A few months ago when I thought about how I might celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, it did not occur to me that I, and many others, would be forbidden to report to work. This has created the opportunity for more learning and doing. In honor of Earth Day, Real Hartford will have one week of treehugging, dirt worshipping posts.
My first memory of Earth Day was in middle school, when we were assigned to create posters for the occasion. It seemed that all my peers were making “Save the Rainforest” posters, which was the first time I had heard any of them mention a rain forest. (Usually, they were focused solely on NKOTB. I suspect they had help from their parents.) The whole exercise felt cheap and trendy, and even then I did not understand the point of it. Aside from something that might have popped up in a Weekly Reader, I don’t remember us even talking about the environment. The whole activity was full of feel good mantras, but nothing substantial. Yes, that sort of thing bothered me even then. I was obviously the life of the party.
By that point, Earth Day had been around for awhile, not that we learned about it before or after that particular year.
That’s a shame, because Earth Day has a neat origin story, and since I don’t presume all readers here are Boomers, I’ll go ahead and drop some history.
The first Earth Day took place fifty years ago on April 22, 1970. Planning for this occasion, however, got started in the year prior. Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson announced the concept of Earth Day in the autumn of 1969. The catalyst was a massive oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel that began in January 1969. At the time, it was the largest oil spill in U.S. history; over 50 years later, it is ranked as the third largest. Sen. Nelson visited the oil spill site and was inspired by this disaster to organize Earth Day.
The oil spill was not the only ecological disaster of the time. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had been so polluted by industrial waste that it caught fire at least ten times since 1868, though it took spontaneous combustion in 1969 to earn widespread attention.
And y’all thought the Park River had problems.
As for gaining momentum, it was understood that any movement should tap into youthful energy. With college students especially engaged in social activism during this era, the event was planned for the time between Spring Break and final exams, when adult students would be on campus but not overwhelmed by mid-term or final exams. This explains how April 22nd was chosen.
This was a smart move. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day. Over 1,500 college campuses had activities, from teach-ins to dramatic protests. More on that in a moment.
While the timing was great for that demographic, adjustments were needed to involve children, as a number of public schools (k-12) were closed for Spring Vacation. In Connecticut, many marked the occasion in advance by having teach-ins, litter clean ups, poster making activities, and more. The participation was there, just not on the exact same day.
Earth Day, by the way, was not always known as Earth Day. Initially, it was also referred to as Ecology Day, Ecology Drive, Environment Day, and E-Day. Earth Day sounds way better than an Ecology Drive. For one, you can say “Earth Day is Every Day” but what rhyme would you get with the other? “Ecology Drive is Jive?” Doesn’t work.
It’s hard to explain what a big deal this was, but take a look at any newspaper/news site today. What are 98% of the stories about? Now, imagine if you replaced that with tales of what people around the country were doing for the occasion, whether on campuses, in cities, or in Connecticut’s small towns that you forgot existed unless you happened to live in one.
Our state’s then-Governor Dempsey’s “Keep Connecticut Beautiful Committee” officially endorsed the Earth Day activities that were planned on campuses and in communities state- and nationwide. That may seem like nothing if you think everyone just made posters and sang campfire songs.
One of the more radical acts was in New Haven. An audience of 200 students, mostly from Yale, took part in and watched what the Hartford Courant described as a mock trial of a “1952 model car.” The car ultimately got “convicted of ‘murder of plant, animal and human life by willful emission of noxious pollutants.’” Its punishment? Getting destroyed by sledgehammers.
In a “give me my car or give me death” culture, that’s kind of a big deal.
Other Earth Day festivities were less about smashing the status quo and more of what one might expect.
Canton’s Roaring Brook Nature Center held a teach-in to educate about foraging and canning wild fruits. I’ll say it now: I really am not in love with the term “teach-in”. Call it a class or a workshop already!
Groton hosted a survival workshop and offered tugboat excursions.
University of Hartford scheduled activities for what they called the “National Teach-In on the Environment,” including a panel discussion featuring someone described as a “crusader against transport pollution.”
