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In the News: Celebrate Earth Day!
04/22/10
April 22, 2010, is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day—an annual occasion when people around the world participate in grassroots projects and activities aimed at raising environmental awareness, conserving natural resources, and protecting the planet.
Earth Day was the brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. He came up with the idea in the fall of 1969, when college students across the country were holding teach-ins to educate their campuses about the Vietnam War. Nelson decided that the teach-in model could be applied to the environmental cause as well. “If we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force the issue onto the national political agenda,” he explained in one of the many Earth Day documents available in the Gaylord Nelson Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
An estimated 20 million people—or 1 out of every 10 Americans—took part in some sort of Earth Day activity on April 22, 1970, from recycling projects at elementary schools, to rallies on college campuses, to community cleanup and tree planting events. Earth Day is widely regarded as a major milestone in the history of the American environmental movement, and it is also celebrated in dozens of other countries around the world.
Read the EARTH DAY DOCUMENTS