Earth Day is over, but the melody lingers on - smoke still gets in your eyes.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans marched, rallied and demonstrated Wednesday for a cleaner earth. There was some heckling and rowdyism, but the overwhelming majority - a mixture of congressmen, militants, businessmen, housewives and hippies - reflected a sense of unity.
In Pittsfield, Mass., folk singer Arlo Guthrie, who rose to fame through a song telling about his conviction for littering following a Thanksgiving dinner at Alice's Restaurant, did his part.
Guthrie, along with Alice Brock, chief cook and bottle washer of Alice's Restaurant, and two dozen others, collected six truckloads of empty beer cans along highways near Pittsfield.
In Long Beach, Calif., oceanographer and wilderness explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau told students that earth is "the jewel of the solar system" but that her life supporting ability is doomed to fail if environmental problems aren't solved.
Two major thoroughfares in downtown New York City were closed for two hours by some of the most pollution-oppressed city dwellers in the nation. Nearly 250,000 joined in the celebration.
Mayor John V. Lindsay met them in Union Square after walking down Fifth Avenue, saying it was the first time he'd made such a walk "without being booed half the distance."
Some other political leaders did not fare so well. Student radicals stormed the stage where Michigan Gov. William G. Milliken was speaking at Michigan State University. State police moved him to safety.
Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. and Henry Jackson, D-Wash underwent heckling during their speeches at Yale University and Seattle, Wash. Kennedy put aside his prepared text on pollution and spoke instead about the draft and Black Panthers.
In a sunny rally at the Washington Monument in the nation's capital, demonstrators chanted, "All we are saying, is give earth a chance" and heard writer I. F. Stone say President Nixon was "conning" the country on the pollution issue. "We are slipping into a wider war in Asia while we are talking about litterbugs," he warned.
Nixon sat in a lounge chair in the White House rose garden in between appointments and did not participate in the celebration. A White House Spokesman said however the President is "vitally interested in the battle to reclaim our natural environment."
The United Auto Workers in St. Louis, Mo., led a parade featuring a smog-free, propane-powered auto. The union workers pledged to press automakers for development of a pollution-free car in contact talks this year.
Thirteen persons were arrested at Logan International Airport in Boston after 200 gathered to protest development of supersonic aircraft and noise pollution. Police arrested the 13 after six coffins were brought into the terminal and the crowd refused to disperse on police orders.
"Pollution is an internationalist," Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., told an audience at the College of Marin in Kentfield. "Pollution recognizes no borders or boundaries.
"We must also enlist the remainder of the world in a similar effort," he told a wildly cheering crowd.
Cranston added war was "the ultimate pollution" and warned the environmental issue "must not be used to cop out on Vietnam, the arms race and the many social and economic problems of the this nation."
Along the same line Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis., who first suggested the Earth Day idea, told a University of California at Berkeley group, "Our goal is not just an environment of clean air, clean water and scenic beauty, while forgetting Appalachia and the ghetto. Our goal is a decent environment without poverty, war and discrimination."
Meanwhile, at Stanford University, Rep. Paul McCloskey Jr., R-Calif., who joined Nelson in originating Earth Day, told his listeners he would vote for delay of the manned space program in favor of environmental control spending. Later he tempered his remark.
After getting a huge ovation by saying he would vote against "putting a man on Mars" in favor of funding more pressing programs in pollution control, education and poverty, McCloskey told a newsman he would vote for the space program.
"But," he added, " I will vote against the $400 million appropriation tacked on to the President's request by the Appropriations Committee."
In Athens, Ohio, Ohio University students pasted stickers reading "This is a polluter" on cars. About 350 school children in Ripon, Wis., took advantage of an offer by local merchants and collected discarded cans for one cent apiece and made $250.54.
There was a "Dead Orange Parade" in Miami, a "Survival March" in California, a "Festival of Death" in Boston and, at Southeast Missouri State University, a mock funeral to "symbolically bury the earth under a pile of trash."
