Volcano resident helped guide the first Earth Day

Fifty-five years ago, on April 22, 1970, the world took note of its burning rivers and acrid air. An overdue shift in perception about the environment had arrived, and Earth Day was born.

When new information from the 1962 book “Silent Spring” about DDT harming humans and the devastating January 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, Calif., met the activist tendencies from the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, a nationwide day of action saw 20 million Americans stand up in defense of the environment.

This included Bruce Justin Miller, a new doctor of marine ecology at the University of New Hampshire who helped host an environmental teach-in that day with the group UNHITE (University of New Hampshire for Improving the Environment) and special guest Stewart Udall, former secretary of the Interior.

“We didn’t, at first, get how big it was becoming,” Miller, 83, said of being a leader on the first Earth Day.

Surprised by a large crowd of 15,000 activists in the small town of Durham, New Hampshire, Miller — now a part-time Volcano resident — guided them to pick up trash, a relatively foreign idea in a time when dumping anything anywhere was second nature and rarely given a second thought.

By the day’s end, Miller said the literal mountain of garbage collected offered a physical testament to both the problem and the solution.

“It went from thinking about it and making people aware to encouraging people to do something,” Miller said. “It shifted everything for me — the realization of the issues we have around, the threat to the reefs and the threat to the animals. I got to realizing that what I really want to do is something that relates to protecting those things.”

Miller’s career shift took him from his research beginnings in New Hampshire to a path that included directing the University of Hawaii Manoa’s Sea Grant Extension Service in 1982, establishing the Office of Sustainability there in the 1990s and directing it until his 2007 retirement, mentoring future Sen. Brian Schatz, and, most importantly, authoring the historic 1989 state law regulating ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

This legislation went from becoming law in Hawaii to being adopted globally through the Montreal Protocol that same year, and ultimately led to a phase-out of CFCs by Congress in 1990, recognition of the human impact on the ozone layer with a Time Magazine cover story in 1992, and a change in human habits that cut CFC emissions in half by 1996.

Those achievements are listed on the 1992 commendation Miller received from the Hawaii Senate, one of a slew of environmental awards he’s earned, including the Environmental Hero Award from NOAA in 1999. That win came with a congratulatory letter from former Vice President Al Gore, who wrote, “… at the dawn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt committed America to the conservation of our land and resources…through the efforts of citizens, like you, we are able to take the necessary steps to protect our environment through the next millennium.”

“It felt very satisfying to realize that after all these years of work we put in, things are finally changing,” Miller recalled of the progressive 90s and early 2000s. “That’s why right now is hard, because we’re seeing things that we put so much time into being undone. We all have to deal with this — how do we stop this?”

Environmentally harmful Trump administration edicts that have rattled Miller include the U.S. Department of Agriculture issuing an emergency order in early April for increased timber harvesting across 113 million acres of national forests, as well as a mandate for a 25% increase in timber felling nationwide.

Equally harmful ecologically is the rule change proposed recently by the Trump administration to the Endangered Species Act, which would redefine “harm” to an endangered species to not include the destruction or modification of the endangered species’ habitat.

Another attack on an ecosystem from the White House hit the core of Miller’s life and career: Trump’s opening of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument sanctuary to commercial fishing.

“Trump said he wants to give small fishermen a chance, but no small fishermen can go up there. It’s too far away, it’s too rough, there are no support services where they can get gasoline,” Miller said. “Instead, it’s going to be a factory ship, and factory ships don’t give a darn about endangered species.”

Miller is equally distressed by the staffing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Parks Service, as well as the reduction or elimination of weather monitoring like that of the weather station on Mauna Loa, saying, “That weather station has the longest untarnished record of CO2 in the world. That’s where we really discovered the CO2 increase is really active, and they’ve been tracking it for decades. That place is a treasure.”

Miller said the decisions from Trump’s administration are ignoring the basic tenants of environmental stewardship that allowed America to rise out of the polluted mire of April 1970: management of both resources and population.

Citing the 1968 book “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich, which examines the environmental crisis with an eye on food security as the Earth’s population across one generation grew from 2 billion to 4 billion people, Miller explains why the Trump administration’s simultaneous removal of resource management guidelines, stripping of environmental protections, and encouragement for Americans to produce more babies are creating the perfect storm of environmental downfall far worse than what the planet faced in 1970.

“Where we are now is so much worse than where we were, because in those days, there were four, maybe five billion people, and now there’s eight billion people,” he said. “The climate wasn’t changing as fast as it is now. What we’re looking at now is undoing stuff from a point where things are much more critically endangered. Even though it was bad then, it was better than what it is now.”

In Miller’s opinion, the path back to ecological safety lies in establishing a new leadership that will prioritize the planet’s well-being over a fiscally-guided plan of monetization and cost-cutting.

“We have to continue with our anti-pollution efforts. We have to get rid of plastic somehow, and we’re never going to get rid of plastic because we don’t have legislation and people individually won’t do it. A lot of these things we have to do have to have a good government,” Miller said.

“What’s going to make a difference is getting this group of disgusting men out and getting a better government,” he said.

“We have to make sure we that we have a government that has the kind of policies that are designed to protect the environment we share. What they need is values.”

Email Kyveli Diener at kdiener@hawaiitribune-herald.com.