After Earth Day: The Modern Environmental Movement

Earth Day, as Adam Rome points out, is one of the most frequently mentioned and least closely examined events in the history of the environmental movement. Scholars of that movement cannot discuss the 1960s and 1970s without noting the participation of millions of Americans in thousands of separate events on or around April 22, 1970. The events ranged from speeches and rallies to marches, direct actions, clean ups, street theater, workshops, a 500-mile walk from Sacramento to Los Angeles, and hours of environment-related programming on national television networks—all under the broad rubric of “Earth Day.” If thousands of gatherings over several days and all fifty states can be considered a single demonstration, it was by far the largest in U.S. history.

The questions at the heart of The Genius of Earth Day are why this massive demonstration has been historiographically slighted and what role it played in the history of modern environmentalism. Rome hazards an answer to the first question right away: “Historians have assumed that the force of Earth Day 1970 essentially was symbolic,” he writes (p. ix). The sheer size of Earth Day was enough to convince politicians to pay attention, making the fact of the demonstration more important than the specifics of what actually happened. This is surely part of the story; by the end of The Genius of Earth Day, however, other answers suggest themselves.

Rome’s is the first full account of Earth Day and is likely to remain the definitive one, largely because of the breadth of his research. Most descriptions of Earth Day are brief and draw from the same edited collections, published soon after the day itself. Rome has waded through dozens of newspapers large and small, interviewed over a hundred participants, and searched the archives, all to give a view of Earth Day from high above as well as from ground level, and from the perspectives of speakers, organizers, participants, and casual bystanders. This multi-camera point of view offers a story of Earth Day as much more than a single event promoting a simple issue. The genius of Earth Day, for Rome, is that it was diverse, diffuse, and didactic. It was neither centralized nor focused on a specific message or political agenda; instead it was heterogeneous and intended to educate as much as to protest. Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson conceived of the “nationwide environmental teach-in,” assembled the initial staff, and lent the effort immediate credibility and prominence, but Rome believes Nelson’s greatest contributions were to emphasize the educational nature of Earth Day and then stand aside and let local participants determine what they would do, when they would do it, and what their message would be.

The result, Rome makes clear, was an eclectic assortment of activities, emphases, and ideas. New York shut down automobile traffic on much of Fifth Avenue and held a fair bemoaning urban pollution and celebrating a cleaner environment. Cleveland organized a weeklong schedule of activities including conferences, marches, and educational exhibits at schools, museums, parks, churches, and along the banks of the oil-slicked Cuyahoga River. Salina, Kansas, held a conference and rally aimed in part at encouraging reuse and recycling and defeating a proposed landfill. Fairbanks, Alaska, hosted a teach-in concerned primarily with the federal government’s planned pipeline through the state to carry oil south from Alaska’s north slope. In Miami, eco-activists poured dye into sewage-treatment plants to show where the effluent ended up. Some events were largely critical, while others proposed alternatives. Many decried pollution everywhere, and many others focused attention on emissions from local facilities. Lots of communities sponsored conversations about environmental issues, while others advocated immediate action.

No single environmental...