Super Eco

Photo credit: frankh, flickr

Uh, oh. 'Only two days until Earth Day and some of us tree huggin' folk—you know who you are—still don't know our green American history. No worries. Give us two minutes and we'll catch you up.

Ready? Let's bite off 5 of Uncle Sam's environmental milestones:

1. Henry David Thoreau speaks for the trees (1850s). The transcendentalist retreats to backwoods Maine where he falls madly in love with Mother Nature. He also kicks it like a freegan on Walden Pond and famously lives to tell. His groundbreaking conservationist lit becomes the blueprint for the modern environmental movement.

2. America gets its first National Park (1872). That would be Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, where Old Faithful still loses her cool every 45 to 125 minutes. Yogi Bear’s real-life Jellystone was the first-ever public land to be set aside by any federal government in. the. world! From sea to shining sea, America, the Beautiful, now boasts 58 national parks, spanning every state (well, except for odd-man-out Delaware).

3. Green gets personal (1948). When Pennsylvania's Donora “Death Fog” fatally clears, early save-the-trees efforts make a sharp, sudden turn from natural conservation to human preservation. Americans begin fearing—and protesting—the ways in which pollution poisons not just the Earth, but also people's food, workplaces, household products and bodies. 

4. Rachel Carson slams pesticides (1962). The marine biologist pens Silent Spring, an exhaustive pollution exposé that turns her argument against America's rampant use of toxic pesticides into poetic protest prose. The result: A government ban on DDT and the birth of a revolution that demands more living through less chemistry for all creatures, big and small.

5. The EPA debuts (1970). The the Nixon administration and Congress launch the Environmental Protection Agency in response to a Silent Spring-fanned outcry for cleaner air, purer water and better protected land. A flood of environmental legislation and activism follows, including the Water Pollution Control Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the founding of, yes, Earth Day.

Well done, kids. Now who's ready for a pop quiz on your own, personal environmental footprint?