Dennis Pease's Blog: Eugene Oregon

The story goes that Earth Day was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin after a trip he took to Santa Barbara, CA right after that dreadful oil spill off their coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth.

In September 1969, at a conference in Seattle, Washington, it was announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment. There was a rising concern of an environmental crisis sweeping the nation's college campuses and so it was that on April 22, 1970 the First Earth Day came into being with 20 million Americans going into the streets for peaceful demonstrations in favor of…