view the crying Indian ad as often as you like thanks to the magic of the Internet. The preservation of pop-cultural ephemera is perhaps one of the most underappreciated blessings the Internet has bestowed on humanity; reviewing the crying Indian ad, I find myself experiencing something akin to those time-traveling intimations of immortality ignited in Proust’s mind by a petit madeleine.11 Said Indian was played by an actor who went by the stage name—ironic for a crying Indian—of Iron Eyes Cody. Even off camera Iron Eyes Cody tried to pass as an Indian of Cherokee-Cree descent. In truth, like many of my Greenwich Village in-laws, he was descended from Sicilians. Irony Eyes Cody he should be called, for his real name was Espera Oscar De Corti. What, in the ad, makes him cry, is a bag of trash tossed onto a highway shoulder from the window of a passing car.
First broadcast on Earth Day in 1971, the ad appeared to be the heartfelt if heavy-handed work of environmentalists. It wasn’t. It was part of the Keep America Beautiful campaign. If like many Americans you thought that Keep America Beautiful was an environmental group, you’d be mistaken. It was created by beverage and packaging executives in 1953. By organizing volunteer cleanups and running public service announcements, the group has over the past half century managed to present pollution as an aesthetic problem for which litterbugs, not industries, are to blame. Meanwhile, the group’s sponsors—the American Chemistry Council among them—continue to lobby against regulatory actions.
In Bob Shavelson’s opinion, GoAK was comparable to Keep America Beautiful. It was an Astroturf group, a Trojan Waterkeeper. Politicians and corporations “love beach cleanups,” he told me, “because of the metrics.” By metrics he meant measurable results. Results that lend themselves to spectacular photo ops. Results that can be reckoned in tons, rather than in parts per billion. Show a scientifically illiterate layperson the chemical formula of bisphenol A, or try explaining to them the phenomenon of lipophilic bioaccumulation, or endocrine disruption, and their attention will drift off on currents of boredom or doubt. They’ll seek refuge in pictures of Jessica Alba or go dipnetting in Bird Creek. Show them photographs like those Pallister had taken at Gore Point, before and during the cleanup, and wallets begin to open. “I have a friend who used to be a Democratic congresswoman,” Shavelson said. “She says, ‘You know, there’s nothing that resonates more with senators than that stuff.’” It’s no wonder, says Shavelson, that Ted Stevens, Alaska’s famously pro-development Republican senator, cosponsored the 2006 Marine Debris, Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act.
Nor is it any wonder that the commercial fishing industry supported it. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing funding, the director of another Alaskan environmental group would later tell me, and I would later confirm, that the largest Alaskan beneficiary of the Marine Debris Program was the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation (MCAF), the group from which Pallister had just won a $50,000 grant. Since the MCAF had been given the power to disburse an outsize portion of the federal funds allocated to Alaska for marine debris programs, this unnamed environmentalist was, like Pallister, beholden to their largesse. Hence, her request for anonymity. Like Keep America Beautiful, and Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling, the MCAF is no more a conservation group than Iron Eyes Cody was an Indian or GoAK a chapter of the Waterkeeper Alliance. It’s a taxexempt nonprofit created in 2005 by the commercial fishing lobby.
“A lot of what they lobby for favors the big guys,” this environmentalist told me. By big guys she meant the owners of the factory ships and processing plants, as opposed to “the little guys,” the “cowboy” fishermen like Larry Calvin who own a boat or two. To the MCAF, she said, “beach cleanups are a PR issue.”
A few days later, I flew down to Juneau to meet with representatives from the MCAF. Their spokesman, Bob King—an erstwhile radio news anchor who’d crossed over to the journalistic dark side of public relations—readily acknowledged his employers’ connections to commercial fishing. The connection was logical and legitimate, King argued. The fishing lobby could more effectively than mistrusted outsiders teach fishermen how to prevent gear loss. Then he took me to the Alaskan Brewing Company, where a flack named Amy Woods plied me with brochures and beer. The beer, I will admit at the risk of product endorsement, was quite tasty. The brochures, less so.