The First Earth Day: Recalling Wisconsin Senator and Founder Gaylord Nelson

[iwishiwas]

Some good history included.


http://dundalk.patch.com/articles/the-first-earth-day-recalling-wisconsin-senator-and-founder-gaylord-nelson

The First Earth Day: Recalling Wisconsin Senator and Founder Gaylord Nelson

Earth Day rallies helped lead to passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts.

By Ron Cassie | Email the author | 2:16am

Founded in 1970 as an environmental teach-in by a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, Earth Day rallies helped lead to passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Act. Courtesy image
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In 1969, two environmental crises—a massive oil tanker spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, and an oil, grease and garbage fire on the infamous Cuyahoga River, which shot flames into the air over Cleveland—became iconic images of ecological destruction.

Other images, of urban smog, of a dead Lake Erie, of the pesticide DDT killing backyard birds, stuck in the public’s mind, as well as with a Wisconsin U.S. senator named Gaylord Nelson. The principal founder of Earth Day, Nelson launched the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, attracting 20 million Americans to demonstrations, rallies, lectures and marches across the country.

By 1990, Earth Day had become a global phenomenon, mobilizing 200 million people in 140 countries.

In Beyond Earth Day, published in 2002, Nelson says he got the idea for Earth Day while on a conservation tour out west in the summer of 1969, when peace “teach-ins” against the Vietnam War were gaining popularity........................

[prairierose]

1. I remember the first Earth day teach- in....

I skipped school and spent all day listening to various seminars about cleaning up rivers and global warming and the problems industrial ag was causing with run-off and other things. There were some great speakers and presentations. Since then, I have recycled as much as possible, tried to educate others and planted trees most years. I drive small cars, live in a small house and do not buy everything that comes along.

[era veteran]

2. The tears never leave, it is worse now.

[swilton]

4. You are right Era Veteran

It is not so much the environmental destruction that is so sad, it is that we have the technological capacity to mediate that destruction but we are unable to do so because we lack the political will. The oil and MIC interests and capitalist power structures are holding the country as well as the planet hostage.

[swilton]

3. University of Oklahoma 1970

The first Earth Day Celebrated...My physics (for non-science majors) teacher told us all to cut class and go. He also inspired me because he didn't own a car - rode his bike and/or took public transportation every place he had to go. He also required the class to write papers on 'the environment'. I will never forget the epiphanal moments from that class.

The environmental teach-in was one of many demonstrations of student activism that year....It really upset the Republican Governor Bartlett who proclaimed 'dissent on a college campus is an insult to the integrity and intelligence of that campus".....Dr. J. Herbert Hollomon was the University President and resigned that summer. (Oklahoma Daily Headlines, Friday, July 24, 1970, 'Hollomon Resigns')
Despite what others may thing that we can 'economically grow' our way out of the environmental crisis, capitalism is not an ally of the environment or our ecology.

It also saddens me that student activism is not what it was - If the University of Oklahoma was active (Women's Rights, the Environment, Anti-War, Native American Rights) that summer, just consider what other college campuses must have been.

[freshwest]

5. I and my other Young Democrats organized this for our college. So much was accomplished.

When the war ended, it freed more people to go to work resulting in switching focus for most young people like us, although I continued on environmental movements through the mid-seventies. Then like many, I adapted the lessons learned in my own life and worked hard in all the other fields I could after hours, including union work in the eighties. Reagan attacked all of what we worked for, along with the religious right, and the rest is history. It's destroying us now.