By the early 1960s, Americans were becoming aware of the effects of pollution on the environment. Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring raised the specter of the dangerous effects of pesticides on the American countryside. Later in the decade, a 1969 fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River shed light on the problem of chemical waste disposal. Until that time, protecting the planet’s natural resources was not part of the national political agenda, and the number of activists devoted to large-scale issues such as industrial pollution was minimal. Factories pumped pollutants into the air, lakes and rivers with few legal consequences. Big, gas-guzzling cars were considered a sign of prosperity. Only a small portion of the American population was familiar with–let alone practiced–recycling.
Did you know? A highlight of the United Nations' Earth Day celebration in New York City is the ringing of the Peace Bell, a gift from Japan, at the exact moment of the vernal equinox.
Who Started Earth Day?
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962, Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, was determined to convince the federal government that the planet was at risk. In 1969, Nelson, considered one of the leaders of the modern environmental movement, developed the idea for Earth Day after being inspired by the anti-Vietnam War “teach-ins” that were taking place on college campuses around the United States. According to Nelson, he envisioned a large-scale, grassroots environmental demonstration “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda.”
Nelson announced the Earth Day concept at a conference in Seattle in the fall of 1969 and invited the entire nation to get involved. He later recalled:
“The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes and air—and they did so with spectacular exuberance.”
Denis Hayes, a young activist who had served as student president at Stanford University, was selected as Earth Day’s national coordinator, and he worked with an army of student volunteers and several staff members from Nelson’s Senate office to organize the project. According to Nelson, “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.”
The first Earth Day celebration took place on April 22, 1970. In New York City, some 250,000 people flooded Fifth Avenue.
Students at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California release a large balloon during a rally celebrating the first official Earth Day.
A close-up of a hand holding up an Earth Day button, which reads, "Save your Earth—You can't get off." Though urban events made the biggest splash in the press, the true impact of Earth Day came from the more than 12,000 events scattered around the country, attended by an estimated 20 million Americans.
Kurt Amuedo, a third grader at University Park Elementary in Denver, Colorado, displays poster hitting air pollution for Earth Day at school.
Students build a "world" of tin cans at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts for Earth Day, April 21, 1970.
In Hohokus, New Jersey, Terry Seuss, 14, on Earth Day spends time cleaning up recyclable litter.
College students from University of California, Irvine observe the first official Earth Day by visiting a garbage dump in a trolley car with a poster reading "Recognize the Polluter, Recognize Ourselves."
Children use push brooms to sweep a New York City park on Earth Day.
People looking at chart showing average emissions released into the atmosphere per mile of motor travel on the first official Earth Day.
Bicyclists wear signs on their back touting the benefits of biking over driving cars to reduce air pollution.
New Yorkers rollerskate in New York City on Earth Day, 1970.
Peter Cohen of the University of Colorado leads 260 cyclists in the "Bike Hike." Starting the previous weekend leading up to the first Earth Day, a small unit of student cyclists left Boulder. Others joined in Fort Collins, Greeley and Colorado Springs to arrive, along with some 200 walkers, at Denver's Currigan Hall.
Chalk art fills the streets on Earth Day on April 20, 1970 in New York, N.Y.
In NYC's Union Square, girls plant flowers on April 22, 1970
A crowd of people gather in NYC near a large poster that shows a speech bubble from planet Earth that reads "Help!!"
Two young people attempt to share a kiss with each other while wearing gas masks during an Earth Day pollution protest march. Earth Day’s success helped spur action in Washington on behalf of the environment. Just eight months later, Congress authorized the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the 1970s would see passage of a slew of environmental bills.
1 / 16: Santi Visalli/Getty Images
On the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, rallies were held in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and most other American cities, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In New York City, Mayor John Lindsay closed off a portion of Fifth Avenue to traffic for several hours and spoke at a rally in Union Square with actors Paul Newman and Ali McGraw. In Washington, D.C., thousands of people listened to speeches and performances by singer Pete Seeger and others, and Congress went into recess so its members could speak to their constituents at Earth Day events.
