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First Earth Day celebration
the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political "limelight" once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. -
Publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
When Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published in 1962, it generated a storm of controversy over the use of chemical pesticides. Miss Carson's intent in writing Silent Spring was to warn the public of the dangers associated with pesticide use. Throughout her book are numerous case studies documenting the harmful effects that chemical pesticides have had on the environment. -
UFW’s Nationwide Boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms
The first convention of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) is convened with hundreds of delegates assembled in an abandoned movie theater in Fresno. The group's distinctive flag, a black eagle symbol on a white circle in a red field, is unveiled. -
Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, on February 17, 1963, is often cited as the founding moment of second-wave feminism. The book highlighted Friedan's view of a coercive and pervasive post-World War II ideology of female domesticity that stifled middle-class women's opportunities to be anything but homemakers. -
Publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, a study that revealed that many American automobiles were unsafe. -
NOW is founded
n June, 1966, Betty Friedan and 27 other women and men founded NOW, which has grown into the United States' largest feminist organization. Later that year she was elected NOW's first president, and her fame as an author helped attract hundreds of thousands of women to the new organization. -
Woodstock
August 15-18, 1969, represents more than a peaceful gathering of 500,000 people and 32 musical performances. Woodstock has become an idea that has suffused our culture, politically and socially, as much as musically. -
Congress passes the Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act is the federal law designed to make sure that all Americans have air that is safe to breathe. Public health protection is the primary goal, though the law also seeks to protect our environment from damage caused by air pollution. -
The EPA is established
The EPA was established as an independent agency of the U.S. government on December 2, 1970. The first EPA administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, was sworn in on December 4, 1970. The date should be registered as one of the most important environmental milestones of the 20th century. Yet some have asked what the EPA has really done aside from making a bunch of rules and regulations that slowed so-called progress. -
Supreme Court rules to legalize abortion in the Roe v. Wade case
Roe v. Wade is the historic Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas interpretation of abortion law and making abortion legal in the United States. The Roe v. Wade decision held that a woman, with her doctor, could choose abortion in earlier months of pregnancy without restriction, and with restrictions in later months, based on the right to privacy. -
Protesters from the AIM take over the reservation at Wounded Knee
Traditional members of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe and activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, a protest designed to draw attention to the deplorable living conditions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the corrupt rule of Richard Wilson, head of the tribal council. The site of a terrible massacre of Lakota Indians in 1890, Wounded Knee was chosen for its symbolic importance and because the activists hoped the spot.
