The damage inflicted by the oil spill in Santa Barbara was especially shocking to a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, who became determined to bring the planet's peril to the nation's attention. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, where Americans could show their support for environmental protection on a larger scale. Nelson was inspired by the political atmosphere created by students protesting the Vietnam War, and hoped to use some of that energy for his own cause.
Earth Day became a single, united voice for the people who had been speaking out about the state of the planet. 20 million Americans demonstrated all across the country, pushing Congress to approve of a new federal agency whose focus was to protect the environment. It became known as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established under Nixon in 1970. The EPA went on to pass three very important acts: the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act. Never before had America had laws to regulate all sources of air emissions or prevent factories from dumping hazardous waste into streams. The Endangered Species Act created a program for the conservation of endangered species and their habitats and prohibited the "taking" of any endangered wildlife.The creation of Earth Day in 1970 represents the establishment of the modern American environmental movement that is now four decades old. Environmentalism has been considered trendy since the the 1990s, but has faced its fair share of political backlash. More recently the movement has been reignited with concerns over climate change.
https://www.earthday.org/history/
https://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/12/10/history.environmental.movement/index.html
https://www.epa.gov/history/epa-history-earth-day
I found this post surrounding the origins of Earth Day very interesting. Something else I found fascinating about this topic was how it connected to other issues and events during the time period. Prior to the environmentalism movement, an extremely low number of Americans knew about or practiced recycling. After observing anti-Vietnam war "Teach-ins", Senator Nelson decided to model Earth day in a similar fashion, hoping to educate the population about climate in order to cause political change. As such, many young demonstrators part of the teach-ins also took part in the Environmentalism movement, such as Dennis Hayes, who served as the event's national coordinator. Following Earth day, national opinion of protecting climate skyrocketed. A year after the first Earth day, an EPA survey found that 25% of Americans found protecting the climate important, which was 2500 times more than the previous poll.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.history.com/topics/holidays/earth-day
Although as stated in the Blogger post, activism for climate change had started long before the movements in the 21st century such as the Paris agreement, global warming has clearly been a problem in today's world. We have seen these horrible atrocities such as the hurricanes and most recently, the Australian wild fires. However, we have known about climate change as early as the 1970s when Jule Charney from MIT made an accurate prediction for the rise of global warming. However, despite their warnings, no significant change was created by politicians or major powers. It's sad to see that despite such accurate predictions, global warming has expanded to the atrocity it is now in the 21st century.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/40-years-ago-scientists-predicted-climate-change-and-hey-they-were-right
I really like how this blog is relevant to situations happening today, where the environment around us is being destroyed by us and how there is little happening to stop it. Earth day this year in 2020 would be hitting its 50th anniversary and currently it is so widespread globally that 1 billion people worldwide support Earth day. The first month of 2020 has been chaotic, disease, wildfire, hurricanes, happened and all these environmental issues bring about the serious discussion of what to do to save our planet. Small actions to energy save, going green, and reducing our carbon footprint were brought about by the popularity of Earth day. It is great to see that the world is aware of the environmental issues but actions must be taken to prevent and solve those issues.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://www.livescience.com/50556-earth-day-facts-history.html