 
Earth Day: a simple idea, a world of change
Gaylord Nelson speaks to an Earth Day crowd in Denver, Colorado, on April 22, 1970. You can view the speech notes by Nelson on this page.
Gaylord Nelson's speeches on Earth Day emphasized that the environment
must also include poverty, hunger, and urban blight.
Nelson said, "Our goal is not just an environment of clean
air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency,
quality and mutual respect for all other human being and all living creatures."
Gaylord Nelson, the ambitious junior senator from Wisconsin, grew accustomed
to disappointment in the 1960s. In his first Senate speech, supporting
a bill banning phosphates in detergents, he insisted that "we need
this...just as desperately as we need the defense against atomic missiles." That
did not stop his fellow legislators from voting down the bill, just
as similar pleas could not win him a single co-sponsor for his 1966
bill banning DDT. While he was able to lure President Kennedy to take
a "conservation
tour" of
Wisconsin and the West in 1963, he watched helplessly as the President,
the press, and audiences preferred to debate taxes and Cold War
politics.
To wake up Washington, he would need a new plan.
The idea came to him in August of 1969 after surveying the oil spill
in Santa Barbara. For the past few years, college students had been
staging teach-ins to educate their campuses about the war in Vietnam.
What if, Nelson wondered, students used the same forum to raise environmental
awareness, and what if they coordinate their events to fall on the same
day, grabbing headlines and sending a strong environmental message to
the Capitol? He proposed the idea in front of a small, fledgling conservation
group in Seattle on September 20. A short wire story broadcast
the idea.
Seven months later Nelson's idea resulted in the largest demonstration
in U.S. history. Millions of Americans observed Earth Day in April 1970,
whether in groups of tens of thousands in New York or Philadelphia or
with events big and small at thousands of colleges and schools across
the country. While Nelson with his staff worked tirelessly to promote
the day and coordinate select events, he would grow fond of saying Earth
Day "organized
itself." Nelson encouraged all Americans to celebrate the day "in
any way they want."
For the first time, the Earth
Day stage gathered together the diverse constituents of the modern environmental
movement: youthful idealists, liberal Democrats, middle-class women,
scientists, professionals, and representatives of conservation groups,
labor unions, and churches.
Addressing the Earth Day 1970 audience in Denver,
Nelson proclaimed, "Our
goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty.
The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect
for all other human being and all living creatures."
View more Nelson Collection documents about this topic:
See related webpage on how Nelson's idea for a national day for the environment (Earth Day) developed >
 Read the letter to CBS President Fred Stanton about how the Earth Day idea was born
 View
the video of Nelson's Earth
Day 1970 speech in Milwaukee
 View
the orignal
transcript of Nelson speech on April 11, 1970 to the Pennsylvania
legislature
Learn about the very first teach-ins, the activism that was the model for Nelson's idea
|
