Aquila de Osa in Drake Bay, Costa Rica, is a lush, green haven on the Pacific coast, accessible only by boat or – in the dry season – by fording several streams and crossing miles of unmade rough tracks in a 4x4. For those who do make the journey, the reward is a tropical rainforest bright with the colours of toucans, macaws and hummingbirds, fronting a picturesque bay with (if you are lucky) glimpses of whales, dolphins and turtles. 

It is a beautiful, unspoilt corner of the world and therefore a fitting place for a chance encounter with one of the original founders of Earth Day back in 1970: a pioneer of the environmental movement in the US, former Wisconsin Secretary of State, Doug La Follette. 

Now 85, Mr La Follette was teaching organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin back in the late 1960s when he first met and started working with Senator Gaylord Nelson, the US Senator for Wisconsin. Senator Nelson had earned the nickname ‘the Conservation Governor’ during his time as Governor of Wisconsin between 1958 and 1962. At that time, in the post-war era, the US was in the midst of a manufacturing and industrial boom time. But while the economy was growing and consumerism flourishing, the environment was paying a heavy cost.  Senator Nelson became increasingly appalled at the pollution in the air and rivers, not just in beautiful upstate Wisconsin but throughout the US. He decided to do something about it.

Mr La Follette says:  “One of the things Gaylord was most concerned about was the high levels of BOD in our rivers. BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) is a measure of the dissolved oxygen in water used by microorganisms to decompose organic matter. A high BOD level means the river is badly polluted and ours were dying.”

Senator Nelson came up with the idea of the first Earth Day in 1970. Inspired by the growing anti-Vietnam War movement in American universities, Earth Day was originally conceived as a series of campus teach-ins led by Denis Hayes, who was recruited by Senator Nelson to mastermind the day. Doug La Follette, based at the University, organised the Wisconsin events. 

The original Earth Day, on April 22nd 1970, was a huge success with 20 million people taking part, but it wasn’t until 1980 that the movement began to go global. On the 50th anniversary event in 2020 an estimated 1 billion people took part in 160 countries around the globe.

Mr La Follette remains remarkably humble about the impact of Earth Day and seemed delighted that I, a Brit from the Home Counties, had heard of it. However, despite his involvement as a founding member of one of the environmental movement’s most impactful events, the legacy of which he is most proud is his role in co-founding (with his colleague Peter Anderson and Senator Nelson again) the organisation that has come to be known as Clean Wisconsin. (He was proudly wearing a Clean Wisconsin t-shirt when we met in Costa Rica.)

He says: “Having got involved in the early environmental movement, I decided to move into politics myself to try to make a difference. I first ran for office as an anti-war*, pro-environment Democratic candidate in 1970 but I lost by 24 votes on a recount.”  Undeterred, he stood again and was elected to the State Senate of Wisconsin in 1973 and in 1974 he was elected Secretary of State. He served from 1974 to 1979 and from 1983 to 2023, only retiring two years ago at the age of 83.

“We followed up the first Earth Day by founding a movement called Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade but that decade extended by necessity so in 2003 it was re-named Clean Wisconsin” he says. The state of Wisconsin covers a larger land mass than England and for over fifty years the organisation he co-founded has fought for environmental improvements in the state’s air, water and land and to protect its natural resources.

Mr La Follette has dedicated his life and career to environmental causes. In 1992 he published a book The Survival Handbook – A Strategy for Saving Planet Earth. He has been a vegetarian for over 50 years (“the emissions from beef production alone are something else”), he has served on the board of directors of Friends of the Earth and for many years was a popular speaker on the history of the environmental movement.

Asked about his views on the climate action movement today, Mr La Follette says: “First of all, I think we need a change of nomenclature. We started off calling it global warming, but we realised that didn’t work because some people in the coldest parts of the world thought that was a good thing. It gets pretty cold in Wisconsin in winter you know. So we started talking about climate change, but even that is unsatisfactory because we all know change can be good thing. The trajectory we are on is not a good thing, so I believe we should call it climate disruption. Some places will get hotter, others colder, some wetter, some dryer. It’s total disruption of our climate and that is what we should call it.”

He won’t be drawn on Donald Trump’s environmental credentials at first. “What is is there to say?” he shrugs, with a look of disgust. But then he adds: “The damage he is doing is astonishing.”

Overall, he believes the outlook for the planet is bleak. “I’m 85 so I won’t see it, but our grandchildren will and I worry for them.”  Is there anything we can do? I ask. “I think we could still change things, but the chances of it happening are one in a million. We’d need to stop all fossil fuel consumption overnight and switch to renewables and we’d need to introduce a global one-child only policy for 50 years, to allow the global population to decline. When we started Earth Day in 1970 the population was 3.9 billion and we thought we were stretching things to the limit then. Today our population is more than double that and the future is very worrying.”

This second suggestion is controversial and I don’t necessarily agree, but it might be helpful to understand the context. Mr La Follette knew Paul Ehrlich (even standing in for him as a speaker on several occasions) and was heavily influenced by his seminal 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich linked population growth to global survival and there is no doubt that the book, which sold millions, helped to shape the attitudes of many 1970s environmental campaigners like Mr La Follette. 

Today we are more aware of the impacts of consumption and the global distribution of resources, rather than population numbers per se. So as someone who advocates the idea that we can (and should) all make a difference to our carbon emissions, however small, it was hard to hear that from a pioneer in the environmental movement. But it is also hard not to share some of his cynicism, especially with the current state of affairs in the White House where the most powerful world leader claims that climate change is ‘a hoax’.

Despite ending on a rather depressing note, it was a joy to talk with Doug La Follette. They say you should never meet your heroes; in this case I beg to differ. It was a privilege to meet someone who was there at the start of one of the most impactful cultural and political catalysts for environmental change - Earth Day. It is people like him who got the ball rolling. I will be raising a glass to him and his colleagues next April 22nd.

* Vietnam War

©️ Text by Gill Coates. This interview was carried out with the agreement of Doug La Follette and he approved the text. It is reproduced here with his permission.

(Photos: Above left - Doug La Follette . Below (l-r) - dolphins in Drake Bay; Doug La Follette and Gill Coates; approaching Drake Bay via a mangrove swamp.)