Events Set Around the World as Earth Day Turns 40

20 April 2010

Schoolchildren in Katmandu, Nepal, celebrating Earth Day in 2002

FAITH LAPIDUS: I’m Faith Lapidus.

BOB DOUGHTY: And I’m Bob Doughty with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. April twenty-second marks the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. Former United States Senator Gaylord Nelson started the observance in nineteen seventy. The aim of this day is to urge local action and increase awareness about the state of the world’s environment. The creation of Earth Day is widely considered the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

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FAITH LAPIDUS: Gaylord Nelson was a Democrat from the state of Wisconsin. He had always been interested in environmental issues and worked hard to improve the environment in his state. The American public was also increasingly becoming aware of the huge environmental problems the country faced.

In nineteen sixty-nine two environmental problems caught the nation’s attention. The first was a huge oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. More than eighty thousand barrels of crude oil from the spill severely damaged over sixty kilometers of coastline. The second was increased news reporting about a river so polluted that it caught on fire. This was the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio.

BOB DOUGHTY: Senator Nelson knew there was growing public concern about the country’s polluted air, rivers and land. He had been searching for a way to make the environment a subject of national interest to the country’s politicians and leaders. He had observed that students at colleges across the country had been organizing “teach-in” demonstrations to protest the war in Vietnam. He realized that this “teach-in” method would be a useful way for the public to express concern about the environment to federal and state officials.