Earth Day 2007: History of Earth Day
Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.
– Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day
Thirty-seven years after the first Earth Day, we’re still struggling with An Inconvenient Truth: That we may not be doing enough to save our planet.
What makes me hopeful is how our kids are handling it themselves. They seem to care so much about picking up trash and throwing it away whenever they see it, even to the point of Abby finding a broken steak knife in the park a few weeks ago and bringing it to my attention, concerned about some little kid finding it and hurting herself. She held trash she’d cleaned up from the stream in her other hand.
Every little bit helps.