Tucson Opinion: Honoring Tucson's 'Green Giant'

It’s been 51 years since the first Earth Day, when 20 million Americans demanded an end to the destruction of paradise. It’s time to honor the pioneers from that heady era of conservation. Perhaps the most influential was Stewart Udall, who ran the Department of the Interior building during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

As Interior Secretary, Udall, a lawyer and former Tucson congressman, added dozens of parks and monuments to our national system and led the charge for most of the significant environmental laws we now take for granted, including the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Pesticides Reduction and Mining Reclamation Acts, the Highway Beautification Act, the National Historic Trust, the Endangered Species List, the National Scenic Trails Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

“Udall was one of the great environmentalists of the Twentieth Century” says his biographer, historian Thomas Smith.

But as my team interviews people (including his brother Burr who still practices law in Tucson) for our documentary film, “Stewart Udall and the Politics of Beauty,” we’re learning that Udall was about much more than the environment.

As a University of Arizona basketball star in 1947, he and brother Morris successfully challenged Jim Crow policies that kept Black students from the UA cafeteria. Discovering at Interior that the National Park Service didn’t employ Black rangers, he recruited dozens of students at traditionally Black colleges to serve in the parks.

Moreover, Udall challenged the paternalism that pervaded the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. He fought to protect the lands of Alaskan Natives and appointed the first Native American to direct the Bureau in a hundred years.

A machine gunner during World War II, Udall became a peace advocate who traveled to the USSR in 1962 to encourage a ban on atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. Later, back in Arizona after his stint at Interior, he fought for the victims of such tests who got cancer from radioactive fallout, and Navajos whose deadly tumors came from the uranium they mined without being warned of the dangers. Udall also championed the arts, especially Native American art.

Udall was known for his bipartisanship, counting Barry Goldwater as a close friend. But the environment was his passion.

“Udall was a transformational figure in Washington,” Interior Secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt told our crew. “He turned the Interior Department away from its hundred-year emphasis on development, dams and highways, toward a transcendent view of nature’s impact on our spirit.” He stopped a plan to build dams in the Grand Canyon at great political cost in Arizona. He was also the first American public official to warn about climate change, in the 1960s.

Udall died in 2010. “But his legacy lives on,” our new Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told us. “I feel like the politics of beauty is still there, and it’s up to us to keep it alive, giving children opportunities to surround themselves with that beauty so they grow up to realize that it’s up to them to protect these spaces.”