Today, 50 years ago, on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized their shared common values.
Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons, and labor leaders. By the end of that year, the first Earth Day had led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts.
As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995) – the highest honor given to civilians in the US - for his role as Earth Day founder.
Earth Day 2000 used the power of the internet to organize activists focusing on global warming and clean energy and featured a drum chain in Gabon, Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington for a First Amendment Rally.
Earth Day 2010 came at a time of a great challenge for the environmental community with climate change deniers, well-funded oil-lobbyists and a disinterested public. However, 250,000 people rallied again at the National Mall and launched the world's greatest environmental service project: A billion Acts of Green, a global tree-planting initiative that grew into The Canopy Project , which engaged 22,000 partners in 192 countries in observing Earth Day.
Earth Day has become the largest secular observance in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year, and a day of action that changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.
Now, 50 years after the beginning of this movement, we find ourselves in the strangest situation, almost total isolation through the threat of the novel coronavirus for which we don't have a cure yet. At the same time as scientists warn about impending catastrophes, and we witness rising temperatures, melting ice deposits and fast disappearing species, the government of the United States of America dismantles all the improvements that have been made. It needs great intention and courage of many engaged citizens to remind ourselves that we are facing a new reality and work tirelessly towards beneficial change.
Let us vow with all bodhisattvas in the ten directions:
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them,
Delusions are inexhaustable, I vow to end them,
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow o enter them,
Buddha's Way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.not
(Note: I have used information from the internet for this article, but cannot find the source, sorry.)