A Commemoration of Conservation: The Story of Earth Day
Note: This article was originally published in the February-April 2019 edition of the Wisconsin Historical Society's publication, "Columns."
It was time.
Nearly a decade earlier in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which laid bare the dangers that DDT was exacting on the environment, had built a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. A year prior, an oil spill had occurred on the beaches of Santa Barbara and Ohio’s Cuyahoga River made national headlines on the cover of Time magazine when it burned — again. And social movements, like the protests against the Vietnam War and protests in support of expanded civil rights, were building and contributing to the overall sentiment to raise up society, its people and its environment.
It was time for Earth Day.
Oil portrait of Gaylord Nelson, created in the 1960s from a photograph taken by Ed Obma of Dodgeville, Wisconsin. WHI 2844
“Our goal is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other creatures—an environment without ugliness, without poverty, without discrimination, without hunger and without war,” said Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson in the address he delivered on the first Earth Day, the annual event he founded. “Our goal is a decent environment in its deepest and broadest sense.”
Organized in just six months, the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, drawing together millions of people across the country.
“I marvel in this day and age of social media how quickly, within about six months, they were able to organize an event like that,” Matt Blessing, administrator of the Division of Library-Archives for the Wisconsin Historical Society, said in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio in April 2018. “Somewhere between 10 and 20 million people participated, more than 2,000 colleges and universities had events, and at least 10,000 high schools [had events that] students participated in.”
A Wisconsin Native Son
on June 4, 1916 in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, Nelson’s parents, Anton and Mary Bradt Nelson, were active Progressives and adhered to the populist, reformist political philosophies of Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette that had garnered Wisconsin national attention. In 1948, Nelson was elected to the Wisconsin State Senate, and in 1958, he was elected governor of Wisconsin. After serving two two-year terms as governor, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1962.
Along with his political ideologies, Nelson inherited a love of nature, plants, and wildlife from his parents... and others. He had been deeply influenced by Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology and Wisconsin’s adopted son, who spent the last 24 years of his life in Wisconsin and at UW–Madison, says Blessing. Those influences, he adds, would later help Nelson emerge as a leader on all things environmental as a U.S. Senator.
“We have more than 500 boxes of Gaylord Nelson’s papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society,” says Blessing. “When we digitized materials during the Internet revolution, we knew immediately that we had to focus on the Earth Day materials in that enormous political collection. [In those materials], we see Leopold influencing a public policymaker, the greatness of Gaylord Nelson.”
A commemoration of Conservation
The idea for Earth Day came to Nelson after speaking at a water quality conference in California and viewing the aftermath of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The idea was further reinforced by an article Nelson read about the Vietnam War teach-ins occurring on college campuses. “It popped into my head. That’s it! Why not have an environmental teach-in and get everyone involved?” he said.
Blazing forward with the idea of a nationwide environmental teach-in, Nelson explicitly wanted to design an event of broad appeal and without a partisan tinge. With this in mind, he enlisted Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a Republican congressman, to be co-chair and recruited Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard University with extensive activist experience, as the national coordinator. Nelson also raised funds for the event from groups spanning the political spectrum.
In choosing a date, Nelson wanted to commemorate the death of Leopold, who died of a heart attack while fighting a prairie fire on a neighbor’s property on April 21, 1948. He died just days after receiving word that Oxford University Press had accepted “A Sand County Almanac” for publication, today an international classic in terms of both nature writing and environmental ethics.
April 21 also marked the birthday of naturalist John Muir, who left his own mark on Nelson. Muir’s family came to Wisconsin from Scotland when Muir was 11, and his awe for the land that surrounded his family’s home in Marquette County inspired what would become Muir’s renowned activism in preserving the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park, and other wilderness areas, as well as the Sierra Club, which Muir co-founded.
In the end, however, Nelson selected April 22. It was in the middle of a week that would optimize attendance by college students as it didn’t fall during exams or spring breaks or conflict with religious holidays like Easter or Passover, and it was late enough in spring to have pleasant weather. And in 1970, April 22nd was a Wednesday, so Nelson predicted more students would be in class, and there’d be less competition with other events.
But there was also a political reason for April 22, says Blessing, an aide at the Senate offices had learned that April 21 marked the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary.
“We were deep into the Cold War, and there was hot war raging in Southeast Asia. Senator Nelson was concerned that choosing April 21 in homage to Leopold and John Muir would become controversial because of the linkage to Lenin, so he decided to push it back a day.”
The Rally Cry
On Earth Day 1970, entire communities, grade schools, and college and university campuses across the nation organized for a healthy, sustainable environment. In Cambridge, Mass., Harvard students opened an organic coop. In New York City, tens of thousands of people participated in a parade on Fifth Avenue, which closed to traffic for two hours. In Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga River had caught fire about a year earlier, the mayor’s office organized an entire week of events. There was an enormous rally in downtown Chicago, which had been the site of a huge protest during the Democratic convention about 18 months prior. Reflecting the spirit of Earth Day, Blessing noted that The Chicago Tribune reported there was no litter “whatsoever” on Chicago’s streets to pick up after the rally.
Through this event, many groups that previously had rallied around seemingly divergent issues — factory and paper plant pollution, raw sewage, toxic dumps, freeways, the loss of wilderness, oil spills, the extinction of wildlife, and pesticides — now shared common ground, and the modern environmental movement emerged.
“It really caught the nation’s attention, and within just a year or two, we had major legislation,” says Blessing. “Of course, Gaylord Nelson had also worked on the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, he’d worked on the National Trails Act, did major amendments to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water. He has a tremendous legacy, including Earth Day, in environmental circles. “The first Earth Day also helped propel the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in July 1970.
Earth Day continues to be force for the global environment; by Earth Day 2010, it had become the largest secular observance in the world, attended by more than one billion people in 192 countries worldwide.