Earth Day got its name from an ad man whose birthday was April 22
Organisers of a 1970 environmental campaign had a problem: the word teach-in felt stale. Julian Koenig, the advertising writer behind Volkswagen's Think Small, came back a week later with mock-ups. His favourite option was Earth Day, partly because April 22 was his birthday and the two words rhymed.
The spark was an oil blowout off Santa Barbara on 28 January 1969, which spilled more than three million gallons and killed over 10,000 seabirds and marine mammals. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, reportedly moved after flying over the slick, had watched students rally around Vietnam teach-ins and thought the same energy could serve the environment. He announced a national teach-in that September.
A front-page New York Times article about one of his talks drew Denis Hayes, then a Harvard graduate student. A ten-minute meeting with Nelson stretched to two hours, and Hayes soon left Harvard to run the campaign. Paid staff earned a flat $375 a month. Hayes gambled roughly half the bank balance on a full-page Koenig ad in the Sunday edition of the New York Times; it paid for itself and made Earth Day the name everyone used. He also chose not to trademark it, so anyone could organise under it.
Help came from unexpected places. The United Auto Workers under Walter Reuther was the biggest outside backer, and Hayes later said the first event would probably have flopped without the union. More than 10,000 schools took part, mostly with beach clean-ups, tree planting and recycling. Separately, peace activist John McConnell had proposed a day for the Earth on the spring equinox, a proclamation signed at the United Nations by U Thant.
The first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, was an American affair. Hayes took it international in 1990 with events in 141 nations. The Paris Agreement was signed by the United States, China and many others on Earth Day 2016, and more than 100 million people marked the 50th anniversary in 2020. Coordinated today by a global organisation formerly called Earth Day Network, it reaches an estimated billion people in over 193 countries.
Source: Earth Day
