The History of Earth Day

The original site - a company built on an environmental wager - kept a page honoring the history of Earth Day, drawn from the recollections of its founder, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Nelson died in July 2005 at age 89; not long before his death he set down answers to the questions he was most often asked about how the first Earth Day came to be. We preserve that account here.

How the First Earth Day Came About - In the Founder's Words

The idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years, starting in 1962. For several years it had been troubling Nelson that the state of the environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. In November 1962 his idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give the issue visibility through a national conservation tour. The President began a five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963 - and for many reasons it did not succeed in putting the environment onto the national political agenda. But it was, Nelson wrote, the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

He continued speaking on environmental issues to audiences in some twenty-five states. Across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed - except the political establishment. The people were concerned; the politicians were not.

Six years passed before the breakthrough came to him, on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969: why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment? At a conference in Seattle in September 1969 he announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment, and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story coast to coast, and the response was electric. The American people finally had a forum to express their concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes and air - and they expressed it with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, members of his small Senate staff managed Earth Day affairs out of his office.

Five months before the event, on November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy report on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events: "Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation's campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam... a national day of observance of environmental problems... is being planned for next spring."

Earth Day worked, Nelson always insisted, because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. His office had neither the time nor the resources to organize the 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and communities that took part. "That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day," he wrote. "It organized itself."

What Followed

The page's mid-2000s snapshot of progress still reads as a fair ledger of the era: dramatically cleaner air than in 1970; over a thousand abandoned industrial sites restored; hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands restored or protected; landmark rules cutting mercury from power plants; dozens of endangered species recovered; and a National Wildlife Refuge System grown to more than 93 million acres. Earth Day itself is now observed around the globe each April - see earthday.org's history pages for the movement's continuing story, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin for the founder's living legacy.

Why This Page Lived on a Cleaning-Products Site

Because the company's whole reason for existing - replacing strip-mined pumice with recycled glass - was Earth Day thinking applied to a product aisle. That story is told in the environmental philosophy and company history pages.