There was no federal regulation of the paper industry. The mill provided no protection for its workers but there was a free shower in the parking lot to wash off the acid rain that ate away the paint finish on the cars.
His father was deaf by his mid-50s. “In those days, ‘real men’ wouldn’t complain or wear ear plugs,” says Hayes. “It was ghastly.”
Hayes’ parents, which he calls “smart but untutored,” didn’t finish high school. His mother had greater ambitions for her son. “It was understood I would go to college,” he says.
After his junior year in high school, Hayes spent a summer studying ecology at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. There, he read Fundamentals of Ecology by Eugene Odum. He was not transformed but he internalized Odum’s message.
Personal Despair
In 1964, when he graduated from Clark Community College in Vancouver, Wash., personal despair set in, exacerbated by the state of the nation in the turbulent Sixties. “I felt I had no reason to go on living,” says Hayes.
So he took off in search of life’s meaning. For the next three years, he hitchhiked around the globe, generally sleeping under the stars and subsisting mostly on rice, peanut butter and vitamins. During summers, he refueled in Tokyo, working as a model for Yamaha and an athletic director at a country club.
In 1967, Hayes had an epiphany in the Namib Desert in southern Africa. His haze lifted when it became clear that everything in nature uses the sun’s energy as its currency.
“My blinding insight, which seems foolish now, was that humans are animals and principles of ecology could apply to humans,” says Hayes.
He soon returned to the States and enrolled at Stanford University, eventually to study history. A year later, as senior class president, Hayes was making waves as an anti-war activist. He rallied 10,000 people in Palo Alto, Calif., to protest Stanford’s classified weapons research. Within a year, the school eliminated it. California’s state university followed suit.
Hayes used the same organizing strategy to gather support for Earth Day 1970. After that, as director of Environmental Action, he coordinated lobbyists for the Clean Air Act and organized the first Dirty Dozen Campaign against Congressional members, who had poor voting records on the environment and had won by small margins. “We defeated seven of the 12 incumbents, including the chair of the House Public Works Committee,” says Hayes.
