An oil spill and twenty million people
In January 1969, an oil well off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, blew out, and millions of litres of crude oil spread along the beaches, coating seabirds and seals. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, shocked by the damage, proposed a national day of teaching about the environment. A young organiser called Denis Hayes ran it, and on 22 April 1970 around twenty million Americans, about one in ten people in the country, joined marches, rallies and school events. Nelson chose a Wednesday in late April on purpose, after most universities' spring holidays and before exams, so that students would be free to take part.
It changed the law. By the end of 1970 the United States had created its Environmental Protection Agency and passed a much stronger Clean Air Act. Earth Day went worldwide in 1990, with around 200 million people in 141 countries taking part, and in 2016 world leaders chose Earth Day to sign the Paris Agreement on CLIMATE change. The book that helped start the whole movement, Silent Spring, is covered on our activists page.
The photograph of a planet
On Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to see the whole EARTH from far away, as they orbited the Moon. The astronaut Bill Anders took a colour photograph of the blue and white PLANET rising over the grey lunar surface. Earthrise, as it was called, appeared everywhere, and many people said it made them see for the first time how small and fragile the world is. Our space race page covers the missions. A peace campaigner called John McConnell designed an Earth flag with a photograph of the planet on a dark blue background, and he also started a separate Earth Day on the March equinox, still marked each year at the United Nations.
Reduce first, then do something
The three Rs, REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE, are in that order for a reason. Using less in the first place saves the most, reusing comes next, and RECYCLING, which still takes energy and transport, comes last. Some materials recycle far better than others. An aluminium drinks can can be melted down and back on a shop shelf as a new can in around two months, and it can be recycled again and again without wearing out. Paper fibres get shorter each time and can only be recycled a handful of times.
Food scraps put in a COMPOST heap rot down into rich soil instead of rotting in a landfill site, where they give off methane, a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
Earth Day is now marked by more than a billion people a year. Schools and families plant TREES, join a CLEANUP of a beach, park or riverbank to collect LITTER and plastic before it reaches the OCEAN, build homes for WILDLIFE or save energy at home. Topics from SOLAR power and other RENEWABLE energy to protecting each HABITAT and FOREST, cutting CARBON and POLLUTION, and learning to CONSERVE NATURE all turn up on the day, and the colour GREEN is everywhere. Each year has its own theme; in 2024 it was plastic waste, and in 2020, the fiftieth anniversary, events moved online during the pandemic.