Up All Night with a Sick Environment

Project Survival captured national attention and had an immediate impact, including in law and environmental policy. Some of its organizers felt the impact was hard to sustain, but in ways large and small, Project Survival and Northwestern Students for a Better Environment have continued to serve as inspiration. 

NSBE reunion for the tenth anniversary of Project Survival, January 1980. Left to right: Chuck Sigwart, Warren Muir, Gretchen Van Meer, Wesley Pipes, James Reisa, Casey Jason.

A spread from the Spring 1970 issue of the Northwestern Report.

A student modeling the Project Survival Earth medallion. Photo by Robert Gesteland.

Both within Northwestern and in the national media, immediate reactions to the teach-out were impressed but mixed with doubts about the student movement. Devoting most of an issue to the event, articles in The Daily Northwestern praised NSBE for breaking with the tradition of “campus inefficiency,” but also critiqued the spectacle as a “put-on” for the “wired world outside” by playing to the media presence and relying on “frightening metaphors about the extinction of mankind.” The paper quoted an attendee during a heated discussion: “Let’s be orderly or this TV camera is going to show us as a lot of hippie radicals.”

The university’s press release emphasized that the organizers were “apolitical activists.” For some more radical groups NSBE were too “wishy-washy,” and for some academics they were “too politically oriented.” NSBE’s organizers continued to stress, though, that their policy was activism only after research. Most newspaper reports, such as in the Chicago Tribune, focused on the scale of the event and the prominent speakers. Time, Newsweek, Life, and Fortune had cover stories about the environment within weeks of the teach-out. Others, such as Geoffrey Norman in Playboy, wrote about how the various groups present had differing agendas but the event presented itself as a victory.

Cover of the teach-out transcript published by Project Survival.

Cover of a book published by Playboy in 1971, including Geoffrey Norman’s report from the teach-out and a selection of articles published by the magazine.

Meanwhile, the Northwestern Report observed in its Spring 1970 issue that school “committees on pollution proliferated with weed-like speed.” Shortly after the teach-out, Project Survival formed as a chartered faculty-run organization and set about publishing the transcript, with the goal of distributing it to over 2,000 colleges, and producing copies of the filmed program for rental or purchase. The publication also included proposed text for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution “directed toward establishing a habitable environment as one of man’s fundamental rights.” Project Survival and NSBE continued to sell medallions of the teach-out’s Earth symbol. The university formed multiple committees of faculty and students to make proposals on establishing an environmental sciences center and curriculum at Northwestern, and to recommend pollution and public health measures to ComEd. Project Survival also submitted a proposal to ComEd outlining ways that the company could contribute funding, such as toward a new center at Northwestern.

Others, such as the Northwestern chapter of the Campaign Against Pollution, took more radical stances, including criticizing Project Survival for seeking a grant from ComEd (which at the time was planning to build new nuclear power plants that would further pollute Lake Michigan). The Daily Northwestern also published an editorial three weeks after the teach-out that warned against trusting the recent attention of government and industry on pollution, which some felt came at the expense of addressing other interconnected issues.

Programming for the first Earth Day, 1970.

A 1970 NSBE booklet of household tips.

NSBE got to work quickly to use the momentum and publicity of the teach-out. NSBE and the Northwestern Environmental Law Club spoke before a committee of the Illinois Constitutional Convention, proposing a provision drafted by law professor Anthony D’Amato and student Anthony Fessler to ensure a “right to a clean, healthy and enjoyable environment.” Parts of the proposed “right to a healthful environment” were adopted as Article XI in the new 1970 Illinois Constitution that is still in effect today. During 1970 alone, NSBE worked on projects such as a new air pollution ordinance for Evanston, lobbied against the use of DDT (an insecticide with widespread environmental and health effects), and helped defeat the National Timber Supply Act in Congress.

In March, NSBE began a campaign against the use of phosphates in laundry detergents, which had stimulated algae growth in bodies of water and caused the phenomenon of “dead” lakes. NSBE did a chemical analysis of different detergents, picketed a local Kroger store and handed out the information, and got Jewel-Osco to post the list in a local store. “Within a matter of weeks, the sales of high phosphates detergents from that store plummeted and the sales of the low phosphate detergents just skyrocketed,” James Reisa recalled. Other stores soon did the same. Chicago passed a ban on phosphates in detergents that year, and Mayor Richard J. Daley invited NSBE to visit his office. “We thought Chicago politics was more than we could handle,” Casey Jason told The Daily Northwestern in 1995. “The late Mayor Richard J. Daley was so impressed by us that he was trying to figure out a way to get us to support his candidates.”

A page from the 1970 yearbook on the student strike. Courtesy of Syllabus Yearbook.

Along with schools nationwide, NSBE organized around Earth Day for April 22, including a series of student-organized seminars on how to “give earth a chance.” NSBE received over seventy-five speaker invitations for Earth Day alone and managed to fill twenty of them.

Meant to build off of Earth Day and set out proposals for concrete actions, Project Survival planned “Renaissance of the Earth” for the first three days of May. The event included an ecological symposium and a cultural and arts fair, called “The Rights of Spring,” with exhibits hosted in the library. Project Survival ran into difficulty with the cost of the program and the organization ultimately closed down, with some of its resources absorbed into NSBE. The program was also overshadowed by events that week. On May 4, soon after the announcement of the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, National Guard troops killed and wounded anti-war protestors at Kent State University. On May 5, the Northwestern student body began a week-long strike.

Poster for an October 1976 meeting.

In the following years NSBE remained especially active around Earth Day and collaborated with groups involved with nuclear and anti-war issues. They sponsored events such as Sunrise ’78, a two-day program on solar and alternative energy sources. NSBE continued as an organization until it was re-named Students for Ecological and Environmental Development (SEED) in the 1990s, which is still active today.

Many of the students involved in the early years of NSBE remained active in environmental issues. Jason got his medical degree, served as a medical expert for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and researched the impact of environmental effects on low birth weight. James Reisa (who wrote about some of the people involved at the tenth anniversary of the teach-out) served in several governmental and research positions including with the EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “I was studying organometallic reaction mechanisms. I was going to be a university teacher,” Warren Muir recalled. Instead, he got recruited to be one of the first scientists in the White House working on federal environmental policy.

Jason recalled that what NSBE did in the 60s and 70s was unique. “It wasn’t little projects of this, that and the other – we impacted Chicago and the nation. That doesn’t happen too often out of a university undergraduate school.” Paul Friesema, a political science professor who attended Project Survival and later advised NSBE, told Medill Reports in 2010 that the group was aware of what worked and what didn’t in their campaign to raise awareness. They believed they fell short on their initiative to build a stronger environmental research department at Northwestern. Charles Sigwart added that “Northwestern couldn’t have done what it did unless student groups reached out to thousands of community groups that responded and put pressure on the manufacturers and public policy.” Gretchen Van Meer Sigwart assessed that unlike many activist groups, NSBE had a lot of technical expertise and made sure they got their facts right.

A March 1995 ad for Project Survival Two. Courtesy of The Daily Northwestern.

SEED took inspiration from their predecessor and held “Project Survival Two” in 1995. Believing that students at the time were generally apathetic about the environment, SEED said they hoped to bring the enthusiasm back with another Project Survival. Friesema, who co-chaired the Environmental Council and sponsored the event, told The Daily Northwestern  that they planned this conference on a smaller scale and with a different brand of activism, but to address the new understanding of issues like global warming and rainforest destruction. SEED recognized that it was more of an establishment conference than an activism conference, but involved grass-roots activists in panel discussions.

Environmental activities, especially around global warming, have been more widespread and common at Northwestern in the years since. Organizing Earth Day events in 2010, students told The Daily Northwestern that Project Survival continued to be an inspiration, in part because it was put together by a small group of people. Friesema observed that opportunities to get involved had flourished and become more diverse, from political initiatives to eco-friendly physical projects. “There’s a lot more hands-on engagement now,” he said. “That doesn’t supplant the advocacy, but it does add a rich dimension.”

Others have felt that Project Survival had limitations, and taken that insight as an opportunity. With the “Generations of Environmental Justice” conference in 2022, another all-night event, students took the initiative to emphasize people power and community action. Organizer Lucy London noted that while Project Survival only featured white male speakers in the program, they wanted Generations of Environmental Justice to center Black and Indigenous people’s work. Activists hoped to inspire people to work in “leader-full, non-hierarchical movements.”

This page draws on archival collections and other resources from Northwestern University Libraries, in addition to some external publications. Visit the Bibliography page for more information about these sources. Certain library resources may only be accessible online to those with Northwestern University credentials. All library resources are accessible for on-site research at the McCormick Library of Special Collections & University Archives. For assistance with access or reference questions, please contact specialcollections@northwestern.edu.