WENDELL — Everyone seemed to be there, filmmaker Robbie Leppzer told the nearly 50 people gathered in Wendell Town Hall.
“This event changed all of our lives,” he said.
When he co-directed an 80-minute film about the Seabrook nuclear plant protest of the 1970s, Leppzer was an 18-year-old Hampshire College student creating the first of what have been more than 30 documentaries.
The anti-nuclear protest at the New Hampshire construction site was carried out on May 1, 1977 by more than 2,000 members of the Clamshell Alliance. Leppzer’s recent film showing was attended by a host of longtime Franklin County residents featured in the documentary and no strangers to civil disobedience and citizen activism.
The protest drew heavily on Gandhian principles of nonviolence, and was noteworthy in “creating a consciousness all across the country about the dangers of nuclear power,” said resident Chris Queen said in introducing the film. It’s also a close-up look at a massive social protest — 1,414 protesters were arrested and held in several armories — that left its mark on other peaceful demonstrations that would follow.
“I really felt it at the time that this was grassroots history in the making,” Leppzer said immediately after the Wendell showing, which was paired over four days with a showing of “Power Struggle,” his new film about the recent controversy over the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant and its 2014 shutdown.
“Moments like this, when people come together … Literally, there were hundreds of events across the country that were inspired by Seabrook, where there were occupations and civil disobedience. These actions, people standing out and sticking their necks out for change, really reverberated, across the country and across the world.”
Veteran social activist Frances Crowe of Northampton, shown at age 58, the same age Leppzer is now, tells the camera, “We can, I feel, determine our future, that we can get together and organize and begin to change society and the world.”
As well as with protesters, the documentary includes interviews with a spokesman for the Public Service of Co. of New Hampshire, which was building the twin nuclear plant, as well as with police, National Guard officers and then-New Hampshire Gov. Meldrim Thomson.
The film has important lessons for students, said Harvey Wasserman, who has shown it every year in history classes he’s taught at Columbus State Community College.
Wasserman helped coin the phrase “no nukes” while living in Montague during the struggle that successfully defeated construction of a twin, 1,150-megawatt nuclear plant on the Montague Plains. He also was one of the Seabrook demonstrators filmed by Leppzer and said, “I think it’s really impossible to overstate how important what we did was. This is not just about nuclear power.”
Wasserman, a guest speaker for last week’s showing, is author of “Solartopia,” as well as other books on American history and nuclear power. He pointed out that — despite Richard Nixon’s 1973 prediction of 1,000 nuclear plants operating in this country by 2000 — Seabrook’s start of its commercial operation in 1990 marked the end of nuclear plant construction in this country. Ninety-nine commercial plants are operating today, and several are being shut down, like Vermont Yankee, because they are financially unable to compete with cheaper forms of energy.
Wasserman believes the “key” to defeating nuclear power and replacing it with renewable energy sources like wind and solar — especially in the face of what he called erroneous arguments that nuclear power could provide a sane, carbon-free response to climate change — is the tremendous potential for jobs in renewable technologies.
The 40 years of citizen protests that have followed Seabrook include demonstrations against nuclear power and gas pipeline construction, for nuclear disarmament, the Women’s March on Washington and the People’s Climate March in April. These have all followed in the nonviolent tradition of the Seabrook demonstration, Wasserman and others attending the showing said.
In the film, Wasserman said while following the mass arrests for trespass, “If you were facing 1,800 or 2,000 highly organized, dedicated people committed to nonviolence and committed to the idea of getting on this site and stopping the nuclear power plant, I think you’d be real confused and you wouldn’t exactly know how to proceed and you would probably follow the line of least resistance, which was allowing us on the site, and that’s what happened. Nonviolence is just a whole other level of tactic and it’s something that is totally mind blowing.
“If we came, if we had approached this thing with any ideas of violence or heavy macho sort of, we would not be on the site, there’s no way, but somehow being nonviolent really opened the doors. I don’t … there’s no way to understand it really, it seems to be some sort of magical force.”
Among those present for the showing were Pat and Tex LaMountain of Greenfield, who wrote some of the anti-nuclear anthems written around Seabrook; Anna Gyorgy of Wendell, who is interviewed in the film as one of the protesters and who went on to write the 1979 book “No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power,” and Court Dorsey of Wendell, who was among those arrested at Seabrook and went on to perform music of social protest in the years after Seabrook as part of the troupe, “Bright Morning Star.”
Dorsey, who was among those who participated in a discussion after the film showing, recalled, “It was wonderful the way we were able to connect with the police and the National Guardsmen.” According to one arrested protester, some volunteered to walk to the school buses that would take them to an armory, rather than forcing the arresting officer to hurt their backs by carrying them.
But Sharon Tracy of New Salem, who was also among those at the anti-nuclear protest, added that while there were those kinds of expressions of “compassion” at the Seabook demonstration, she fears that, “It’s a different world now from what it was 40 years ago,” with less restraint likely.
Rob Okun of Amherst was among those in the audience who harkened back to a “Toward Tomorrow Fair” at the University of Massachusetts, and its emphasis on renewable technologies the year after the Seabrook demonstration. He said he was struck by watching the film.
“You’re inspiring people, whether they’ve been part of this struggle for a long time or they’re new to it. You’re waking people up,” he said.
On the Web: www.turningtide.com.