April 22, 1970: The United States first celebrated Earth Day, the culmination of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson’s campaign to bring environmental activism into the mainstream. Throughout the preceding decade, he was the leading congressional advocate of environmentalism and traveled the country speaking especially about the everyday impacts of pollution. The first Earth Day started as a teach-in event at the University of Michigan and then blossomed into a series of similar actions across the United States. Historian Adam Rome emphasizes that “Because Earth Day 1970 was unprecedented, the organizers had to plan everything from scratch, and the effort often was life-changing. Tens of thousands of people spoke on Earth Day—and many had never spoken publicly about environmental issues before . . . Earth Day built a lasting eco-infrastructure: national and state lobbying organizations, environmental-studies programs, environmental beats at newspapers, eco sections in bookstores, community ecology centers.”
Citations: Bill Christofferson, The Man from Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 1, 8, Kindle edition; Adam Rome, *The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), Kindle edition; Bernard Gotfryd, “Earth Day, NYC,” photograph (New York, NY, 1970), https://lccn.loc.gov/2020738311.
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