Sunday, April 22nd was recognized as “Earth Day” on the calendar, but what exactly does that mean and how did it come to exist in the first place?
As noted, April 22nd marks the date that is, for lack of a better term, “celebrated” as the particular day when we are supposed to focus on the welfare of our planet and the environment.
April 22nd of 1970 was the first official Earth Day in the United States. As the tumultuous decade of the ‘60’s came to a close and the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam continued, gas-guzzling vehicles and pollution-belching factories were the norm.
The New York Times’ best-selling 1962 book “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson had already brought attention to the needs of the environment and the relationship between pollution and public health; the pent-up energy and frustration associated with the anti-war movement now had a more positive outlet.
Then-Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin is credited as being the founder of Earth Day in 1970. Having noted the environmental costs of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, the year before, Nelson contrived to channel the energy that had been so evident in college students’ reactionary movements against the war into a positive focus on the health of the planet itself. Nelson went on to build a bi-partisan coalition led by Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey and Harvard’s Denis Hayes. Together, these three subsequently established a national staff of 85 workers and determined the date of April 22nd – midway between spring break and final exams for college students – to be the target day for nationwide recognition of the needs of the environment.
On the appointed day, over 20 million Americans demonstrated in the streets in the quest for a sustainable environment. Colleges and universities across the country organized previously splintered and independent protest groups into a united front against all types of pollution.
Earth Day was an immediate success. That initial Earth Day in 1970 was the culmination of a rare political alignment between multiple factions and segments of society, all coming together to raise the hue and cry of the American citizenry against environmental threats. But more importantly, the Earth Day movement precipitated the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
Earth Day enjoyed a resurgence as the decade of the ‘90’s approached. An influential group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to once again facilitate a renewed effort on behalf of the environment, only this time on a global scale. Earth Day 1990 replicated the effects of its original version of two decades prior, yielding a focus on recycling and leading directly to the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Senator Nelson himself was eventually awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1995 by then-President Bill Clinton for his role as the recognized founder of Earth Day, a date on which our shared natural resources are appropriately recognized for their tremendous intrinsic value and obvious need for permanent sustainability.
