Earth Day as a Model for Positive Change

This article originally appeared on my substack; please sign up there to keep receiving these articles (and get the content I don't post to LinkedIn).

Over one billion people participated in Earth Day events across 190+ countries, making it the largest secular observance in the world. That’s awesome! In this piece, I introduce the MA’AM framework to help explain why Earth Day was such a success and offer tips for how to nurture and grow additional movements. The four parts of the framework are: Message, Audience, Activation, and Momentum. This post is pretty long, so I’m putting the conclusions up at the top (though I hope you read the whole thing).

TL; DR - the Conclusion

Earth Day demonstrates the four interlocking things that need to happen for an idea to realize its full potential and galvanize change. They are:

• Message - Your language needs to be clear and expansive. People rarely join movements when they require deep knowledge of specific jargon. Make it simple, memorable, and inspiring.
• Audience - You need to find the audience for whom the message resonates. There’s often a feedback loop between audience and message. No one gets both right at the start; it’s always a work in progress with room for improvement. That said, once you have a message that works, it’s time to…
• Activate - You’ve found a message and an audience. Great. Now it’s time to inspire people to take action. I believe that the only way we’ll solve the climate crisis is to leverage our zones of genius to all become bright spots. Earth Day harnessed the power of people who wanted to help create a better future.
• Momentum - No single event or moment will define a movement or our future. It’s the combination of decisions and actions, day-by-day and step-by-step, that will get us where we need to be. Some steps will be big, others small —but they all matter if they’re in the right direction.

Now to the story of Earth Day.

Message

Senator Gaylord Nelson, an environmentally-minded Senator from Wisconsin, had the idea for what became Earth Day. He lectured on environmental issues across the country, inspiring people to get involved. This excerpt from his speech on that first Earth Day in 1970 shows why:

Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.

Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.

Are we able to meet the challenge? Yes. We have the technology and the resources.

Are we willing? That is the unanswered question.

Establishing quality on par with quantity is going to require new national policies that quite frankly will interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse the air, the water, the land, just because that is what we have always done.

Nelson’s view of the environment is expansive and beautiful. His clear articulation of the changes we’ll need to make is both inspirational and refreshingly blunt. He doesn’t sugarcoat. Earlier in the speech he said: “Environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is housing that is not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.”

Nelson’s simple, strong, and clear language is a model we should seek to emulate.

Audience

Nelson nailed the message, but his planned audience was off. His idea was a set of Environmental Teach-ins on college campuses that could combine the energy of the student anti-war protests with increased public concern about air and water pollution.

After recruiting Pete McCloskey as his Republican co-chair, they hired Dennis Hayes, a 25 year-old activist and student, to organize the teach-ins. Being a good organizer, Dennis dispatched regional organizers to talk to college students. It turned out that they weren’t interested.

The first thing that we did was find some regional organizers and send them out to colleges across the country. This was all starting the first week in January [1970]. And everybody came back after a week or two and said, “This is like running into a brick wall. This is not something activist students care about.” So we analyzed the mail that had come into Nelson’s office as a result of press coverage of his speeches. Overwhelmingly, it was from women, mostly they were 25 to 35, mostly college-educated, mothers of young children, mostly in single-wage-earner families, and they want to know what they could do to get involved. By the end of January, we had changed the name from Environmental Teach-in to Earth Day and taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times announcing the change.

It turns out that the audience for this message was broader and different than Senator Nelson had imagined. There are a few lessons we can draw from this:

• The right message with the wrong audience will fail.
• Be courageous and humble enough to listen and pivot. Dennis Hayes listened to his audience and updated his plans.
• After you listen, act. Don’t analyze issues to death.

The environmental consciousness they were tapping into really began with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962 and strengthened following a series of environmental disasters in 1969, including the Cuyahoga River fire in my beloved hometown of Cleveland and the oil spill in Santa Barbara.

Activation

A single page add in The New York Times does not a movement make. Hayes and his team followed this up with three crucial things: 1) they got people with narrow environmental concerns to see themselves as part of a broader environmental movement; 2) partnered strategically; and 3) never stopped recruiting organizers.

Uniting the environmental movement was critical, but not easy. In the early 1960s, people tended to organize around discrete issues like birds, local air pollution, oil spills, or being anti-freeway. According to Hayes, Earth Day changed this.

I think the most important thing that Earth Day did was to take all of those different threads and weave them together into this fabric of modern environmentalism, to help them understand that they were operating from similar sets of values and then that they could support one another and be much stronger as a whole than they were individually. I remember this one passionate conversation with the then-president of the Audubon Society. He basically said, “What the hell does clean air have to do with birds?” After Earth Day, nobody would say something that absurd.

To get the word out, Earth Day organizers worked with journalists to place articles that amplified their message; these articles led would-be Earth Day volunteers to reach out and ask how they could get involved. Interestingly, the biggest supporters of Earth Day were the United Auto Workers, who ended up printing the Earth Day newsletter and paying for postage for the ~60,000 people on their mailing list. These letters were stamped and mailed by volunteers. Throughout the lead up to Earth Day, people kept reaching out and signing up to organize events in their communities.All of the work paid off. On Earth Day, an estimated 20 million people across the US attended events, including student groups in 2,000 colleges (I guess there was an audience) and 10,000 lower schools as well as citizen groups in 2,000 communities. The crowd in New York stretched 40-50 blocks on 5th Avenue.

Momentum

CBS News’ Walter Cronkite gave Earth Day a tepid review (watch it here):

Success was mixed: beyond expectations here, far below there… By one measurement, Earth Day failed. It did not unite. It did attract a broad cross-section of America…it’s demonstrators were predominantly young, predominantly white, predominantly anti-Nixon. Often its protest appeared frivolous. Its protesters curiously carefree. Yet the gravity of the message of Earth Day still came through, act or die.

And act we did. While those 20 million people didn’t “accomplish” any concrete legislative actions that day, they demonstrated that Americans broadly cared about the environment. Say what you will about Nixon, he was politically astute and knew that protecting the environment was good politics. From the Earth Day site:

By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first of their kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act. A year after that, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and soon after the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

Here’s the key: it’s impossible to judge a movement — especially an emergent one — by its first event. Only by panning out to look at a longer time horizon can we truly measure the impact of an event.

In 1990, Earth Day went global. Today, not only do a billion people participate in Earth Day, it’s become a fulcrum that companies, NGOs, politicians, and activists use to announce goals, demand action, and celebrate wins. It’s circled on every calendar across the global environmental and sustainability movements. The truth is, the complaints about greenwashing and corporate co-opting of Earth Day today wouldn’t exist — hell, “greenwashing” as a concept wouldn’t exist — if it wasn’t for the people who laid the foundation for the environmental movement on that first Earth Day.

Conclusion

Earth Day is awesome because it’s a true bright spot—both in terms of what it is today AND because its story underscores that almost everyone wants a clean environment and healthy future.