This news item got my attention this morning.

The launch of Earth Day in 1970 raised suspicions in Washington, D.C., according to former Rep. Pete McCloskey, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day.

The annual event was launched as a national teach-in on April 22, 1970, by former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, McCloskey and others. Earth Day galvanized a political movement that led to some of the country's most significant environmental legislation, including the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.

At a panel discussion on the Endangered Species Act and its future, held Jan. 31 at the Western Section of The Wildlife Society's annual meeting in Sacramento, Calif., McCloskey recalled the FBI's scrutiny of the event. According to McCloskey, President Richard Nixon ordered the FBI to observe college students across the country.

"I was friends with John Ehrlichman at that time, who was an environmental lawyer, incidentally, before he went to jail for Watergate," McCloskey said, referring to Nixon's domestic policy chief, who approved the Watergate break-in.

"And he called me after Earth Day — he was laughing as hard as I'd ever heard, and he said, 'Pete, I've got this report from (FBI Director) J. Edgar Hoover to deliver to the president tomorrow,' because the president was so paranoid that Earth Day was going to be a bunch of anti-war kids gathered that he had put them under surveillance by the FBI," McCloskey said.

"He read me part of the report: ‘There's a bunch of girls with flowers in their hair, and they're wearing only three garments, no bras,’" McCloskey said. “And it was very benign. They were a little drunk, (there was) a little pot, maybe a little love out under in the bushes, but these girls sat in the grass patting their dogs, and it was a very benign affair."

"He was laughing about having to give this report to Nixon," he said.

Though the report was benign, its effects were not. On April 14, 1971, Nelson and former Sen. Edmund Muskie, both Earth Day organizers, released copies of the FBI reports, revealing the surveillance. The reports were the latest in a series of stolen or released documents detailing FBI surveillance of U.S. citizens through a program called COINTELPRO. After the resulting Senate hearings, Hoover said he would severely curtail such FBI surveillance.

How President Nixon spied on the first Earth Day - Science

At the end of my senior year I was part of the first E Day organizing committee at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1970. In April 1970 my girlfriend and I manned a booth at an Outdoor Expo providing information to counter Project Sanguine, the US Navy's project to build a huge underground antenna grid in parts of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. We both pretty much fit the profile of hippie campus radicals that inspired so much fear and loathing at the time so needless to say we were not exactly given a warm welcome.
Immediately after I noticed round the clock surveilance on my apartment from a guy with a crew cut in a black Ford Galaxy. After about a week the guy and the Ford disappeared. I guess he got bored watching me sitting in my apartment getting stoned. Amusing to have my suspicions pretty much confirmed after all these years.