s the unanswered question.”

In the fall of 1969, Senator Nelson announced the idea for a nationwide teach-in on college campuses. To help coordinate the national effort, he convinced Harvard student activist Denis Hayes \ to take time away from his studies.

Not long thereafter, Morey Wolfson, a graduate student and student government leader at CU Denver and founder of Environmental Action Colorado, got a call from Hayes. Would Morey be willing to help organize an event for Earth Day in Denver? He said yes.

The efforts of Wolfson and his colleagues were so promising that Senator Nelson accepted Wolfson’s invitation to be keynote speaker at Denver’s event for his personal participation on that first Earth Day.

Other speakers on that agenda were true stalwarts in the nascent environmental movement: Kenneth Boulding, a CU professor who focused on the interactions between economics and natural systems (look up “The Economics of Coming Spaceship Earth”); CU physics professor Al Bartlett, famous for his lecture “Arithmetic, Population and Energy;” Dick Lamm, a DU law professor and future Colorado governor; and John Bermingham, a Colorado state senator and environmentalist.

The Denver event at Currigan Hall was packed with 5,000 attendees, the third-largest such indoor event on Earth Day. CBS News featured the Denver event in a five-minute segment during its national TV news with Walter Cronkite. Nationwide, Earth Day inspired 20 million Americans — at the time, 10% of the total population of the United States — to take to the streets, parks and auditoriums like Currigan Hall to demonstrate against the impacts of 150 years of industrial development which had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts. It remains the largest coordinated protest movement in US history.

By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first-of-their-kind environmental laws, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Clean Air Act. Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act.

As the years passed, Earth Day kept moving forward, though not with an impact that matched that initial effort. Yet celebrations of the 10^th and 20^th and 30^th anniversaries of the event drew attention to an expanding pallet of environmental issues.

For the 50^th anniversary, scheduled for April 22, 2020, Denis Hayes helped organize a worldwide event. Unfortunately, COVID-19 intervened and was declared a pandemic five weeks earlier, scuttling all in-person events. Hayes and others helped organize a massive on-line event on Earth Day, although it lacked the punch to combat the growing issues of the day. Here in the US, Hayes lamented to a Seattle TV news station that the Trump administration was “rolling back more than 100 laws, regulations, rules…mounting a full-scale assault on 50 years of environmental progress.” One can safely assume that Hayes is just as concerned today, if not more so. Wolfson certainly is.

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An informative tangent on Wolfson’s story is worth recounting to solar advocates.

Soon after Earth Day, as part of a student team studying the broad field of energy, Wolfson volunteered to study solar energy—a topic about which he knew nothing. His hunt for information took him to the “card catalogues” (younger readers should look up this term) in the Denver Public Library. On the topic of “squirrels”, right next to “solar” in the cards, he found 35 books covering the field; on the topic of solar, he found one (uno) book, a 1964 publication that had been checked out just once in the six years since publication.

The takeaway conclusion of that book, Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, by Farrington Daniels, was that there “was no technical reason why direct use of the sun’s energy cannot be the basis for the energy needs of an advanced economy.”

Wolfson was hooked and determined to expand the available pool of knowledge. Starting in 1973, he operated the Solar Bookstore in Denver at Colfax Avenue and York Street. The store was devoted to renewable energy, and the mail-order business patronized by architects and others like energy guru Amory Lovins kept it afloat, if barely.

Wolfson also helped found various environmental groups in Denver before handing off the bookstore to the Denver Solar Energy Association and joining the staff of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission in 1985. At the PUC, among other assignments, Wolfson was executive assistant to the three commissioners through 1999. Subsequent stints had him working for the National Renewable Energy Lab, the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office, and a large architectural design firm. These days, he focuses his personal energy on challenging the legislative movement in Colorado toward data centers and nuclear energy. On those topics, he’s in lockstep with many in REOCA, Pueblo’s Energy Future and other environmental organizations in southern Colorado.

Steve Andrews is a retired energy consultant. His experience included consulting work with utilities, builders, state energy offices, and PBS-TV series, plus free-lance writing in in the energy sector. Questions, comments, critiques or corrections? Contact [email protected]

The photo from an Earth Day march in Denver in 1970 is courtesy of the Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives.