On April 22, 1970, millions of people participated in events across the country in the first celebration of Earth Day. According to a New York Times article about the event, more than 2,000 colleges participated, 10,000 K-12 schools, and a couple thousand towns. The wire services tallied the total participation at 20 million across the U.S. Today, Earth Day is the most widely celebrated secular holiday on the planet, with more than 180 nations participating.
The first Earth Day was primarily organized by a man named Denis Hayes, whose paternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland and eventually settled in Wisconsin. Two generations later, Wisconsin’s democratic senator, Gaylord Nelson, acted as a mentor to Hayes, and compelled the 25-year-old environmental activist to get to work organizing what would be one of the most successful nation-wide demonstrations in the country to date.
“There were no computers, smart phones, email, texts, Twitters, postings, etc., so organizing involved an enormous amount of telephoning, mimeographing things and shoe leather,” Hayes told GreenBiz in 2015. “Organized labor, and in particular Walter Reuther and the UAW, were strong supporters of the first Earth Day.”
It would take two decades for Earth Day to go international, and in the interim years, Hayes directed the federal Solar Energy Research Institute under President Jimmy Carter. He also taught engineering at Stanford, was a senior fellow at the WorldWatch Institute, and has been called by Time one of the Heroes of the Planet. Today, he chairs the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, and oversaw construction of the most energy efficient building in the world, the foundation’s headquarters, which is entirely self-sufficient, powered by solar panels on the roof, and boasts composting toilets.
When asked if small local events, particularly those at schools, lead to meaningful action by GreenBiz, Hayes replied with his trademark dry humor:
“First, 100,000 or so schools in the U.S. alone engage students on environmental issues on Earth Day. When we unleash 30 million little green guerrillas on their parents – most of whom really want their kids to admire them – it produces a lasting result.
“Second, every religion recognizes that humans are flawed and will never be sin-free. Still, sacramental acts help to solidify values. I’m not one of those folks who poor-mouths tree planting or beach clean-ups – they are a physical manifestation of a value system and they cumulatively add up to changed personalities.
“In my neighborhood, a great sense of community has been built by a handful of retirees who organize volunteer activities, e.g. eliminating invasive species and planting natives. In the process, people talk about lots of other issues and sometimes recruit new activists. This happens in hundreds of thousands of places each year.”
Earth Day has evolved since its initial year, and Hayes is still focused on how to continue to grow it.
In a far-reaching interview in Harvard Gazette in April 2020, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Hayes talked about growing up in a community that lived with the “pervasive stench” of a paper mill; being selected to attend the Harvard Kennedy School in the fall of 1969; and the need to protect the planet “as our only home.”
As he said in an earlier interview with National Geographic, Hayes reflected: “You come in with a tailwind when you have the 50th anniversary of anything, and in this instance, we hope to move it away from a day and into a full month of different kinds of things circling the world, everything from protecting big game on the Serengeti to talking about the impacts of poverty and war on the global environment to what have you. Just keeping this stuff in the public attention long enough in our increasingly attention-deficit-disordered digital world to have people think about it and ask what it means for them,” he told National Geographic. ♦
The Harvard Gazette interviewed Denis Hayes in 2020, 50 years after the first Earth Day rally.
Thanks!