Up All Night with a Sick Environment

In September 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin called for colleges to hold “teach-ins” on the environment, helping to kick off a process that would culminate in the first Earth Day the following April and events on hundreds of campuses. Meanwhile, Northwestern students organized themselves around the same issue, coming out ahead of the national schedule.

NSBE testing the water of Lake Michigan. Left to right: John Stegeman, Casey Jason, James Reisa, Warren Muir. Photo by James Biery.

NSBE newsletter no. 1, October 1969.

Northwestern Students for a Better Environment (NSBE) started with a scientific perspective that it would hold onto throughout its time as an organization: students saw a problem and investigated what they could do about it. Reporting on the origin story, James Sweet, science editor for the Northwestern public relations department, wrote in a press release that NSBE was born after premedical student Casey Jason watched out a window in Cresap Laboratory as a plume of smog spread over the lake from Chicago towards Evanston. “I wondered if something couldn’t be done to stop it,” Jason said. James Reisa, a Ph.D. candidate in biological sciences with an interest in ecology, recalled that Jason came to him several times asking what he thought could be done. They asked Wesley Pipes, professor of biological sciences and civil engineering, to sponsor a student group.

“A better environment through education”

NSBE’s office and library space in Cresap Laboratory. Photo by James Biery.

In the summer of 1969, a group of about a dozen students and faculty met to discuss water pollution in Lake Michigan. They confronted issues facing the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago, the agency overseeing treatment of the area’s waterways. Graduate student and later NSBE executive committee chairman Charles Sigwart told the Northwestern Report that a proposed rule change would “increase the concentration of stuff that they could dump into the Sanitary District system.” The Northwestern group brought technical arguments to a hearing and ultimately got what they asked for. NSBE was formed that October and more and more students, faculty members, and area residents got involved. NSBE decided their purpose was education and their method should be unemotional. While college campuses had been boiling with anti-war protests, Sigwart said that NSBE could not “get involved in a completely emotional type of protest” or they would lose their contacts in government and industry. With the slogan “a better environment through education,” NSBE wrote a statement of purpose explaining that they hoped to bring the technical competence of the university to address the “communications gap” between “the university and scientific community on the one hand, and legislators, conservation groups, and concerned citizens on the other.” NSBE set out to “substitute in place of mere agitation well thought-out, documented opinions and programs.”

NSBE set up an office first in Swift Hall and became a “committee of committees” that each focused on specific issues, all with the goal of raising awareness of pollution. Of all pressing environmental issues, they felt that pollution was “attackable” with the means they had. They started a newsletter to keep members informed internally. They moved to Cresap and set up resources like a reference library, with the goal of opening an information center and reading room to the public. In December, they organized to attend a public meeting to fight air pollution by Commonwealth Edison and held a talk with a Department of the Interior official about saving Lake Michigan. Beginning in January 1970, Sigwart and guest lecturers lead an “Evanston Free University” course open to the public on the topic of “Ecology, Pollution and Society.”

“Teach-ins” had been a popular tool in the student anti-war movement in the late 1960s. Senator Nelson, who had campaigned on environmental protection issues for years, took inspiration from that trend in calling for teach-ins on the environment. He sought out student collaborators, about a dozen of whom, lead by a Harvard law student named Denis Hayes, took time off from school to organize the project. They formed a group called Environmental Teach-In, Inc., to promote the effort nationally and raise funds. The group hoped to stress ways that citizens could help confront pollution.

A January 1970 article in The Christian Science Monitor described the success of Senator Nelson’s and the group’s efforts in coordinating events for April 22, which the organizers had come to refer to as “E-Day,” “Environment Day,” or “Earth Day.” About 350 colleges and 200 high schools had expressed interest in holding events. An article in the journal Science noted that the idea caught on because significant numbers of students were already paying attention to the issue and had been organizing study groups. Turning activist energy to the environment may also have been helped by the possibility of publicity from the news media, which had recently been taking an active interest in the environment. While many large-scale events were planned, such as a four-day gathering at the University of Michigan, Northwestern’s teach-out the following week would be one of the first.

Planning for Project Survival in NSBE’s office. Photo by James Biery.

NSBE developed a model of its own for its event, titled “Project Survial: A Public Teach-Out on the Environmental Problems of Species Man.” Jim Robin, who served as chairman of the air pollution committee, told North by Northwestern in 2017 that while teach-ins “were very ‘in’ at the time,” the Northwestern students “were doing a ‘teach-out,’ which means we reached out to the community.” The goal was to make sure the message went beyond the academic community. NSBE’s newsletter explained that the event would be a “crash course introducing people to the interlocking problems of population growth, crowding, limitation of our resources, and degradation of the environment by pollution.”

Nationally recognized environmental experts agreed to speak for a fraction of their normal fee, reportedly after Reisa pitched them that NSBE was the most powerful student environmental group in the country. “Instead of getting $10,000 or $20,000 they accepted an honorarium of under 1,000 bucks, with the idea that they would be making history,” Jason said.

“This free program is a crash course on our deteriorating environment.”

The program, to be held at the Technological Institute, would begin at 7 p.m. on January 23 with a series of prominent speakers, continue with an hour of entertainment at midnight by folk singer Tom Paxton, and round out with 17 study sections running from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., with some lead by panels representing the views of industry, scientists, and government agencies, and conclude with another “sing-out” at dawn. NSBE hoped that if audience members moved between study sections, they could gain what might amount to the equivalent of a university course. There would also be a cooperative meeting for student environmental groups and the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration’s Student Council on Pollution and the Environment (SCOPE), as well as screenings of films. NSBE set out to widely promote the event and urged “concerned members of the public” to come.

NSBE and law professor Anthony D’Amato, one of the group’s collaborators, sent out a press packet in early January, promoting Northwestern’s as the first major university event on the environment, before campuses would be “swept in a wave of such teach-ins this coming spring.” NSBE promised to confront nothing less than “the survival of the human species in an increasingly degraded environment.” They sent around invitations to faculty and requested that they discuss environmental problems in their classes on January 22 and 23.

Sweet wrote in a press release after the event that when the teach-out was first suggested, NSBE had eighty members, each with an assigned task. Shortly before the teach-out another hundred responded to a request for volunteers in The Daily Northwestern. Groups from schools around the midwest, such as the University of Illinois, planned to travel to Northwestern in busloads and stay the night.

The administration cooperated with Project Survival and organized faculty and funds to help, including for film and audio of five hours of the program. Walter Owen, the dean of Tech Institute, authorized NSBE to take over the auditorium, six large lecture halls, and about 30 classrooms. He provided for personnel to rewire the Institute to allow capacity for TV cameras, lights, closed-circuit TV, sound systems, and radio, and paid custodial staff overtime. Sigma Xi and the Kiwanis Club of Evanston made donations. Ultimately, Project Survival treasurer and geological sciences professor Peter Bretsky reported the event cost over $13,000. The Daily Northwestern reported that much of the total came from university funds.

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