Remembering the First Earth Day

Nearly 40 years ago today, in September 1969, America’s very first “Earth Day” was announced by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin in Seattle, Washington.

I was editor of the Monterey Park Californian at the time, and was more concerned about issues faced by a small Los Angeles suburban city than I was about long-haired hippies. I saw the story come over the wires, and dismissed it as just another tree-hugger publicity ploy.

After all, environmentalists were crying wolf at every opportunity. I’d recently attended a fund-raising dinner featuring an address by Eddie Arnold (of "Green Acres" fame), who decried the state of the environment and warned that if things continued as they did, if we did not take full responsibility for the stewardship of the Earth, that our planet was doomed to die in five years.

Many Americans remained idealistic at the time. Photos of the planet from Apollo 8’s first moon orbit a year earlier made us all fall in love again with the “beautiful blue marble” that was Earth. Granted, the Zero Population Growth movement and its acronym “ZPG” worried us some, but after all, wasn’t that just mathematics and algebra? Recycling was being touted for the first time as a positive move humans could take to save the environment.

Five years to doomsday? I doubted that very much.

Sen. Nelson was no fool, however. Have you ever wondered why April 22 was selected as Earth Day? It took me a while to figure THAT out, but I did.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the college campuses were the nurseries of social change, as they have been throughout the ages in all cultures, but particularly at this time in the United States because of the Vietnam War. That’s where the social change is cultivated, where political pressure can be applied quasi-innocently, and where young people develop their values and philosophies that will guide them for the rest of their lives.

April 22 was a good day. It was a Wednesday, in the middle of the week. Spring break was over, and college students were back on campus. There were no major college sports to occupy the students’ times, and they were back on campus. There were no major holidays in April, and the students were back on campus. Earth Day was definitely set up to be a college event.

April 22, 1970 dawned as the first Earth Day. Was anything different? Not in my little city. Business went on as usual, there were no parades or demonstrations, the high schools were quiet, people dropped off their cans at recycling bins as they usually did, and there wasn’t much television coverage.

In fact, my only real memory of Earth Day 1970 was looking up from the San Bernardino Freeway and seeing a half-dozen huge black balloons floating over the California State University at Los Angeles campus.

So much for April 22, 1970 becoming an auspicious first attempt to call attention to a deteriorating planet.