Twenty Million Americans Take a Day Off to Look at the Planet

On April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans marched, rallied, and sat through teach-ins on smog, oil spills, and dying rivers, in what became the first Earth Day. Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson had pushed the idea after seeing the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill coat beaches in crude, and hired a young Harvard student, Denis Hayes, to turn a campus teach-in into a national event. More than 10,000 schools joined in, New York shut down part of Fifth Avenue, and organized labor, especially the United Auto Workers, quietly paid for the phone lines and the pamphlets that held it all together. Nobody on stage that day was talking about what was on anyone's plate. The idea that eating habits and planetary health were the same fight was still decades from the mainstream, waiting for its own teach-in.