Between 1960 and 1973, ordinary Americans transformed concern for clean air, clean water, and wild places into one of the most consequential political movements of the twentieth century — and won laws that still govern American industry, agriculture, and public land today.
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During the 1960s, environmentalism became a mass social movement. Drawing on a culture of political activism inspired in part by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, thousands of citizens — particularly young, middle-class Americans — threw themselves into environmental politics. It was not led from a single pulpit: it grew out of marine biologists alarmed by dying songbirds, suburban families choking on smog, college students mobilizing on April afternoons, and a Wisconsin senator who believed Congress could be made to listen — if 20 million Americans showed up first.2
The movement was broader than its suburban image suggests. Historically marginalized groups — women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and working-class union members — also joined the public pressure and grassroots activism that pushed environmentalism to the forefront of the liberal agenda during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.2
Like the women's movement, environmentalism entered the 1960s with a long history but relatively little public support. By the early 1970s it had emerged, in the words of historian Alan Brinkley, as "a powerful and enduring force in American and global life" — fueled by visible environmental disasters, a maturing science of ecology, and a counterculture that questioned industrial progress at any cost.1
This dispatch traces the movement's rise: the ideas that prepared the ground, the people who spoke for it, the disasters that radicalized the public, and the laws — the Wilderness Act, NEPA, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the Environmental Protection Agency itself — that turned a slogan into permanent policy. Begin where you like: the full set of leaders is on the second page, a chronological run of dispatches follows on the third, and the manifesto & the long legacy bookend the rest.
1. Alan Brinkley, American History: Connecting with the Past, 14th ed., ch. 30, pp. 847–850.
2. Encyclopedia.com, "Environmental Movement"; "Michigan in the World — Origins of the Environmental Movement," University of Michigan.
What the movement was actually asking for — and the daily-life problems of pesticides, smog, and rivers on fire that drove ordinary citizens to act.
Dossiers on the scientists, senators, and grassroots organizers who built the movement — Rachel Carson, Gaylord Nelson, Denis Hayes, David Brower, William Ruckelshaus, Aldo Leopold.
A chronological run of the publications, disasters, marches, and laws that defined American environmentalism from 1960 to 1973.
What the movement left behind, how it shaped policy and culture, and a full bibliography of the sources used in this project.