Green When Green Wasn't Cool

70

 22

The first Earth Day

How the First Earth Day Was Borne From 1960s Counterculture

On April 22, 1970, a nationwide “teach-in” inspired millions of Americans to care more about the environment.

SARAH PRUITT

I took a lot of kiddin' 'cause I never did fit in

Now look at everybody tryin' to be what I was then

— Kye Fleming & Dennis Morgan

The Jesuits had assigned us Silent Spring three years earlier, but not because they were environmentalists. 

They considered Rachael Carson's book exemplary science writing and thought we'd learn effective argument from it. 

It did make quite an impression.

So when school let out that April day in '71, my friends and I caught the PATH from Grove to 14th Street.

We dashed up the subway steps and filed into the mob. 

A quarter million hippies and wanna-be hippies were romping 5th Avenue, free of traffic by mayoral decree.

It was the giddy "birth of the green movement," as history books record it.

To us it was a massive schoolboy lark.

The spring weather was joyous, the kind of New York City weather celebrated in schmaltzy Broadway tunes. We bought Good Humor bars from a cart and picked our way along the teeming street, stopping to gawk at the painted performance artists, the jerry-built exhibits and impromptu demonstrations.

Most memorable was the rock band we encountered performing on the pavement in front of Madison Square Park. 

The Lower East Side Band was fronted that day by a long-haired Puerto Rican named David Peel, who belted comedy songs about hippies, teeny boppers, reefer and LSD.

We loved them!

Only a year later, Peel and the band would emerge from obscurity when they were discovered in front of another city park by John Lennon, who rushed out The Pope Smokes Dope on Apple Records. 

The album was banned in every Catholic country.

But Earth Day was not. 

And from it arose the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the EPA.

Not a bad payoff.