Earth Day, a Short History of Saving the World

by Jack R. Johnson 04.2024

Three hundred years ago, the Hindu Bishnois people of India set the standard for saving the world. Their religious sect held two important environmental principles: Be merciful to all living beings and love them (i.e., don’t eat them); Do not cut down green trees.

 In 1730, their commitment to these religious principles were severely tested.  The king of Jodhpur decided that he needed to build a new palace and wanted to use the Khejri trees the Bishnoi grew. He sent soldiers to gather the wood. A female villager named Amrita Devi would not relent. She decided to hug the trees to protect them, and encouraged others to do the same, proclaiming: “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree.”  The soldiers struck her with an axe. When her three daughters witnessed the brutality, they rushed and hugged the trees as well, and were also killed by the soldiers.  After their example, other Bishnois from nearby villages traveled to the forest and embraced the trees to protect them. As each villager hugged a tree, refusing to let go, they were beheaded by the soldiers. News spread. Bishnois from some eighty-three villages traveled to save the trees. Older people went first. Many of them were killed as they hugged the Khejri . Like some cheap FOX News host, the king’s minister, a fellow named Giridhar Bhandari, claimed that the Bishnoi were only sending people whom they thought were useless to be killed. In response, younger men, women, and children began to hug the trees, resulting in dozens and then hundreds of them being killed. In all, 363 Bishnois were murdered while protecting the trees.

When the king, Maharaja Abhai Singh, learned about the carnage, he was repentant and forbade any killing of animals and cutting of trees in the Bishnois territories afterwards. To this day, one can spot the endangered Black Buck, peacocks and other wildlife, and tree cover where the Bishnois communities live, which is why the Bishnois are considered among the earliest conservationists in the world.

In the United States, the modern environmentalist movement can trace its roots to someone almost as heroic, our own Amrita Devi, Rachel Carson. Marine biologist and author of the seminal environmental work Silent Spring, Carson documented the dangers of the pesticide DDT while also questioning America’s blind post war faith in technology. Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months—not only the targeted insects but countless more—and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life—from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children—had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

In retaliation, Monsanto, which produced DDT, published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.

President John F. Kennedy read the book however, and ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised. The report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. 

After Carson, the U.S. environmental movement gained an unlikely champion; President Richard M. Nixon. Ever the politician, during his first State of the Union address, delivered in 1970, President Nixon designated the environment as the defining issue of the new decade. “The great question of the Seventies is…shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water.”  In a divided political climate, the Nixon administration initiated many of the most important, and enduring, environmental policies in American history. He signed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970. He created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act. He oversaw the creation of the Legacy of Parks program, which converted more than 80,000 acres of government property to recreational use in 642 new parks.

Despite his ignominious political end, Nixon’s legacy as a steward of the environment may well outshine any other president, even Teddy Roosevelt. Nixon declared the first-ever Earth Day, on April 22, 1972, the same year he also created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Water Act. “Nothing is more precious and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” he said.

Nixon was able to do this in a highly partisan environment, because at that time, the Republican Party was still onboard with being decent conservationists. In fact, while the original congressional resolution to create Earth Day came from Wisconsin Democrat Gaylord Nelson, the resolution was co-sponsored by California Republican Pete McCloskey. The 1968 Republican Party platform called for an expansion of urban green spaces and of our natural parks, declaring that “our nation must pursue its activities in harmony with the environment.… We must be mindful of our priceless heritage of natural beauty.” Yes, that plank came from the Republican Party platform. 

The environment became a more partisan economic issue in the 1980s and 1990s, with businesses vociferously opposing regulation. But as Tina Featherstone has noted in The New Republic, “…the biggest lesson of Nixon’s time is that a huge political movement can shape the political culture, allowing even the most hardened right-wing culture warrior to find their inner tree hugger.” 

By the way, that term for environmentalists derives from the Hindus Bishnois mentioned earlier, the original “tree huggers” who sacrificed their lives to save trees.