Earth Day Cliff Notes Founder Note

Today is Earth Day 2026. It’s been fifty-six years since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, which was spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who recruited Denis Hayes, a Harvard graduate student, to organize mass events all over the country. It was a complex, chaotic time in history, with many similarities to today’s political and environmental landscape.

Earth Day 1970 aimed to harness the heightened public attention to environmental harms brought to light by the Santa Barbara oil spill, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, and the exposed truth about the toxic and ubiquitous chemical DDT poisoning wildlife, plantlife, and humans.

And it was a success. That first Earth Day is still the largest single-day protest in US history, with 20 million people participating across a spectrum of organized events. It proved the mass disgust our citizens had towards unchecked and unremediated pollution and environmental degradation, primarily caused by companies. It forced further action.

Some of the bedrock laws passed during that time were the Wilderness Act, Endangered Species Act, the Wild and Scenic River System, the National Trails System, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Water Quality Act, and of course the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Other inspiring individuals from the long sixties, all of whom contributed to the ultimate passing of the abovementioned laws plus much more action and influence, include: author and marine biologist Rachel Carson, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, JFK, LBJ and Lady Bird, Richard Nixon, Idaho Senator Frank Church, photographer Ansel Adams, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, head of the United Automobile Workers union Walter Reuther, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club David Brower, journalist and Everglades defender Marjory Stoneman Douglas, just to name a few. What an era!

I’ll make one recommendation, and that is to read about the above time period from the environmental viewpoint. I just gave you the cliff notes (thanks for the term, Cliff!), but the book to read is “Silent Spring Revolution” by Douglas Brinkley. I mentioned this in one of my previous newsletters when I was reading it. Well, I finished. I absolutely loved it, and it continues to be a major source of inspiration for me. The environmental movement is an ecosystem of many, many people who contributed and are contributing in ways both big and small. My hope is that we can expand the ecosystem to include every single person alive. That is my motivation for building Generation Environment. For us all to be environmentalists.

To make change, we must be the change. There is no getting around the fact that it starts with us. But that doesn’t have to be daunting. It is simply about looking within ourselves and finding our own connection to this great planet, whether that be from a macro perspective, like in the NASA photo above (a mental shift also called “the overview effect”), or it can be from a micro perspective, like tending to your home garden or house plant and realizing it’s an act of caring for life, which zooms out to caring for all life. Our planet Earth is life! And all life deserves care and attention.

As this community is aware of, our environment is the first thing to be forgotten in everyday life for most people (see: state of our planet, climate change, plastic pollution, species extinctions, rainforests becoming carbon sources vs sinks). This is not ok. It’s not natural. The opposite should be true. So let us be part of the story that creates the positive shift in humanity to treat Mother Earth with the utmost respect. And if we need a goal to work towards, maybe it should be to make next year’s Earth Day the one that beats out the first in attendance, because mass environmental action like that is long overdue.

Keep going, friends. Keep spreading the love, keep fighting the fight. We are in this together. Earth love forever.

Thanks for being here,

Kristen