A Look Back at Earth Day

Pearl Lake - September 2022

This year Earth Day, on April 22nd, celebrated its 55th birthday. To me, Earth Day has always served as a reminder to honor Mother Earth. From the iridescent teal of a magpie’s tail, to the delicate icicles from tree roots to stream, to the epic orange and pink sunset skies silhouetting Emerald Mountain. How lucky I am to regularly see bears and moose and foxes, to hear ospreys and woodpeckers and a literal symphony of birdsong. These are daily and meaningful appreciations. But Earth Day is special. Looking back on its history helps to explain why that is.

Senator Gaylord Nelson was the originator of Earth Day in 1970, but the environment was already on the radar thanks to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a New York Times bestseller. Her book detailed the harmful impact of chemicals on humans, wildlife, waterways and plants, and raised global awareness of these environmental damages, selling 500,000 copies in 24 countries. In 1967, because of Carson’s arguments in Silent Spring, scientists formed the Environmental Defense Fund to ban DDT.

In 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara garnered major public attention. Senator Nelson wanted to build that attention into a movement protesting air and water pollution.***

Senator Nelson, a Democrat, joined with Republican Representative Pete McCloskey and organizer Denis Hayes to organize nation-wide teach-ins on college campuses. They chose April 22 as it was a weekday between spring break and final exams, hoping to maximize student participation.

The day was dubbed Earth Day, and the idea caught on, morphing from campus teach-ins to a day of protests in parks and streets. 20 million Americans - at the time, 10% of the U.S. population - participated to decry the damage of 150 years of unchecked industry on the environment and human health. This movement was remarkable not only in size, but also in that it drew everyone together under one umbrella: Republicans, Democrats, rich and poor, business and labor leaders, rural and urban dwellers.

Did this massive turnout have an impact? It sure did. By the end of 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created, and several crucial laws were passed: the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Education Act. In 1972, the Clean Water Act was passed.

Earth Day has continued to build on that original vision and massive turnout, and is a global movement. In 2020, for the 50th anniversary, over 1 billion people worldwide participated in Earth Day actions, and 100 million observed the 50th anniversary online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This year’s Earth Day theme is Our Power, Our Planet, focusing on renewable energy in order to triple clean energy by 2030. To be clear, various forms of energy production have both pros and cons. Learn more with these Earth Day Explainers.


***A little personal context: while earning my BA at UC Santa Barbara, I wrote for The Daily Nexus, the campus paper. In the late eighties, for my very first story, I interviewed one of the founders of GOO, or Get Oil Out, an organization that formed to fight off-shore drilling after the disastrous 1969 spill. 


Sources/Learn More
Earth Day.org:  History of Earth Day, includes a 1970 video with Walter Cronkite!
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, April 22, 2025 podcast.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American April 22, 2025 printed version.