Government
How Earth Day Changed the Way We View Cities
In 1970, cities epitomized everything that was wrong with the planet. That's changed, partly because of Earth Day.
Not long ago, cities were like a cancer in the environmental imagination. Proposing a national environmental agenda to Congress in January 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin remarked:
Nelson was touching on Americans' growing awareness of the environmental disaster that was urban, industrialized life. In 1965, air pollution in New York City had killed eighty people during a brief weather inversion. The oil-saturated Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron regularly caught fire.