Earth Day Turns 50: The first Earth Day took place 50 years ago, helping give birth to the modern environmental Movement and paving the way for today's climate protests.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST 1970

At noon on April 22, 1970, all cars, taxis, and buses were barred from a two-mile stretch of Fifth Avenue in New York City. A massive crowd of 250,000 people packed the streets to celebrate the first-ever Earth Day.

Denis Hayes had dropped out of Harvard graduate school, where he'd been studying public policy, to organize the events. As he stood on a platform on Fifth Avenue, preparing to give a speech, the 25-year-old couldn't believe his eyes.

"It was like looking at the ocean," Hayes, now 75, says. "You couldn't see the edge of the crowd. And that's when I first thought, 'My god, this really is gigantic.'"

At the same time, all across the country, thousands of demonstrations were taking place-many of them led by teenagers. In Omaha, Nebraska, high school students wore gas masks to protest air pollution; in Ripon, Wisconsin, young people collected 25,000 discarded cans; and thousands of colleges and schools hosted environment-themed events. In total, an estimated 20 million people took part in Earth Day--more than the largest civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

This year, on April 22, people worldwide are expected to participate in the 50th Earth Day. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, it will be the first digital Earth Day, with events including virtual protests, social media campaigns, and online teach-ins.

It comes as young people are once again on the front-lines of environmental demonstrations--this time, calling for more action on climate change. But it was that first Earth Day 50 years ago that helped spark the modern environmental movement, paving the way for today's activists.

"No one even used the phrase 'environmental movement' until the very end of 1969, beginning of 1970, and it was only in stories about the preparation for what became Earth Day," says environmental historian Adam Rome, author of The Genius of Earth Day. "There were obviously a lot of concerns for environmental problems, but nobody understood that they all added up to one big environmental crisis until the lead-up to Earth Day and Earth Day itself."

Rivers on Fire

Though Earth Day helped create modern environmentalism, the seeds of the movement had been planted during the post-World War II boom. As millions of people moved from crowded and polluted cities to the suburbs during the 1950s, interest in preserving America's natural surroundings grew. Smokestacks that spewed pollution into the air had once been viewed as signs of economic growth, but now they struck many as evidence that humans were destroying nature.

"For a long time, people thought they just had to put up with pollution--that it was the price of progress," Rome says. "But as we got wealthier and more affluent in the decades after World War II, a lot of people said, 'Not anymore.'"

The environmental movement really picked up steam in the 1960s--during the decade of many other social movements, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women's movement.

Many historians credit the environmental movement's rise to the release of a book. In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson authored Silent Spring, which exposed the dangers of pesticides, especially D.D.T. The book quickly became a best seller and would eventually help lead to the banning of D.D.T. and other pesticides for agricultural use in the U.S.

Several environmental disasters also captured the nation's attention. In November 1966, the smog in New York City was so bad that it killed an estimated 168 people. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, was so polluted that in June 1969, it literally caught on fire after some oil-soaked debris was ignited, most likely by sparks from a passing train.

And earlier that same year, an offshore oil rig off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, exploded, spewing 3 million gallons of oil into the ocean. Television footage that showed the thick sludge blackening 40 miles of scenic coastline and killing birds, fish, and other wildlife shocked the nation. A New York Times columnist would later call the disaster...