Remembering the Radical Roots of Earth Day: April 22, 1970

[appalachiablue]

- April 22, 1990. View of crowd gathered on the US Capitol grounds and some in the Capitol Reflecting Pool for an Earth Day rally, Washington, DC. The background is the US Capitol Building.
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- Common Dreams, April 22, 2022.

- Set in the wider arc of history, Earth Day stands for me as a reminder of the importance of fact-based and community-grounded advocacy for moving the needle on inclusive, just environmental policy and practice. -

Happy Earth Day! I was only four years old when the first Earth Day took place. But as I began to work on climate change, I found it inspiring to look back at the photos from April 1970 and learn about what motivated 20 million people to action—and the impact of public mobilization on policy and practice in the years that followed. Earth Day didn’t come out of nowhere. The seeds for action were incubated in the fertile ground of anti-war, civil rights, and women’s rights protests of the 1960s.

Many of my friends in the climate movement are understandably cynical about what Earth Day has become today—in many ways, it has been reduced to calls for small individual acts (like picking up trash or composting coffee grounds) over the larger systemic changes and solutions that require much harder choices and trade-offs. Some companies have co-opted the day to sell more “environmentally friendly” products, or worse, to provide polluters with an opportunity to greenwash their miserable track records. But as a lifelong student of history and an unbridled optimist, I still find hope and inspiration in its radical roots.

The buildup to a movement

Earth Day didn’t come out of nowhere. The seeds for action were incubated in the fertile ground of anti-war, civil rights, and women’s rights protests of the 1960s. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s bestseller Silent Spring pulled the curtain back on the dangerous effects of pesticides and helped spur public awareness about the links between environmental degradation and public health. It’s satisfying to me that Dr. Carson’s visionary research did find its mark even though she had to endure highly gendered criticism from men who pegged her as “hysterical, mystical and witchy.”

Seven years later in 1969, an oil slick on Cleveland’s polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire just 25 miles down the road from my grandparents’ farm in Canton, Ohio. National media coverage by Time magazine and National Geographic helped shine a light on the injustices of chemical waste disposal. By 1970, the American public was just waking up to the disastrous implications of environmental degradation. The first Earth Day was envisioned by one of its founders, the former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, as a way to “shake up the political establishment,” and broaden national attention to environmental issues through teach-ins, demonstrations, and other advocacy. - A big tent for our planet: Politicians left, right, and center embraced the cause in the beginning. Labor unions were also deeply involved...

- More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/04/22/remembering-radical-roots-earth-day

[spike jones]

1. I remember the first Earth Day.

We worked on a project in a city park in Redlands California planting trees by a stream, during which we took some acid, and I don't know what happen after that, but I hope those 52-year-old trees are doing well.