The History of Earth Day—and Why It Still Matters

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with environmental historian Adam Rome. 

Earth Day was born in 1970 during a moment of human solidarity in troubled times. Violent Vietnam war protests, burning Black communities and girdles and bras publicly trashed by feminists spoke of great social divides. 

And then, like the sweetest chord in a symphony, Christmas Eve 1968 brought photos of Earth taken by the first humans to circle the Moon. Humanity gasped as Apollo 8 showed that all of us were on a single gorgeous blue marble, shimmering in the black vastness of space. 

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

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 atmosphere 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 in attendance on that first Earth Day? 

ROME: Twenty million people, which was about an eighth of the population—which was astonishing. 

Pretty much every college, every K-12 school, had some kind of Earth Day event. And there also were events in public spaces and in front of offices of corporations or government buildings. So it was everywhere. It was such a big deal that Congress shut down for the day. Two thirds of the members were going to be speaking somewhere, and that was Republicans as well as Democrats.

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

ROME: The “teach-in” was Gaylord Nelson’s phrase. It was a strategy that the anti-war movement had used a few years before to have these politicized events on campuses that brought both pro-war and anti-war people together to debate. And Gaylord Nelson was convinced that that could empower people, that it could lead them to action. So he said he would organize an environmental teach-in. 

I think his insight was shrewd, that the issues hadn’t really been widely discussed. There weren’t a lot of experts, there weren’t a lot of books, there weren’t journalists writing on the environmental beat, and Earth Day became this soul-searching experience for a lot of people; that was a phrase The New York Times used to describe Earth Day events at the University of Michigan. 

Tens of thousands of people spoke on Earth Day who had never spoken about environmental issues publicly. People really debated, first of all, how serious the issues were. Were they annoyances, or were they civilization-threatening? People debated, how deep did the causes go? Was there something fundamentally wrong with capitalism? Was there something fundamentally wrong with Judeo-Christian religious tradition, or was it something that you could just, through ordinary political means, figure out solutions to? 

People also really had to decide how much it mattered to them personally. Were they going to do anything different? This was also the first time, really, that people imagined that maybe they needed to consume less or differently. 

People asked really practical day-to-day questions, you know, “What do we do about Lake Erie? It seems to be dying …” to more existential kinds of questions about what kind of relationship we had with nature and whether that needed to change in some profound way. The conversations were civil, but they were incredibly challenging. They forced a lot of people to think about things in a way they hadn’t thought about before.

CURWOOD: This year’s Earth Day draws a lot of parallels to that first event back in 1970. Both then and now we’re seeing a lot of political division and unrest. The U.S. is waging a war in another country and another continent, but at the same time, we’re sending people to the moon. How can we apply lessons from the original movement to today?

ROME: In the past, I could easily give a variety of lessons about what made Earth Day so powerful, what was the genius of Earth Day and ways that we, even though we can’t ever have another Earth Day like 1970, what we might do. 

The current moment feels much more challenging to me, because although there are all the parallels that you just mentioned, I don’t think people in 1970 really thought that democracy might be at stake, and a lot of people did look to government to help solve these problems. There’s a huge part of our country now that just can’t begin to accept that idea. 

When I talked about this with my students, they’re interested in finding ways to bridge the partisan divide, if that’s possible. And many of the ways that they find compelling are not big public events that are obviously political, but other kinds of things, like they have hopes that community gardens could bring people together and be empowering and allow people to talk who might otherwise disagree about a lot of things. Or if they start growing some of their own food, they might think about other environmental issues. 

That’s really profoundly different than Gaylord Nelson’s sense that if we just had a really civil but deep conversation, people would change. It’s hard to imagine a really civil, deep conversation right now for lots of reasons.

CURWOOD: Despite the unexpected success of its inaugural event, 20 million people attending, today, Earth Day feels—let’s face it—a little more symbolic than it is impactful. It might be celebrated with a local trash cleanup or maybe a craft in a classroom, if it’s remembered at all. How did we get there?

ROME: Gaylord Nelson never envisioned when he was first planning Earth Day that it would be more than a one-time event. But some places have had Earth Days ever since. Sometimes they’re pretty amazing, but as you say, mostly they’re much tamer. They’re mostly for kids. 

And the 2020 Earth Day, which would have been the 50th anniversary, was wiped out by the pandemic. So we don’t have that example. There had only been one other one that was nationally organized: That was 1990, the 20th anniversary. We don’t really have a recent example of what a really kick-ass Earth Day could be. 

This year when I asked my class, “What do you expect this year?,” they all expected pretty much nothing. I hope they’re wrong. But they had a hard time imagining anything really dramatically meaningful. 

CURWOOD: In your classes do students ever ask what we’ve lost by not paying much attention to Earth Day anymore? And what would you say?

ROME: I’ve been asked over the years by a number of people, like, “Is it even worth it to have Earth Day anymore?” That question, to me, is less interesting than asking questions about why the first one was so powerful and what we could learn from it. 

The lessons that we learned from the first Earth Day might not be applied to Earth Day itself. The biggest lesson I draw is that it was empowering. How can we think about what would be empowering today? What would change the way people think and act? And it might be something totally different than what we think of as Earth Day. 

Whenever I get depressed—and it’s not hard to get depressed when you think about climate change and some other issues—I am inspired by the story of the first Earth Day, which was totally unexpected and led, in all kinds of ways, to dramatic, measurable progress in dealing with environmental problems. 

Our air is much cleaner, our water is much cleaner, all the problems that people wanted to address in 1970, we’ve done a lot. We haven’t solved them all, but we’ve done a lot. So I would say, read about the first Earth Day 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.