When Earth Day Was a Radical, Millions-Strong Challenge to Power

It is Earth Day, the day where Americans—do what, exactly? If we follow the exhortations of the media, we'll take a minute to consider the impact we have on the planet. We'll "celebrate" it. We'll remember to recycle. We'll watch green-themed TV ads and Google Doodles. If we are exceptionally proactive, we will attend an Earth Day volunteer event.

These are all nice things, and while it suffers criticisms that it has become a nebulous and highly Hallmarked consumerist panacea, Earth Day continues to offer a visible platform for communicating conservationist ideas and to serve as a useful organizing tool for environmentalists. But, like many other 'holidays' we have institutionalized and perfunctorily observe, we have pretty successfully scrubbed it of its impressive and provocative radical origins.

The first Earth Day, in 1970, of course, had nothing to do with remembering to turn the lights off when you leave a room. It was about mobilizing a massive, popular demonstration to enact sweeping institutional reforms—to curb pollution spewed freely by corporations and enact environmental protections on a federal level. The protests and teach-ins that sprung up across the nation dwarfed Occupy and Tea Party protests, combined. Easily.

The Earth Day Network elaborates on its history:

… on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. "It was a gamble," [US Senator Gaylord Nelson] recalled, "but it worked."

This kind of political event—at once radical, bipartisan, peaceful, and huge—is simply unimaginable today. To further emphasize its import, remember that there were 100 million fewer people in the US in 1970, which means an estimated one-tenth of the nation participated.

The unfortunate truth is that now, as we face an even greater spate of threats to the environment, some of them downright existential—climate change, species loss, water and resource shortages, and so on—there's no true Earth Day in sight.