On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans walked out of their classrooms, offices, and homes and into the streets. It was the largest coordinated civic event in American history — ten percent of the entire U.S. population, in an era before social media, email, or the internet.
They weren't celebrating Earth. They were furious about what was being done to it.
The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland had caught fire — for the thirteenth time. A massive oil spill off Santa Barbara had coated 35 miles of California coastline in crude. Smog in Los Angeles was so thick children were kept indoors at recess. DDT was killing bald eagles. And no federal agency existed to do anything about any of it.
That was the first Earth Day. It worked. Within eight months, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency. Within three years, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act were law. Earth Day didn't raise awareness — it changed the law.
Fifty-six years later, Earth Day is a corporate branding exercise. How did that happen?
The Man Who Started It
Earth Day was the vision of Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin. Nelson had watched the anti-Vietnam War teach-in movement mobilize college campuses and realized the same model could channel public anger about environmental destruction into political action.
He announced the idea in September 1969 at a conference in Seattle, proposing a national "teach-in on the environment" for the following spring. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Without a central organization, without funding, without coordination — communities across the country self-organized events.
Nelson hired a 25-year-old Harvard Law student named Denis Hayes to coordinate the national effort. Hayes built a small staff in Washington that helped channel the grassroots energy into the April 22 event.
The date wasn't random. It fell between spring break and final exams — maximizing college participation. It was a Wednesday, forcing people to miss work or school to attend, which meant the people who showed up actually cared.
Twenty million people showed up.
The Skeleton in the Closet
There is a name the Earth Day establishment would prefer you forget: Ira Einhorn.
Einhorn was a charismatic counterculture figure in Philadelphia — part activist, part guru, part showman. Known as "The Unicorn" (Einhorn means "one horn" in German), he was the master of ceremonies at Philadelphia's first Earth Day event, one of the largest gatherings that day.
For years, Einhorn traded on his Earth Day association, positioning himself as an environmental visionary. He cultivated powerful friends, corporate connections, and an image as the intellectual godfather of the ecology movement.
In 1979, police found the mummified body of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, stuffed in a steamer trunk in his apartment closet. She had been dead for eighteen months. Her skull had been fractured in several places.
Einhorn fled the country before trial. For twenty-three years he lived in Europe — Sweden, Ireland, France — sheltered by wealthy supporters. He was finally extradited from France in 2001, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2020.
Was Einhorn a "co-founder" of Earth Day? He claimed to be. The official Earth Day organization says no — that Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes were the true founders, and Einhorn was merely an MC at one city's event. The truth is somewhere in the middle: Einhorn was a prominent and visible figure in the first Earth Day, and the movement was happy to have him until he became a liability.
None of this diminishes what Earth Day accomplished. But it's a reminder that movements are made of people, and people are complicated. The instinct to sanitize history — to pretend the uncomfortable parts didn't happen — is the same instinct that turned Earth Day from a protest into a parade.
When the Corporations Showed Up
The first Earth Day had no corporate sponsors. It didn't need them. It was funded by outrage.
By the 1990s, Earth Day had become something else entirely. Major polluters discovered that sponsoring Earth Day events was cheaper than cleaning up their operations — and better PR. The holiday that was born from the Cuyahoga River fire became a vehicle for the companies still poisoning rivers.
Consider the guest list at modern Earth Day celebrations:
- BP — sponsor of Earth Day events while operating the Deepwater Horizon platform that would spill 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
- Coca-Cola — Earth Day partner and the world's largest plastic polluter, producing over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles per year.
- Shell — Earth Day participant while its own internal research confirmed fossil fuel emissions were driving climate change, decades before the company acknowledged it publicly.
- Dow Chemical — Earth Day sponsor and manufacturer of Agent Orange, responsible for the Bhopal disaster, and a major producer of single-use plastics.
These aren't companies that had a change of heart. They're companies that found a cheaper way to manage public perception. A few hundred thousand dollars in Earth Day sponsorships buys more goodwill than a few hundred million in environmental remediation.
The Awareness Trap
The original Earth Day didn't ask people to "be more aware" of the environment. It demanded that the government do its job. And the government responded — because twenty million angry voters are hard to ignore.
Modern Earth Day asks you to plant a tree, carry a reusable bag, and post a green square on Instagram. It asks nothing of the corporations or governments responsible for the vast majority of environmental destruction. It has shifted from a demand for structural change to a request for personal virtue.
This is by design. The corporations that sponsor Earth Day have every incentive to frame environmental responsibility as an individual choice rather than a regulatory obligation. If the problem is that you didn't recycle, they don't have to change how they manufacture. If the solution is "awareness," nobody has to pass a law.
Gaylord Nelson understood this distinction. In one of his final interviews before his death in 2005, he said: "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around." He didn't envision a holiday where oil companies hand out tote bags. He envisioned a citizenry that held power accountable.
What Earth Day Should Be
The problems that inspired the first Earth Day haven't been solved. They've gotten worse and more complex. PFAS contamination has been detected in the drinking water of over 165 million Americans. Microplastics are in our blood, our lungs, and our placentas. Climate change is no longer a prediction — it's a daily news story. And the regulatory agencies created in Earth Day's wake have been systematically weakened.
If Earth Day meant in 2026 what it meant in 1970, it wouldn't be a celebration. It would be a confrontation. Twenty million people wouldn't be planting trees — they'd be demanding to know why their tap water contains industrial chemicals that the EPA has known about for decades.
The original Earth Day worked because it was angry, it was specific, and it demanded legislation — not awareness. It didn't ask corporations to sponsor it. It didn't ask citizens to feel good about themselves. It asked the government to protect its people, and it made clear that there would be consequences if it didn't.
That's still what environmental protection looks like. Not a logo. Not a hashtag. Not a sponsored post from a petrochemical company. A demand, backed by data, aimed at the people with the power to act.
Happy Earth Day.
The EPR Foundation works to make environmental, public health, and governance data transparent and accessible. We believe the best way to honor the spirit of the first Earth Day is to give communities the tools to hold power accountable — not to celebrate the companies that need to be held accountable.
Learn more at eprfoundation.org