Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day, and A Racism

This week, let's talk about the father of Earth Day! He did a lot of great stuff - like pushing for side effects to be listed with medications - and preached some racisms. Why do people suck so much?

Resources

• Wikipedia
• Nelson Earth Day
• Founding of Earth Day
• Death-related article
• 95 speech on Earth Day
• Is the way we think about overpopulation racist?
• I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why. (Roberts)
• Environmentalism’s Racist History
• Perpetuating neo-colonialism through population control: South Africa and the United States
• Is Thanos Right About Killing People In 'Avengers: Infinity War'?

Featured image from NASA

Transcript

Welcome to another edition of the Spooky Sconnie Podcast, the podcast that talks about everything, spooky paranormal, and weird in the state of Wisconsin. Since it's April, I thought that it would be remiss of me to not discuss the founder of Earth Day and the actual founding. And it was created by a Wisconsinite naturally. His name was Gaylord Nelson and he was born on June 4th, 1916 in a city called Clear Lake. Um, it's located up in Polk county which is kind of the upper north western corner of the state and it's about an hour away from Minneapolis. Nelson's father's parents - so his parental grandparents - were immigrants from Norway who moved to the area in 1878 and I couldn't find much about his maternal grandparents, but his mother was a nurse. Um, at least she completed the training to do that, but she spent most of the time kind of at home, spending time with the kids, that kind of stuff.

----more----

She taught Nelson a lot about the natural landscape and the world around him - while Nelson's father who was a doctor and very politically active, taught him about political life. And this reminded me a lot actually of college in an interesting way. Um, one of my history professors in college who I love, uh, we had a course on feminism in history and we talked a lot about the two spheres of the world in about the same time period. You had the domestic sphere, which was the realm of the woman who, you know, cleaned house and all of that. And then you had the public sphere, which was the realm of the man who did all of the outward things and voted and all that crap. So I had, this was a really clear cut example of that, which was interesting. In the time period we're talking about Clear Lake was not a great space to be in. There was a lot of pollution. Um, there was a lot of poverty. Of course, we're talking leading up to the Great Depression, which was not great anywhere, but especially in kind of tiny towns and rural areas. The Great Depression, you know, brought a lot of itinerant workers to the area. Um, a lot of people got grumpy about itineran