Up All Night with a Sick Environment

A poster for the Project Survival teach-out, with a design inspired by an alchemical symbol for Earth.

The modern American environmental movement got underway rapidly in the late 1960s. Before the first Earth Day in April 1970 and amid new coordination on college campuses nationwide, Northwestern held the first environmental “teach-out” on January 23: “Project Survival.” Organized by Northwestern Students for a Better Environment (NSBE), the all-night event was addressed to the campus, local community members, students from all over the midwest, and a national audience. As many as 10,000 people passed through the doors of the Technological Institute that night, including members of the press who started a flood of national media coverage.

Drawing from archival collections, this exhibit explores Project Survival as a complex event, its background and aftermath, how its message was presented and received. The focus of the teach-out itself may represent a snapshot of the environmental movement in 1970. Has that message lived on? Has memory of Project Survival changed? And what lessons have the generations of students since taken from it?

In the next three pages, explore how the early work of NSBE and the growing student environmental movement led Northwestern to hold the first event of this kind in the nation. Then, see photographs, video, and articles to learn more about how the teach-out unfolded and how reactions to it were formed. Finally, explore the immediate aftermath of the event, the ongoing work of NSBE, and the efforts of generations of Northwestern students in the years since.

Explore this history further with a more extensive set of photographs and films from the teach-out, archival collections related to the event and student environmental activism more broadly, and other publications that expand on these themes.

I curated this exhibit in the spring of 2023 as a practicum project while working toward a degree in library and information science with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am focusing in archival and special collections work, and this project offered a tremendous opportunity to explore the collections held by the McCormick Library of Special Collections & University Archives and develop skills in translating what I found there for a public audience. It was rewarding to see this story take shape as I leafed through the collections, an experience that may be unique to spending days in a reading room.

A special thank you to Charla Wilson, Archivist for the Black Experience, for her guidance, knowledge, and support in putting this exhibit together. I would also like to thank all of the Library and University Archives staff for their help and diligence during the time I spent researching. I gained great appreciation for the work they do and for the Library and University Archives in their stewardship of these collections.

Many thanks to Cory Slowik for suggesting the title of this exhibit. The phrase appeared several places immediately after the teach-out, and it is not certain who coined it. It may have appeared first in a Milwaukee Journal report, but was quickly used in Northwestern press releases and publications about the event.

– Ben Taylor, exhibit curator

Northwestern University Libraries is dedicated to the fair and ethical preservation, digitization, curation, and use of its collections. This exhibit is made available to the public under Fair Use (Section 107 of the Copyright Act) for learning and teaching purposes, as well as to promote the mission and activities of Northwestern University Libraries (ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use). Northwestern University Libraries does not claim the copyright of any materials in this collection. If you are the copyright holder of any item(s) in this collection or have questions, comments or concerns about this exhibit, please contact us via email at library@northwestern.edu.