History of Earth Day
Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the celebration of the modern
environmental movement that started in 1970. In the spring of 1970,
Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force the issue of
pollution onto the national agenda. There are over 190 countries that have
engaged in the celebration of Earth Day. In the years leading up to Earth
Day, Americans were consuming a lot of fossil fuels. In 1980 the
celebration of Earth Day went global. Today, Earth Day is widely recognized
as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a
billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and
create global, national, and local policy changes.
https://www.earthday.org/history/