Earth Day

Observed for the first time on April 22, 1970, Earth Day was created by environmental activists as an unofficial holiday on which people could reflect on the planet's ecology and engage in pro-environmental activities. The cause was taken up by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson (1916–) of Wisconsin, whose support helped make Earth Day a reality. It is estimated that some twenty million people across the United States participated in the first Earth Day through demonstrations, exhibits, and teach-ins in more than ten thousand communities.

Images of the Earth as a fragile, blue-green ball hanging in dark space were just beginning to filter into the public's consciousness, especially after the first moon landing in 1969. That year also saw two environmental disasters that captured public attention: the Santa Barbara, California, oil spill and a fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio. These graphic portraits helped stimulate support for Earth Day, which is now considered the beginning of the modern environmentalism (see entry under 1970s—The Way We Lived in volume 4) movement.

The original Earth Day helped arouse support for several important environmental programs undertaken by the U.S. government: the creation of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, all of which began in the early 1970s. For the rest of the decade, environmental activists, many of them veterans of the antiwar and civil rights movements (see entry under 1960s—The Way We Lived in volume 4) of the 1960s, continued to press government, industry, and the American public to pay attention to environmental issues. They appealed to government and industry to end pollution and halt the construction of nuclear power plants. They persuaded the general public to conserve resources and recycle their garbage.

By April 22, 1990, Earth Day was being observed by millions of people in 139 nations around the world. Some two hundred million people reportedly participated in what has been called the largest grass-roots demonstration in history. More than a million people gathered in New York City's Central Park, and two hundred thousand assembled in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to listen to music and hear speeches. Earth Day is still regarded as the symbolic beginning of a wide-scale popular movement to raise consciousness about the perilous state of the planet's ecology.

—Edward Moran

For More Information

Cahn, Robert, and Patricia Cahn. "Did Earth Day Change the World?" Environment (September 1990): 16–42.

Earth Day Network.http://www.earthday.net/ (accessed March 29, 2002).

Gilbert, Bil. "Earth Day Plus 20, and Counting." Smithsonian (April 1990): 46–52.

Hayes, Denis, "Earth Day 1990: Threshold of the Green Decade." World Policy Journal (Vol. 7, no. 2, 1990): 289–304.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.http://www.epa.gov/ (accessed March 29, 2002).