How a California Disaster Inspired the First Earth Day

cheap bmx bikes How a California Disaster Inspired the First Earth Day Capitalism Store

  Happy Earth Day.

As you probably know, April 22 is a day set aside for appreciating the environment and demonstrating support for laws that protect it.

The tradition dates back to the first Earth Day in 1970, which led to the passage of landmark environmental legislation in the United States. It was a momentous event that helped create the modern environmental movement — one whose origins can be traced to the shores of California.

Here’s a little history: Americans in the 1960s were becoming increasingly aware of the ways their behavior could be harming the natural world.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, detailed how pesticides hurt the environment. The polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland kept catching fire. The California condor faced extinction. Panic was brewing about a global overpopulation crisis.

But it was a massive oil spill in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara that ultimately served as a catalyst for Earth Day.

“Santa Barbara brought it home to people — that this could affect the well-to-do, this could affect the poor and, of course, the natural environment,” said Denis Hayes, national coordinator of the original Earth Day. “It began to weave all of these issues into a common narrative.”

In late January 1969, millions of gallons of crude oil began to pour into the waters off Santa Barbara. It was the biggest oil spill in U.S. history at the time (though not anymore) — and it was televised.

From their living rooms, Americans watched as sandy California beaches turned black and birds’ feathers were slathered in tar. The corpses of seals and dolphins washed in with the tide.

The catastrophe gave Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, the idea to hold a national teach-in about environmentalism. In the fall of 1969, Nelson recruited Hayes, then a 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard, to organize the event, which would eventually turn into Earth Day.

Hayes told me that it has never been entirely clear to him why the oil spill captured the public’s imagination the way it did. “There was something about Santa Barbara that I think no one could explain, except that I think the time was ripe,” he told me.