Earth Day originated 56 years ago as a reaction to the shocking headlines of oil spills, a polluted river catching fire, wildlife suffering from pesticide poisoning, and a general feeling that we’d been taking the planet for granted for far too long. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin gathered a coalition of like-minded politicians and student activists to kick it off on April 22, 1970, when 20 million Americans participated in Earth Day protests and events.
The 1960s’ Apollo missions—like the recent Artemis mission—gave people an entirely new perspective on our rare blue planet. Seen from outer space, this haven of life amidst the cold darkness of the universe motivated many to protect it. Along with the civil rights and war protests of the era, the environmental movement gained steam within this cultural atmosphere of change.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed later that year, creating a home in the federal government for regulating and monitoring air, water, and soil quality. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed by 1972.
By the early 90’s, Earth Day had taken off worldwide. It is celebrated with festivals, outdoor events, lectures, and service projects. For those of us in the ecology field, every day is “Earth Day,” but it is nice to see the planet get a little extra love every spring.
This planet is a remarkably diverse, beautiful, and resilient place, with an unfathomable number of plant types, wildlife species, landforms, and waterways. We all have a role in protecting it and appreciating it—we humans are not separate entities from nature, but another species deeply dependent upon its success.
After reflecting on an image taken during the 1990 Voyager mission, renowned astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan said it best.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
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