Art by Johnny Craig
Millionaire industrialist Tony Stark has invited a group of corporate colleagues to his Long Island Plant to watch a filmed message from Iron Man. “She’s dead, killed by the very atmosphere of our own Earth,” the superhero says of the woman he holds in his arms. “An atmosphere so polluted, so befouled, we can no longer breath it and live. My built-in oxygen supply will last a few more seconds, then I’ll join the rest of mankind – an extinct species.” He then adds, “It need not have been, except we did nothing until too late.”
While Stark had hoped that the brief film would rally his peers to take action against the continuing decline of the planet due to rampant pollution, those in attendance are not so easily swayed, calling environmentalism Stark’s “charity-of-the-moment,” one that they’re not interested in joining. Since Iron Man’s taped plea did not have its desired effect, Tony Stark decides to engage his listeners with a “true” story instead of the fictional missive from his alter ego.
After four years as the “conservation governor” of Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson was elected to the United States Senate in 1962. Once in Washington, he attempted – much like Tony Stark – to convince his colleagues of the need for better environmental protection but likewise found little support. In 1969, Nelson therefore decided to take his message directly to the people and embarked on a cross-country speaking tour. By the time he reached his final destination of Seattle, the senator had come up with the idea for a national “Earth Day.”
Although Nelson conceived the idea and spearheaded the overall organizing for Earth Day, he believed that specific events should be decided by individual cities and universities. As Adam Rome notes in his 2013 book The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, this willingness to “let go” of his vision inevitably led to its massive success, as both young and old alike were able to be involved, provide their own creativity and ingenuity, and tailor each event to the locale in which it was being presented.
In Iron Man #25, Namor the Sub-Mariner encounters a school of dead fish deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Searching for answers, Namor discovers a pipeline on the ocean floor that is discharging industrial waste into the water. The Sub-Mariner smashes a nearby protrusion and uses the resulting individual rocks to seal the pipe, then follows its serpentine path to its source of origination.
Tony Stark, meanwhile, arrives on Meridian Island to meet with Blane Ordway, project manager for Stark Industries. Stark is impressed by the installations that Ordway has constructed, marveling at how the project manager has turned the entire island into one giant factory. Stark becomes concerned, however, when Ordway explains that he had to dig deep into the island for natural resources after depleting those above ground. Those efforts enabled him to save enough money to build a Solar Energy Converter to power the now barren island solely on sunlight.
Tony Stark mentions that the Solar Energy Converter hasn’t been tested on such a large scale and may cause unintended side-effects. Blane Ordway rejects his boss’s concerns, arguing that the Converter’s potential value far exceeds any flaws. Before he can finish, he is interrupted by his fiancé June Duncan, who tells Ordway that the Purification Plant is malfunctioning, causing chemical waste to build up and engulfing the area with billows of poisonous gas.
“I don’t understand it,” Tony Stark says. “The filtration units I designed for all my plants should have broken this down before its disposal.” As he ponders the discrepancy, Namor the Sub-Mariner suddenly leaps out of the ocean and onto the island, having found the starting point of the pipeline he was following.
A full array of events was scheduled for Earth Day. In Ohio, one thousand residents and students embarked on a “procession of death” from Cleveland State University to the spot on the Cuyahoga River where Moses Cleaveland first landed in 1796. The president of the university openly apologized to the city’s founding father for the current state of the river, while students wearing period clothing re-enacted Cleaveland’s arrival – only they turned their boats around after seeing the heavily polluted Cuyahoga instead of landing.
Earth Day in Miami marked the debut of Eco Commando Force ’70, a group of three men and two women – a landscape architect, a marine biologist, a microbiologist, a teacher, and an anthropologist – who dropped yellow dye into eight sewage treatment plants during the early morning hours of April 22, 1970.
“The dye patches will show what happens to the sewage that is dumped into our waterways,” Eco Commando Force announced. “If the dye is not carried very far downstream from the plants, residents should be warned of possibly dangerously high concentrations of pollutants due to lack of stream-flow. Dade County citizens need not worry about this attack – unless their drinking water turns yellow.” Needless to say, many residents found their water to be a different color that day.
Tony Stark transforms himself into Iron Man and confronts Namor, who informs his counterpart about what he discovered on the ocean floor. “It can’t be true,” Iron Man tells himself. “No project of mine could be causing pollution such as Namor claims.” But as he investigates further, Iron Man discovers that the Purification Plant’s disposal pumps contain no sign of the filtration units designed by Tony Stark, meaning that Blane Ordway never installed them.
The toxic fumes being emitted from the Purification Plant are now fully engulfing Meridian Island. An assistant tells Blane Ordway that the Solar Energy Converter is acting as a massive heat inverter, keeping the toxic fumes from dispersing into the air and out to sea. The solution is obvious – turn off the Solar Energy Converter – but Ordway refuses to do so.
“I’ve spent years, made sacrifices, to get this prototype ready to go,” he says. “The solar converter is going to make my reputation just as transistors and integrated circuits made Stark’s. I’m not delaying that just because we’ve got a slight smog problem.”
In December 1952, unusually cold weather caused airborne pollutants to form a thick layer over London. Nicknamed smog, Los Angeles residents quickly adopted the term for themselves. While London smog– like the word itself – was a form of “smoke fog,” the Los Angeles variety was the side effect of a photochemical reaction to nitrogen oxide, stimulated by heat and sunlight, combining with gasoline by-products. Regulations were implemented to reduce the amount of hydrocarbon emissions from oil fields and refineries in the region, but while those protocols were effective, smog levels continued to increase.
A 1953 report finally identified the culprit – while the petroleum industry was emitting five hundred tons of hydrocarbons a day into the atmosphere, another thirteen hundred tons was being ejected from cars, trucks, and buses. At first, the automobile industry argued that photochemical smog was unique to Los Angeles, caused by the region’s natural configuration and intense sunlight, but the rise in smog in other major cities across the United States quickly dispelled that theory.
In New York City, Earth Day organizers spotlighted the pollution in the air by eliminating the automobile from the streets. For two full hours, Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth to Fifty-Ninth Street was barred from any-and-all vehicular traffic. Dead Hudson River fish, meanwhile, were displayed on Fifth Avenue as a group of kids shouted, “You’re next people!” and a two-hundred-foot-long, forty-foot-tall “Pollution Free Atmosphere” bubble was erected in Union Square.
Iron Man has concluded that the solar rays being drawn to Meridian Island by the Solar Energy Converter was turning the “slight smog problem” into a deadly ozone. He thus places Blane Ordway in charge of leading everyone to fallout shelters while he heads towards the Solar Energy Converter to destroy it.
“Those pulsing solar rays are like a flame to a cauldron,” the superhero notes. “Brewing the chemical wastes into an ever more deadly poison.” A poison too great for even Iron Man, who is quickly rendered unconscious. Once he has recovered, Iron Man is joined by Namor and the pair dive into the ocean and rip a giant rock from the ocean floor. The resulting vacuum unleashes a tsunami that crashes into Meridian Island and destroys the Solar Energy Converter.
“We saved your fellow men from their self-made folly,” Namor says. “But an entire island, once fertile and rich, has died. And I wonder – has any of them truly learned from this?”
“Scare talk, Stark!” one of the corporate bigwigs tells Tony Stark back in the present. “We’re businessmen – see us when you’ve got a proposition, not some crackpot cause. Crusading and changes cost money, Tony. We’re not all independently wealthy like you. We’re responsible to board members, stockholders.”
They then add, “You shouldn’t let the island business upset you. Things will work out. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Anthony Letizia