Ralph Nader calls
Clive Hulick Connor
In 1970, in an effort to make people aware of the environmental damage being done to our world, students of all ages celebrated the First Earth Day. We were still in high school, so I don't know what happened on the Williams campus, but I participated in the Earth Day event held in Philadelphia. I am sure some of my classmates participated where they were too. When I got to campus in 1971, I immediately sought out extracurricular groups for the environment. I joined the Outing Club and later became a board member. I founded the Environmental Club–origins of which remain fuzzy in my memory. I know that we were trying to get the dining halls to be more environmentally conscious about waste and so on.
About this same time, all over the country, college students were responding to the call of Ralph Nader to form grassroots groups that would work together to try to solve environmental problems and other consumer issues.
Somehow, the call came to Williams to join the non-profit Western Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (WMPIRG) being organized at UMass Amherst. Joe Budge ('74), Jon Abbott ('75) and I responded and founded WMPIRG at Williams. We attended meetings down at UMass Amherst and elsewhere, as a number of the western Massachusetts colleges and universities began to set up their own groups. We had organizational meetings that were fairly well attended, and students seemed interested in starting a PIRG group on campus. It was an exciting time. We felt like we could make a difference!
Over the next year or so, however, as we put together WMPIRG at Williams, we began to run into difficulties. Even though we were a non-profit grassroots, student-led, mostly volunteer organization, we were expected to collect dues and send money into the governing state-level chapter. These monies would be used to fund lobbying and research efforts. The model that we were expected to use was a fee attached to the college tuition bill. Students would be able to "opt out" if they didn't wish to pay the small fee (under $20 as I recall). The college administrators took issue with this way of doing business. They felt that most students wouldn't "bother" to opt out and so it was essentially a tax, and the college administrators wanted to no part in this. Many of the other colleges faced a similar issue, and the collecting of the fee in this manner still remains one of the most severe criticisms of the organization. Unfortunately, our appeals to the administrators of WMPIRG went unheard, and they would not allow us to collect the dues in any other manner. We finally had to admit defeat and disband WMPIRG at Williams.
All of our efforts were not completely in vain as we did help to start the successful WMPIRG that by 1974 had joined with other groups around Massachusetts to form the even more successful MASSPIRG, one of the largest in the country. It was among the first few in the country to incorporate and receive its charitable status. Today, MASSPIRG is one of 28 state-level PIRGs, with many college-level groups still actively involved. They do amazing work in many different areas.
One of the very first successes of MASSPIRG and other PIRGs was to make bottles returnable. In Massachusetts, this effort started about the time we graduated in 1975 and finally the legislation passed in 1982.
In 2022, we all take for granted, at least in most states, that we pay a small deposit on our bottles that we get back when we return them, but did you know that this effort in early recycling was started by bands of college students in the early 1970s? And as Paul Harvey used to say, "Now you know the rest of the story!"