Earth Day: A Milestone in the History of US Environmentalism

April 22, 1970, marked the nationwide celebration of the first Earth Day in the United States. The event was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and the choreography of Dennis Hayes, a Harvard Law School student. It began as a loosely connected series of environmental teachins at colleges, high schools, and community centers across the country and then metamorphosed into a typical public display of concern for the planet in the form of demonstrations, parades, and rallies in support of environmental reforms.

Earth Day was not an unexpected demonstration. It was the natural outgrowth of the mounting public awareness of the ecological crisis compellingly described by Rachel Carson in her seminal book Silent Spring. In line with Carson’s argument, Earth Day emphasized that post-WWII obsession with chemical pesticides, industrial growth, and consumerism was straining the environment to breaking point, introducing many Americans to the idea of “living lightly on the earth.”

On a positive note, Earth Day heralded the advent of environmentalism in the United States as a social movement. It was primarily a grassroots initiative in which even the mainstream conservation groups played little role in it. Considering the political ferment of the 1960s, it would not be something of an anachronism to frame Earth Day within the hippie counterculture movement sweeping American society. Mixing the rhetoric of moral suasion with the tactics of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements, Hayes fashioned a strategy that simultaneously included and excluded militance.

What makes Earth Day and the ensuing environmental movement typical, however, in comparison with other contemporaneous social movements, is that a great deal of their ideology was premised on the unpolarizing notions of consensus and compromise, eschewing as much as they could inclinations towards radicalism and militance. In other words, instead of becoming oppositional in the manner of social activism of the decade, environmentalism became a point of healing in the context of bipartisan and generational conflict that was racking the United States. Environmental protection became the sort of issue on which a wide range of Americans, from the leaders of industry to politicians to laypeople, could agree. This assured Earth Day a wide reach.

Mainly due to the compromising nature of the environmental issue, Earth Day achieved rousing success, with more than 20 million people from all walks of life participating in what has been described as the largest, cleanest, most peaceful demonstration in American history. “The key to the whole thing,” Nelson recalled, “was the grassroots response.”

A central ramification of Earth Day and, to be fair, some other previous events, was the immediate incorporation of the environment into mainstream American politics. Almost overnight, environmentalism became the central issue of the nation. As late as 1968, the Brookings Institution did not list ecology among the issues believed to be addressed by the new Nixon administration. However, by 1970, pollution and the environment became issues of national gravity and proportion, propelling it to the top of the national political agenda. Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior, John C. Whitaker, later recalled “when President Nixon and his staff walked into the White House on January 20, 1969, we were totally unprepared for the tidal wave of public opinion in favor of cleaning up the environment that was about to engulf us.”

192 countries now celebrating

Interestingly, Earth Day has had a far-reaching impact on the international level, with at least 192 countries now celebrating this event on the same day. More recently, in 2009, the event was co-opted by the United Nations, which established an International Mother Earth Day through a resolution endorsed by more than fifty countries. The Kingdom of Bahrain, embodied in its Supreme Council for Environment, wholeheartedly embraces this initiative through the regular organization of lectures and events that aim at raising local people’s consciousness about environmental sustainability.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Daily Tribune)