of Hillary Clinton—with hopes that Sanders’ effort would swing her to the left. That same year he suffered a mild stroke, but nonetheless showed up at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate in support of Clinton’s nomination. The Convention was his undoing. He came home to Los Angeles a very ill man.
The morning of October 24th I sleepily padded down to my office in Sucre, Bolivia and opened my email. There I found four red-flagged messages shrieking urgency—from Native American activist Suzan Harjo in D.C., administrator/ecologist Marc Kasky in San Francisco, editor/musician Whitney Smith in Toronto, and non-profit director Lee Cridland in Cochabamba—each passing along a link to an article posted on one media venue or another. Tom had died. Shock gripped my bones, just as the eulogies and accolades poured in. My Goddess! They came from Huffington Post, New York Times, Scotland Herald, Organized Rage, Aljazeera, The Guardian, Cuba Net, and on. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote, “Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known.” Writer/Columbia University professor Trey Ellis said, “As a lifelong believer in the collective, he didn’t take credit. He shared. He dedicated his life to good cause after good cause, relentlessly seeking out justice wherever it was lacking.”
How lucky we had all been to count him one of our own—and how we, and our movements for justice, miss him.
V. “I’D LIKE TO SAY A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. AFTER ALL, WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT IT?”
ECOLOGY IN SAN FRANCISCO
If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!
—WES “SCOOP” NISKER, “THE LAST NEWS SHOW,” KSAN-FM
BY THE 1970S THE San Francisco Bay Area had given New York City a run for its money as the political, cultural, and consciousness Place to Be. Surrounded by ocean and bay, covered in Eucalyptus and Manzanita, burgeoning with tropical and temperate plant life, and just down the foothills from Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountains—it was natural that, among the other flowerings going on, the ecology movement would find its most avid escorts in the urban areas cupping both inlet and sea.
The ghosts of John Muir and Ishi haunted the woods of Mount Tamalpais, after all. David Brower was a Berkeley man, lighting a fire under what essentially had been a hiking organization to become the forceful environmental fighting Sierra Club. Under his leadership as president, the San Francisco chapter of the club came to boast one of the national organization’s largest and most active memberships. Also, under his guidance, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute were birthed into existence. Meanwhile, architect Zach Stewart launched the River Terminus Expeditions up the Sacramento River so that wannabe and veritable activists could learn firsthand about the watershed of the northern California bioregion, while Marc Kasky took on the then-hippie Ecology Center in North Beach and turned it into a vital hub of environmental awareness and organic muffins.
In 1969 the September issue of Ramparts had put out its startling “The Death of the Oceans” essay, by conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich, predicting their demise via pollution and acidification by the year 1979. And there were all those colorful back-to-the-landers with their teepees, Mendocino County communes, organic gardens, compost piles, and Chief Seattle posters …
MARC KASKY: THE MADCAP ECOLOGIST
(1944–)
I’d like to say a few words about the environment.
After all, where would we be without it?
—M.K., IMPROVISATIONAL SKIT PERFORMED AT HOTEL WAWONA, YOSEMITE. HALLOWEEN 1984.
The first year I lived in North Beach with my lover Marc Kasky, he packed up his tent and enough dried food for ten days, and he launched off in his size-thirteen hiking boots to what became a yearly solo hike through the Sierras. That first year, too, he was visited by a hairy spirit in the night. The thing looked like a sort of werewolf-yeti. It appeared at the foot of his sleeping bag, as such creatures have a tendency to do, and crooking its claw in the shape of Little Bo Peep’s cane, beckoned Marc to come. It was the dead of night, and the forest was pitch-black. Marc graciously declined, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
I’m not sure if these kinds of visitations were not normal fare for the man. He had, after all, lived a life of wild and hairy ideas. In fact, he had an idea for just about every challenge that lay before him. Consider the public TV station he instigated at Franconia College in answer to the school’s need to bridge the gap between the insulated student body and the town’s working-class community: the communications students made programs about the town and, boasting next-to-nothing funds for a full-time station, set up a camera in the snowy woods through the night when there were no other shows to be had. Or the basketball team he started. Franconia possessed no phys. ed. department, no basketballs, no gymnasium, no outfits, no lanky athletic stars—and so, at the very least, the project was a risk. But it was an ingenious scheme as the town might then get behind its team.
What would happen if everything just … stopped? Positively Fourth Street mural at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, 1976. Artists: John Wehrle and John Rampley. Photo credit: Jim Petrillo. Courtesy of John Wehrle.
One problem to be hurdled was that the White Mountains of Vermont presented a snow barrier to the other teams that would have to travel north, so they decided to only play, as the saying goes, “away from home.” Upon the team’s first such bus ride to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, an aghast Marc realized they didn’t have a handle. Since basketball courts have a score board that pits “Home” against “Visitors,” Marc thought, they could be the Visitors. They actually won that first game—and the national media went feral. Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, plus newspapers across the country published stories about the Franconia Visitors, and BINGO! the town—now with its very own TV station and an undefeated basketball team—began to feel very good about its college.
Yes, wild spirits sprouted from the head of Marc Kasky. As a student coordinator of Eugene McCarthy’s run for President in 1968, his idea for gaining votes in the all-important New Hampshire primary was not to chuck the campaign’s anti-war message down the throats of the voters of Berlin. It was to set up democracy centers where citizens could experience that they were responsible enough, intelligent enough, free enough to debate the issues and come to their own conclusions. The McCarthys were so impressed with this unique approach that they asked Marc to do the same in Grand Island, Nebraska; Eugene, Oregon; and Santa Monica, California. On the night of the primary they invited him to watch the results in their hotel room, and in her memoir Private Faces, Public Places, Abigail McCarthy called Marc “a symbol of all that was good in the student involvement in the campaign, all that was good in the new politics, all that was good in the campaign itself.”
Later, in the ‘70s, when he was director of San Francisco’s Ecology Center, Marc provided grounding for the churn and swirl of emerging environmental consciousness. The center was on lower Columbus Avenue, below Grant Street, known for its rebel dynamism since the Beat days, and right across from the very symbol of the economic forces that were wreaking corporate havoc upon the Earth: the new pyramid-shaped Transamerica Building.