There were lectures on pesticide use, waste disposal, and noise pollution, along with film screenings. Beside the Park River (that flows through campus) some students joined in an “all night ecology camp-out.”
Eastern Connecticut State University (which went by Eastern Connecticut State College at the time) had Isaac Asimov give a talk titled “The Nature of Man.”
In the week before Earth Day, its founder, Sen. Nelson, along with former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, led a discussion at Yale’s School of Forestry, as a preview of the national teach-in.
Plenty happened beyond Connecticut’s borders, so I will only mention my favorites.
New York’s Mayor John Lindsay converted 45 blocks of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue into a car-free environment for two hours on Earth Day. He remarked that “unquestionably incineration, and automobiles are the biggest contributors to pollution.”
Additionally, automobiles were banned for the day from Central Park, Prospect Park, Silver Lake Park, and Forest Park in New York City.
Mayor Lindsay could be described as ahead of his time, but the Active Conservation Tactics group at Berkeley pushed for “lower tolls for cars with four or more passengers as an incentive for car pools,” wrote the New York Times. Actions in Providence, likewise, intended to promote carpooling.
In what may seem unbelievable today, part of that first Earth Day was a mass phone-in to industrial polluters. Not filling out a petition online, but picking up the telephone and dialing strangers.
We can’t overlook that there were a few fails. Locally, Trinity College students were reported to have released thousands of balloons at rush hour. Did they think having anti-pollution slogans (“This is the only clean air you can breathe”) on the balloons canceled out the act of polluting?
They were not alone in this misguided effort. One year later in Bountiful, Utah, 350 balloons were dropped from a plane. These were emblazoned with both anti-littering and anti-pollution slogans. This effort was determined to be unsuccessful at the time, but not because of the obvious cognitive dissonance. The balloons were supposed to be dropped onto school grounds; instead, because the pilot misjudged the wind, they landed in a nearby subdivision.
While we applaud Earth Day, we should learn from the mistakes of others — no matter how well-intentioned they were in the moment.
50 Years of Earth Day: How It Began
A few months ago when I thought about how I might celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, it did not occur to me that I, and many others, would be forbidden to report to work. This has created the opportunity for more learning and doing. In honor of Earth Day, Real Hartford will have one week of treehugging, dirt worshipping posts.
My first memory of Earth Day was in middle school, when we were assigned to create posters for the occasion. It seemed that all my peers were making “Save the Rainforest” posters, which was the first time I had heard any of them mention a rain forest. (Usually, they were focused solely on NKOTB. I suspect they had help from their parents.) The whole exercise felt cheap and trendy, and even then I did not understand the point of it. Aside from something that might have popped up in a Weekly Reader, I don’t remember us even talking about the environment. The whole activity was full of feel good mantras, but nothing substantial. Yes, that sort of thing bothered me even then. I was obviously the life of the party.
By that point, Earth Day had been around for awhile, not that we learned about it before or after that particular year.
That’s a shame, because Earth Day has a neat origin story, and since I don’t presume all readers here are Boomers, I’ll go ahead and drop some history.
The first Earth Day took place fifty years ago on April 22, 1970. Planning for this occasion, however, got started in the year prior. Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson announced the concept of Earth Day in the autumn of 1969. The catalyst was a massive oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel that began in January 1969. At the time, it was the largest oil spill in U.S. history; over 50 years later, it is ranked as the third largest. Sen. Nelson visited the oil spill site and was inspired by this disaster to organize Earth Day.
The oil spill was not the only ecological disaster of the time. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had been so polluted by industrial waste that it caught fire at least ten times since 1868, though it took spontaneous combustion in 1969 to earn widespread attention.
And y’all thought the Park River had problems.
As for gaining momentum, it was understood that any movement should tap into youthful energy. With college students especially engaged in social activism during this era, the event was planned for the time between Spring Break and final exams, when adult students would be on campus but not overwhelmed by mid-term or final exams. This explains how April 22nd was chosen.
This was a smart move. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day. Over 1,500 college campuses had activities, from teach-ins to dramatic protests. More on that in a moment.
