The history of Earth Day—and why it still matters

From our collaborative partner Living on Earth, environmental magazine of public radiohost Steve Curwood’s interview with environmental historian Adam Romeo.

Earth Day was born in 1970 in a moment of human solidarity in difficult times. Violent war protests in Vietnam, the burning of black communities and the public destruction of girdles and bras by feminists spoke to great social divisions.

And then, like the sweetest chord in a symphony, Christmas Eve 1968 brought the photographs of Earth taken by the first men to orbit the moon. Humanity gasped as Apollo 8 showed that we are all on one beautiful blue marble, shimmering in the black expanse of space.

Within 16 months, the first Earth Day brought together 20 million Americans in peaceful demonstrations—a record that still stands today. We gathered to take care of our common home, and for that day at least each other. On this Earth Day, April 22nd, we seem to share a lot, but we also have brand new images of our shared planet, thanks to Artemis II.

Adam Rome is a professor and environmental historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of “Earth Day Genius: How a 1970 Lecturer Unexpectedly Created the First Green Generation.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

STEVE CURWOOD: Tell me about the political atmosphere of the late 1960s. To what extent did movements such as civil rights, anti-war, and women’s rights set the stage for the first Earth Day in 1970?

CURWOOD: How many people were there at that first Earth Day?

ROME: Twenty million people, which is about one-eighth of the population — which was astounding.

Almost every college, every K-12 school had some kind of Earth Day event. And there were also events in public spaces and in front of corporate offices or government buildings. It was like that everywhere. It was such a big deal that Congress closed for the day. Two-thirds of the members will speak somewhere, and those were both Republicans and Democrats.

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

ROME: “Teach-in” was Gaylord Nelson’s phrase. It was a strategy the anti-war movement used years ago to hold these politicized events on campuses to bring both pro-war and anti-war people together in debate. And Gaylord Nelson was convinced that it could empower people, that it could move them to action. That is why he said that he will organize environmental classes.

I think his insight was astute, that these issues have not been discussed much. There weren’t a lot of experts, there weren’t a lot of books, there weren’t a lot of journalists writing about the ecological rhythm, and Earth Day became this soul-searching experience for a lot of people; that was the 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 publicly about environmental issues. People really debated, first of all, how serious the problems were. Were they a nuisance or a threat to civilization? People debated how deep the causes go? Is there something fundamentally wrong with capitalism? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, or was it something for which you could simply, by ordinary political means, find solutions?

People also really had to decide how important it was to them personally. Did they want to do something different? This was also the first time, really, that people imagined that maybe they should consume less or differently.

People were asking really practical everyday questions, you know, “What should 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 incredibly challenging. They made a lot of people think about things in a way they hadn’t before.

CURWOOD: This year’s Earth Day draws many parallels to that first event in 1970. Both then and now we see a lot of political division and unrest. The US is fighting a war in another country and on another continent, but at the same time we are sending men to the moon. How can we apply the lessons from the original movement to today?

ROME: In the past, I could have easily given a variety of lessons about what made Earth Day so powerful, what was the genius of Earth Day, and ways that while we can never have another Earth Day like 1970, what we could do.

The current moment seems to me to be much more challenging, because even though there are all the parallels you just mentioned, I don’t think people in 1970 really thought democracy was at stake, and many people were looking to the government to help solve these problems. Now there is a large part of our country that simply cannot accept that idea.

When I discussed this with my students, they were interested in finding ways to bridge the partisan divide, if possible. A lot of the ways they find it compelling aren’t big public events that are obviously political, but other kinds of things, like they hope community gardens can bring people together and empower them and allow people to talk who might not otherwise agree on many things. Or if they start growing their own food, they might think about other environmental issues.

That’s really profoundly different from Gaylord Nelson’s feeling that people would change if we just had a really civil but deep conversation. It’s hard to imagine a truly civil, deep conversation now for many reasons.

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

ROME: Gaylord Nelson never imagined when he first planned Earth Day that it would be more than a one-time event. But some places have been celebrating Earth Days ever since. Sometimes they are quite amazing, but as you say, they are generally much tamer. They are mainly for children.

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

This year when I asked my class, “What do you expect this year?”, they all expected next to nothing. I hope they are wrong. But it was hard for them to imagine anything really dramatically significant.

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

ROME: For years, many people have asked me, “Is it even worth having Earth Day anymore?” To me, that question is less interesting than asking why the first one was so powerful and what we could learn from it.

Lessons learned from the first Earth Day may not apply to Earth Day itself. The biggest lesson I learned was 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 could be something completely different from what we think of as Earth Day.

Whenever I get depressed—and it’s not hard to get depressed when you’re thinking about climate change and other issues—I’m inspired by the story of the first Earth Day, which was completely unexpected and led, in every way, to dramatic, measurable progress in solving environmental problems.

Our air is much cleaner, our water is much cleaner, all the problems that people wanted to solve in 1970, we have 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 it inspires you. I think we need inspiration, and especially to do things that make us feel more powerful. We can’t solve any problem if we all feel powerless.