The first Earth Day was effective at raising awareness about environmental issues and transforming public attitudes. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Public opinion polls indicate that a permanent change in national priorities followed Earth Day 1970. When polled in May 1971, 25 percent of the U.S. public declared protecting the environment to be an important goal, a 2,500 percent increase over 1969.” Earth Day kicked off the “Environmental decade with a bang,” as Senator Nelson later put it. During the 1970s, a number of important pieces of environmental legislation were passed, among them the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Another key development was the establishment in December 1970 of the Environmental Protection Agency, which was tasked with protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment—air, water and land.
Since 1970, Earth Day celebrations have grown. In 1990, Earth Day went global, with 200 million people in over 140 nations participating, according to the Earth Day Network (EDN), a nonprofit organization that coordinates Earth Day activities. In 2000, Earth Day focused on clean energy and involved hundreds of millions of people in 184 countries and 5,000 environmental groups, according to EDN. Activities ranged from a traveling, talking drum chain in Gabon, Africa, to a gathering of hundreds of thousands of people at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Today, the Earth Day Network collaborates with more than 17,000 partners and organizations in 174 countries. According to EDN, more than 1 billion people are involved in Earth Day activities, making it “the largest secular civic event in the world.”
Through interplanetary probes, orbiting satellites and camera-wielding astronauts, NASA and partners have compiled an ever-growing image library of our own planet.Taken by the crew of Apollo 17, the last crew to set foot on the moon, this powerful image of the planet was dubbed “Blue Marble.” Taken on December 7, 1972 and released at a time of increased environmental awareness, it has been described as “one of the most iconic images, not just of our time, but of all time.”
Our moon is unique in the solar system. Other planets used gravity to capture their satellites; ours formed when a young Earth collided with a smaller planet, ultimately creating the Earth-moon system captured here, in this December 1990 image from the Galileo satellite.
Whether via satellite or from Apollo, Space Shuttle or Space Station, the last five decades have produced a growing wealth of images of our planet from orbit. This LANDSAT image shows individual reefs in the southern part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest structure made by natural organisms on Earth.
Sarychev Volcano, in the Kuril Islands northeast of Japan, erupts on June 12, 2009, the cataclysm was captured during a fortuitously timed pass overhead by the International Space Station (ISS).
Super Typhoon Noru photographed by ISS astronaut Randy Bresnick above the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on August 1, 2017. “You can almost sense its power from 250 miles above," said Bresnick at the time.
Blue meltwater streams and ponds dot the surface of the Greenland ice sheet in this 2016 satellite image. Although this is a natural phenomenon every spring and summer, it is happening earlier, faster and more extensively as the Arctic warms.
In the past, large icebergs would break from Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier every four to six years. Calving then began to occur almost annually. This calving, in October 2018, produced an iceberg dubbed B-46 that, until it began to fracture, was 87 square miles in area.
For centuries, expedition after expedition failed to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, thwarted by impenetrable ice. A warming climate saw conditions gradually change, and in this 2016 image the former graveyard of explorers is almost completely open and navigable by cruise ships.
From space, it is possible to see not only the impacts of a changing climate, but also the fossil fuel use that is responsible for them. In the bottom right of this astronaut photograph is Kuwait City; at the top is the Iraqi town of Basra and its suburb Zubair. The lines of blotches just left of center are gas flares from the Zubair oil fields, among the brightest such flares observed from space.
The mass of light in the bottom right is South Korea; across the top left of the picture are the lights of southeastern China. The dark space between them is North Korea, the faint glow of Pyongyang the only illumination from the hermit kingdom.
On September 11, 2001, NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was on board the International Space Station, the only American on the crew. As the ISS flew over the New York City area, he trained a camera on the scene below and documented this plume of smoke extending across Lower Manhattan from the World Trade Center.
Wildfires that burned through large swaths of Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 is here captured by this image from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 of burned land and thick smoke covering Kangaroo Island.
From a distance of 898 million miles, Earth appears as a tiny speck beneath Saturn’s rings in this image from the Cassini spacecraft.
As it headed out of the solar system forever, Voyager 1 sent back one last shot of its home world, a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. This version, released in 2020, uses modern image-enhancing software and techniques to brighten the iconic image.
Compiled from a series of images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on October 12, 2015, this image evokes the first "Earthrise" photograph, taken by William Anders from on board Apollo 8 in 1968. Noted Jeffrey Kluger in TIME magazine upon the image’s release: “The moon has not felt the press of human boots for 43 years, and it could be many more years before it does again. But the view from the world we visited and left remains spellbinding.”
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