While the timing was great for that demographic, adjustments were needed to involve children, as a number of public schools (k-12) were closed for Spring Vacation. In Connecticut, many marked the occasion in advance by having teach-ins, litter clean ups, poster making activities, and more. The participation was there, just not on the exact same day.
Earth Day, by the way, was not always known as Earth Day. Initially, it was also referred to as Ecology Day, Ecology Drive, Environment Day, and E-Day. Earth Day sounds way better than an Ecology Drive. For one, you can say “Earth Day is Every Day” but what rhyme would you get with the other? “Ecology Drive is Jive?” Doesn’t work.
It’s hard to explain what a big deal this was, but take a look at any newspaper/news site today. What are 98% of the stories about? Now, imagine if you replaced that with tales of what people around the country were doing for the occasion, whether on campuses, in cities, or in Connecticut’s small towns that you forgot existed unless you happened to live in one.
Our state’s then-Governor Dempsey’s “Keep Connecticut Beautiful Committee” officially endorsed the Earth Day activities that were planned on campuses and in communities state- and nationwide. That may seem like nothing if you think everyone just made posters and sang campfire songs.
One of the more radical acts was in New Haven. An audience of 200 students, mostly from Yale, took part in and watched what the Hartford Courant described as a mock trial of a “1952 model car.” The car ultimately got “convicted of ‘murder of plant, animal and human life by willful emission of noxious pollutants.’” Its punishment? Getting destroyed by sledgehammers.
In a “give me my car or give me death” culture, that’s kind of a big deal.
Other Earth Day festivities were less about smashing the status quo and more of what one might expect.
Canton’s Roaring Brook Nature Center held a teach-in to educate about foraging and canning wild fruits. I’ll say it now: I really am not in love with the term “teach-in”. Call it a class or a workshop already!
Groton hosted a survival workshop and offered tugboat excursions.
University of Hartford scheduled activities for what they called the “National Teach-In on the Environment,” including a panel discussion featuring someone described as a “crusader against transport pollution.”
There were lectures on pesticide use, waste disposal, and noise pollution, along with film screenings. Beside the Park River (that flows through campus) some students joined in an “all night ecology camp-out.”
Eastern Connecticut State University (which went by Eastern Connecticut State College at the time) had Isaac Asimov give a talk titled “The Nature of Man.”
In the week before Earth Day, its founder, Sen. Nelson, along with former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, led a discussion at Yale’s School of Forestry, as a preview of the national teach-in.
Plenty happened beyond Connecticut’s borders, so I will only mention my favorites.
New York’s Mayor John Lindsay converted 45 blocks of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue into a car-free environment for two hours on Earth Day. He remarked that “unquestionably incineration, and automobiles are the biggest contributors to pollution.”
Additionally, automobiles were banned for the day from Central Park, Prospect Park, Silver Lake Park, and Forest Park in New York City.
Mayor Lindsay could be described as ahead of his time, but the Active Conservation Tactics group at Berkeley pushed for “lower tolls for cars with four or more passengers as an incentive for car pools,” wrote the New York Times. Actions in Providence, likewise, intended to promote carpooling.
In what may seem unbelievable today, part of that first Earth Day was a mass phone-in to industrial polluters. Not filling out a petition online, but picking up the telephone and dialing strangers.
We can’t overlook that there were a few fails. Locally, Trinity College students were reported to have released thousands of balloons at rush hour. Did they think having anti-pollution slogans (“This is the only clean air you can breathe”) on the balloons canceled out the act of polluting?
They were not alone in this misguided effort. One year later in Bountiful, Utah, 350 balloons were dropped from a plane. These were emblazoned with both anti-littering and anti-pollution slogans. This effort was determined to be unsuccessful at the time, but not because of the obvious cognitive dissonance. The balloons were supposed to be dropped onto school grounds; instead, because the pilot misjudged the wind, they landed in a nearby subdivision.
While we applaud Earth Day, we should learn from the mistakes of others — no matter how well-intentioned they were in the moment.
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