Interviews
The "Environmental Action in Michigan" team conducted interviews with ten historical actors as part of this project, nine videotaped and one audiotaped. The historical subjects include four organizers of the ENACT Teach-In at the University of Michigan, three members of the Environmental Teach-In steering committee that coordinated Earth Day in 1970 and led Environmental Action afterward, and three leaders of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor. Many pages in the exhibit include excerpts from these interviews.
This section presents the full interviews as a historical archive. Because of the 100 MB limit of video files on this site, each page breaks the interviews down into shorter segments. We are very grateful to each interview subject for taking the time to share these experiences and memories with us.
David Allan David Allan was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Zoology in the fall of 1969 when he started ENACT as a co-chair. Upon assuming his role as co-chair, Allan took the academic year off to focus solely on the Teach-In. Before attending the University of Michigan, he had finished his undergraduate degree in 1966 at the University of British Columbia. Allan organized the majority of the Teach-In and acted as a figurehead for ENACT. After the U-M Teach-In, he finished his Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. Allan later worked for the University of Maryland until 1988 when he returned to the University of Michigan until 2010.
Doug Scott In the fall of 1969, Doug Scott was a graduate student in the Forest Recreation program of the School of Natural Resources with a dream of working on national parks. During his time at U-M, he co-founded a U-M environmental group, Environmental Action for Survival (ENACT), which organized the massive U-M environmental teach-in of 1970. With his obvious passion for the wilderness and his encouraging spirit, Scott became a key figure of the teach-in and the environmental movement more broadly. After the ENACT Teach-In, Scott devoted his life to environmental protection, including work as an environmental lobbyist and as a grassroots organizer, and he eventually played a major role in saving over a 110 million acres of Alaskan wilderness.
George Coling was a first-year graduate student in the School of Public Health in the fall of 1969 when he joined the ENACT Teach-In steering committee. He finished his undergraduate degree earlier that year at the University of Rochester, where he participated in anti-Vietnam War activism. Coling organized several events at the ENACT Teach-In, including the Environmental Scream-Out, and worked with African American students to establish the support group Blacks for the Environment. After the U-M teach-in, he helped establish the Ecology Center of Ann Arbor and then, instead of completing his graduate program, moved to Washington to coordinate the movement to set up local ecology centers nationwide. He later worked for the union-affiliated Urban Environmental Conference, among many other environmental organizations during a long career in activism and public policy.