Earth Day

Earth Day is a Chance to Win the Messaging War Against Polluters

by Laura J. Martin

Climate protectors are at war with the fossil fuels industry in the arena of public opinion, and they're losing. It's time to stop allowing Earth Day statements of corporate concern to substitute for real change. 

An Earth Day Reminder of How the Republicans Have Forsaken the Environment

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Professors James Morton Turner and Andrew Isenberg's recent book identifies the Reagan Revolution as the moment the Republican Party rejected environmental regulation and made further protective legislation politically unthinkable for a generation.

What The Older Generations Owe The Young 50 Years After The First Earth Day

by Matthew D. Lassiter

While we cannot commemorate Earth Day 2020 through mass public demonstrations, it is now more urgent than ever to listen to young activists' demands for a safer future and a more just world.

50 Years Later, Earth Day’s Unsolved Problem: How to Build a More Sustainable World

The first celebration called for people to change their relationship with the planet. After a half-century, we’re still figuring out what that means.

After 50 years of Earth Day, Will we Have 100?

by Kimberlee Hurley

This fiftieth celebration of Earth Day should serve as a celebration of the work that has been done. However, it should also serve as a wake-up call for the work that still needs to be done.

50th Anniversary of Earth Day, Occasion for Hope and Action

by Fred Zilian

Organized by Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day was celebrated in ceremonies at some two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the U.S.

The ‘Profoundly Radical’ Message of Earth Day’s First Organizer

Denis Hayes organized the first Earth Day in 1970. Since then, he has continued fighting for environmental justice.

Liberal Activists Have to Think Broadly and Unite Across Lines

by Matthew D. Lassiter

Fifty years before Greta Thunberg, students at the University of Michigan organized a Teach-In that paved the way for Earth Day demonstrations that mobilized 20 million people in 1970.

University of Michigan plans teach-in, including history of climate activism, ahead of 50th Earth Day anniversary

For Matt Lasseter, professor of history at UM, putting Earth Day and its ties to Michigan into historical context is key.

Pollution Hurts Some People More Than Others. That’s Been True for Centuries.

Concerns regarding a lack of adequate sanitation to combat pollution date back to the mid-19th century, yet it wasn’t until the late 20th century that environmental protection emerged as a nationwide grassroots effort to address what activists have identified as environmental racism.

Historians say the March for Science is ‘pretty unprecedented’

“The march is pretty unprecedented in terms of the scale and breadth of the scientific community that’s involved, and it does recall Physicians for Social Responsibility and various scientific groups against nuclear war in the Reagan era, that’s I think the most recent precedent.” 

Top Ten ways to prove you Love the Earth on Earth Day

by Juan Cole

Environmentalism meant something different in 1970 than it does now.

Whatever Happened to the Environmental Movement?

by Mark Stoll

The surprising answer is that it’s lost its Presbyterian leaders.

Nancy Unger: When Helping Earth was Women's Work

Nancy Unger is professor of history at Santa Clara University and the author of "Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History."(CNN) -- Earth Day is the time of year to hear the usual polarized debates between liberals who lament humanity's reckless use of natural resources and conservatives who deny any human role in climate change and echo Sarah Palin's call for industry to "drill, baby, drill."This division is familiar, but it hasn't always been this way. After all, it was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Long before that, social conservatives were in the vanguard of environmental activism in the United States, in part because of their traditional views about women.