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TWEET OF THE DAY

The numbers for the Science March seem high but we won't know until we compare it to the numbers at the placebo march that's also happening

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—Earth Day is one day of 365. What about polar ice cap day, rainforest day, corporate plunder day?

While Earth Day organizers refused checks from Standard Oil, Monsanto and Procter and Gamble, among others, many political activists on the Left viewed the whole affair with suspicion. They saw environmental advocacy in general as a diversion from "real issues," such as poverty, racism, the Vietnam War and the imperialism that engendered it. Indeed, just a week after that first Earth Day, on April 29, the U.S. sent troops into Cambodia and, within three weeks, six students had been killed during protests at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. Environmental matters were for many protesters a low priority.

But Nelson, an avid opponent of the war, didn't see it that way. After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, he had come up with the idea for Earth Day based on the anti-war college campus teach-ins he had witnessed. He got Denis Hayes—who eight years later would be my boss at the Solar Energy Research Institute—to coordinate Earth Day doings, Instead of putting out a national agenda for Earth Day, Nelson argued that it should be a grassroots affair with activities set in motion in local communities, not by professional organizers based in Washington, D.C.

And that was exactly how it played out.