This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

If you ask Adam Rome, Earth Day isn’t as punk as it used to be.

“Earth Day is so tame nowadays,” says Rome, the author of The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. “For adults, it's often a trade show where you can see the latest green stuff, and for kids it's often a day with some corporate-sponsored lesson about what you can do individually to save the planet.”

But the first Earth Day in 1970, Rome says, was an “intense” day of protest and activism for the 20 million people who participated. “It was a day to ask soul-searching questions about why we had environmental problems,” Rome says.

It’s not just Rome who sees a short-sightedness in the way we mark Earth Day today. For Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican attorney and the executive director of Brooklyn-based community organization UPROSE, Earth Day is merely one marker in a long global history of environmental injustice.

“When you talk about Earth Day, for us, it's not 50 years, it's 500 years of extraction, it's 500 years since slavery, since colonialism,” she says. “And in those 500 years, our communities have managed to survive all of it. Now we are faced with the consequences of those 500 years.”

For better or worse, Earth Day is the closest that the modern environmental movement has to a birthday: a time to celebrate milestones, to look back and plot a way forward. And as Earth Day has morphed since its inception, this year promises to be radically different. The surge of energy from youth activism over the past few years has been impeded by the coronavirus and bans on in-person gatherings. Organizers are hoping that the energy of the original Earth Day can take hold with a new generation grappling with a rapidly changing world.

A green revolution

Environmental protections in the United States essentially did not exist 50 years ago. Before the 1970s, industries of all types were allowed to pollute with little to no oversight, and Americans were largely in the dark about the impact air and water pollution could have on their health.

Prior to the first Earth Day, people across the country were disturbed by a 1969 oil spill in California, and their environmental consciousness was beginning to be raised, thanks in part to Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book Silent Spring. Then, in 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, recruited grassroots organizers across the country to coordinate events on a single day — April 22 — to educate the public on environmental issues.

The scale of the organizing effort involved in the first Earth Day was massive, but Earth Day didn’t happen in a vacuum. The year 1970 came after a tumultuous decade of social upheaval and change, with the Vietnam War mobilizing thousands of young people to speak out; second-wave feminism bringing women out of the home and into the workforce; and the civil rights movement providing a model for what a nationwide environmental organizing effort could look like.

“The original founders of Earth Day literally borrowed pages from the then-happening civil rights movement to engage in righteous civil disobedience, righteous group mass action, to have humanity look at environmental degradation and the degradation of lives of individuals,” Aaron Mair, the Sierra Club’s first black president, told The New Republic in 2017.

The result was a resounding success. Environmental safeguards that we consider basic today — the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act — came about following the massive impact of the early-1970s movements.