Earth Day has been recognized in the United States on April 22 since 1970. The day spurred action in Washington, D.C., to create the Environmental Protection Agency and enact laws aimed at protecting the environment.
As communities across the country celebrate Earth Day in 2025, here’s what to know about the history and its founder:
Who founded Earth Day?
Gaylord Nelson, the late U.S. senator and governor of Wisconsin, is considered the founder of Earth Day.
Nelson established himself as a conservation leader in Wisconsin, where he served as governor between 1959 and 1963. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962 and served three terms.
“The environment was an issue he cared quite deeply about, and he took that passion and concern with him to Washington and found few of his colleagues were interested,” Tia Nelson, Gaylord Nelson’s daughter and an environmental activist and policy adviser, told CBS News.
Her father struggled for years to find a way to motivate the country on the issue of conservation, Tia Nelson said.
Then in 1969, after visiting the site of the then-largest oil spill in U.S. history off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, Nelson read an article on his flight back to Washington about how anti-war teach-ins at colleges and universities were changing the conversation about the Vietnam War.
“That’s when the idea, the aha moment, came to him for the first Earth Day,” Tia Nelson said.
The first Earth Day: April 22, 1970
Gaylord Nelson’s call to action was simple, Tia Nelson said.
“His call to action was to designate a day, April 22, 1970, a single day for all teachers across the country to have a conversation about the environment with their students,” she said.
The date April 22 was chosen to fall when college students weren’t on spring break or taking final exams.
What followed was beyond Nelson’s “wildest dreams,” Tia Nelson said.
While the number of participants may not have been immediately clear on that day in 1970, historians say an estimated 20 million Americans took part in demonstrations.
Part of the success of Earth Day was the grassroots nature of the call to action, Tia Nelson said.
“My father didn’t seek to prescribe a top-down, coming from Washington prescription to what the response to this call to action should be, but rather called for individuals, communities, schools to do what makes sense to them, what resonated to them, in their communities, and the diversity of actions was amazing,” she said. “There were protests, there were concerts, there were trash clean ups, there were tree plantings.”
The day led to other actions, including establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Earth Day today
Gaylord Nelson acknowledged that his goal — “an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other living creatures” — would “require a long sustained political, mural, ethical and financial commitment.”
“He asked the question, Are we able? Yes. Are we willing? That’s the unanswered question,” Tia Nelson said. “The question remains unanswered, and that’s hard, 55 years in, for people like myself who have dedicated their lives to environmental protection.”
While progress has been made, there have also been “a lot of setbacks,” she said. “We’re not where we need to be in addressing the challenge of climate change.”
One place where action continues all the time is at local levels, said Paul Robbins, the dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which was also established in 1970 and then renamed after Nelson in 2002.
“Municipalities are probably the biggest actors on climate change right now,” Robbins told CBS News. “Not the giant cities like Chicago or New York, but the mid-size and small town cities.”
One example he pointed to was the Juda School District in southern Wisconsin installing solar panels on its roofs.
“That’s a really local thing, but you multiply that then over every township and county in the U.S. and you’re actually going to make headway,” he said.
Companies making changes to their energy choices to save money and be more efficient is another example — something that was “unthinkable in 1970,” Robbins said.
For Tia Nelson, more action requires “meeting people where they are.”
“I concern myself a lot these days with thinking about how to broaden the conversation, how not to speak to the choir but to grow the congregation,” she said.
Nicole Brown ChauNicole Brown Chau is a deputy managing editor for CBSNews.com. She writes and edits national news, health stories, explainers and more.
