In fall 1968, the first Whole Earth Catalog reproduced on its cover a NASA composite photograph never before seen in public — Earth floating in the arid blackness of space, beautifully blue and alone and fragile.
In January 1969, a runaway oil rig blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel in California devastated local wildlife and alarmed the nation with images of oil-soaked beaches, seabirds and seals. Then in June, the Cuyahoga River, an industrial sewer running through downtown Cleveland, caught fire. In fact the river had combusted many times before, and some of these fires were bigger, but Time magazine reported on this one and the story went national.
In 1969, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, flying back to Washington from an inspection of the California spill, read an article about "teach-ins" created by activists opposed to the Vietnam War and thought: Why not create a teaching event for the environment? He hired young organizer Denis Hayes to run a national environmental teach-in out of his D.C. office. He and a handful of staff organized what became, on April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million people taking action for what was by then firmly labeled "Earth Day."
Citizens and their representatives in Washington were galvanized, the policy results transformative. President Richard Nixon deserves credit for proposing, on July 9, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency, and later signing pioneering environmental legislation protecting clean air and water, although he did so in part to outflank potential Democratic opponent Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson of Washington — both were consummate politicians who heard the citizenry's howl and responded.
This April 22, the 50th anniversary of what is now the largest secular holiday worldwide, it is useful to recall these founding stories: an inspirational image of fragile earth, omnipresent now as the "big blue marble" photograph taken from Apollo 17; fossil-fueled calamities, now all too familiar; Earth Day's organized citizen action, and determined political response.
The 50th anniversary will be the strangest, as the COVID-19 pandemic will require most citizens to demonstrate at home and online. Yet this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, requiring the urgent, game-changing response COVID-19 received. This year is forecast to be the hottest on record, after 2019's frightening and costly fires, floods and storms that devastated the Australian bush and Midwestern farms. The melting of the ice caps and glaciers accelerates as temperatures soar, a record 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in Antarctica on Feb. 8, the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. Already 90 American cities experience some flooding, while officials in low-lying cities like Manila consider how to move.
Yet good news is also plentiful. Wind and solar energy are booming at a scale and cost unimaginable even a few years ago, with electric cars, buses, trucks and charging stations rolling out fast around the world. In September, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power accepted a bid for electricity produced by renewable energy, including storage capacity for round-the-clock supply, at 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, far cheaper than any other source. And Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are building an island to house 7,000 wind turbines to provide electricity for 80 million Europeans. The green-energy revolution is now.
Meanwhile, the global fossil-fuel industry is reeling from falling demand, a price war and withdrawal of the global finance system from further investment. The fossil-fuel divestment movement begun in 2012 has surpassed $12 trillion in public commitments to divest from fossil-fuel stocks and investments. And in January the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest financial firm, wrote to global CEOs that his company will be considering climate change in investment decisions: "I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance."
