The History of Earth Day—and Why It Still Matters

On behalf of our fellow Earthlings, Public Radio’s Environmental News MagazineAn interview with host Steve Curwood with environmental historian Adam Rome.

Earth Day was born in 1970 during a moment of human solidarity in a time of crisis. Violent Vietnam War protests, burning down black communities, and feminists ripping off waistbands and bras in public speak to larger social divisions.

And then, like the sweetest tune of a symphony, on Christmas Eve 1968 came photographs of Earth taken by the first humans to orbit the Moon. When Apollo 8 showed that we are all on the same gorgeous blue marble, shining in the black vastness of space, humanity was horrified.

Within 16 months the first Earth Day had brought together 20 million Americans in peaceful demonstrations – a record that still stands today. We came together to take care of our shared home and each other, at least for that day. This Earth Day, April 22, much seems to divide us, but thanks to Artemis II, we also have brand new pictures of our shared planet.

Adam Rome is a professor and environmental historian at the University at Buffalo and author of “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Curwood: Tell me a little about the political climate of the late 1960s. To what extent did movements like civil rights, anti-war, and women’s rights set the stage for that first Earth Day in 1970?

Curwood: How many people were present on that first Earth Day?

Rome: Twenty million people, which was about an eighth of the population – which was amazing.

Almost every college, every K-12 school had some kind of Earth Day event. And programs also took place in public places and in front of offices of corporations or government buildings. So it was everywhere. This was such a big deal that Congress was closed for the day. Two-thirds of the members were speakers somewhere, and they were Republicans as well as Democrats.

Curwood: Your book first describes Earth Day as a teach-in or national conversation about the environment. What was the energy like on that first Earth Day in 1970?

Rome: “Teach-in” was Gaylord Nelson’s phrase. This was a strategy that the anti-war movement had used a few years earlier to politicize these events on campuses, bringing both pro- and anti-war people together for debate. And Gaylord Nelson was convinced that it could empower people, it could move them to action. So he said he would organize an environmental teach-up.

I think his insight was astute, that the issues weren’t really widely discussed. There weren’t a lot of experts, there weren’t a lot of books, there weren’t a lot of journalists writing about environmental issues, and Earth Day became an introspective experience for a lot of people; This was a phrase used by The New York Times to describe Earth Day events at the University of Michigan.

Thousands of people who had never publicly spoken on environmental issues spoke out on Earth Day. People really debated, at first, how serious the issues were. Were they an annoyance, or were they a threat to civilization? People debated as to how deep are the reasons? Was there something fundamentally wrong with capitalism? Was there something fundamentally wrong with the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, or was it something you could solve through simple political means?

People also really have to decide how much it means to them personally. Were they going to do something different? It was really the first time that people imagined that maybe they needed to consume less or in a different way.

People were really asking day-to-day practical questions, you know, “What do we do about Lake Erie? It looks like it’s dying…” More existential questions about what kind of relationship we have with nature and whether that needs to change in some profound way. The conversations were civil, but they were incredibly challenging. He made a lot of people think about things they had never thought about before.

CURWOOD: This year’s Earth Day bears many similarities to that first event in 1970. Both then and now we are seeing a lot of political division and unrest. America is fighting a war in another country and on another continent, but at the same time, we are sending people to the moon. How can we apply the lessons learned from the original movement to today?

Rome: In hindsight, I could easily offer a variety of lessons about what made Earth Day so powerful, what the genius of Earth Day was, and how we, even if we may never have another Earth Day like the one in 1970, can do the same.

The current moment strikes me as much more challenging, because although there are all the similarities to what you just mentioned, I don’t think people in 1970 really thought that democracy could be in danger, and a lot of people looked to the government to help solve these problems. A large part of our country can no longer begin to accept this idea.

When I talked to my students about this, they were interested in finding ways to bridge the partisan divide, if that was possible. And a lot of the ways that she finds compelling are not big public events that are obviously political, but other kinds of things, like she hopes that community gardens can bring people together and empower and allow people to talk who might otherwise disagree on many things. Or if they start growing some of their own food, they might think about other environmental issues.

This is actually very different from Gaylord Nelson’s sentiment that if we had really civil but deep conversations, people would change. It’s hard to imagine a truly civilized, deep conversation right now for many reasons.

Curwood: Despite the unexpected success of its inaugural event, which attracted 20 million people, Earth Day today feels like — let’s face it — a little more symbolic than it is impressive. If it is remembered at all, it can be celebrated with a local trash cleanup or perhaps a craft in the classroom. How do we get there?

ROME: When Gaylord Nelson was first planning Earth Day he never imagined it would be more than a one-time event. But in some places Earth Day has been celebrated since then. Sometimes they’re pretty amazing, but as you say, most of the time they’re pretty tame. They are mostly for children.

And the 2020 Earth Day, which would have been the 50th anniversary, was wiped out due to the pandemic. So we don’t have that example. There was only one more that was held at the national level: that was in 1990, the 20th anniversary. We don’t really have any recent examples of how awesome Earth Day can really be.

This year when I asked my class, “What do you look forward to this year?” So they all expected almost nothing. I hope they are wrong. But he was having difficulty imagining anything actually dramatically meaningful.

Curwood: Do students in your classes ever ask what we’ve lost by not paying more attention to Earth Day now? And what will you say?

Rome: Many people have asked me over the years, like, “Is it worth celebrating Earth Day now?” To me this question is less interesting than asking why the first question was so powerful and what we can learn from it.

The lessons we learned from the first Earth Day cannot possibly be applied to the next Earth Day. The biggest lesson I learned is that it was empowering. How can we think about what empowerment would be today? What will change in the way people think and act? And it may be something completely different from what we think of as Earth Day.

Whenever I’m sad — and it’s hard not to be sad when you think about climate change and some other issues — I’m inspired by the story of the first Earth Day, which was completely unexpected and led to dramatic, measurable progress in all kinds of ways in tackling environmental problems.

Our air is very clean, our water is very clean, we’ve done a lot of the problems people wanted to solve in the 1970s. We haven’t solved them all, but we have solved a lot. So I would say, read about Earth Day first and see if that inspires you. I think we need inspiration, and especially we need to do things that make us feel more powerful. We can’t solve any problem if we all feel powerless.