The plan in a nutshell was to get everyone busy watching out for someone flicking a cigarette butt out the car window while the big industrial polluters were busy pouring tons of poison into their drinking water. And the propaganda worked too. Like a charm.
Don
--------------------------------------------
http://griid.org/2010/03/29/re-framing-earth-day-from-corporate-polluters-to-individual-consumers/Re-framing Earth Day: From Corporate Polluters to Individual Consumers
March 29, 2010
Origins of Earth Day
What Carson was advocating and what the first Earth Day organizers emphasized was the need to directly confront polluters and force the federal government to adopt some regulations. After all, it was the first Earth Day that forced the Nixon administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Of course there was also the message of personal responsibility that came with the first Earth Day celebrations, but this was not the focus.
The advocates of capitalism were quite concerned about this light being shinned on the environmental damage they were doing so they began their own campaign to counter what environmentalists of the 1960 – 70s were advocating for.
The business community created the Keep America Beautiful Campaign, which could be considered one of the first corporate Greenwashing campaigns in the country. Some of the most notable companies were Coca Cola, the American Can Company and the National Association of Manufacturers. Their campaign was designed to take the focus off of corporate capitalism’s destructive environmental practices and get people to think about their own personal behavior.
The centerpiece of this campaign became moving attention away from industrial waste and pollution to personalized trash known as litter. The Keep America Campaign even came up with the label “litterbug,” a term which is used even today to describe individuals we all should look down upon. The campaign worked beautifully and by the second Earth Day celebration these corporate entities financed the creation of a powerful TV ad using a Native America actor Iron Eyes Cody. The Native man is seen at numerous places – in the woods, along the beach – and everywhere he goes there is trash. Again the emphasis was on individual behavior and not so much on industry.