By the late 1970s, environmentalism had "become part of the consciousness of the vast majority of Americans," in historian Alan Brinkley's words — "absorbed into popular culture, built into primary and secondary education, endorsed by almost all politicians (even if many of them opposed some environmental goals)."1
The Wilderness Act (1964), NEPA (1970), Clean Air Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972), Endangered Species Act (1973), and the EPA itself form the legal scaffolding of modern American environmental policy. Every one of these laws is still on the books — and still in court.
NEPA's procedural innovation — forcing federal agencies to disclose environmental consequences before acting — was copied by dozens of state governments and adopted in various forms by the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Nations Environment Programme.
The Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Wilderness Society, and Nature Conservancy — all founded long before the 1960s — re-emerged from this decade as professional lobbying and legal organizations with millions of members and significant political weight.
Environmental Defense Fund (1967), Friends of the Earth (1969), Natural Resources Defense Council (1970), and Greenpeace (1971) were all founded in this period and pioneered a new style of activism — combining litigation, science, and direct action.
Between 1970 and 1990, U.S. emissions of the six "criteria air pollutants" tracked under the Clean Air Act fell by an average of 30%, even as GDP grew by more than 70%. Rivers like the Cuyahoga, declared "dead" in 1969, now support fish, paddlers, and waterfront development.
What began as a one-time teach-in in 1970 has been observed annually for more than five decades and was marked internationally on its 20th anniversary in 1990 by an estimated 200 million participants in 141 countries — making it among the most widely observed civic events on earth.
Honest history requires acknowledging where the movement fell short. The environmental coalition of the 1960s was overwhelmingly white, suburban, and middle-class. It paid relatively little attention to environmental justice — the disproportionate exposure of low-income communities and communities of color to pollution, toxic waste, and substandard housing. That critique would gather force in the 1980s, organized by Black, Latino, and Native American communities who saw the new EPA-era regulations bypassing their neighborhoods entirely.
The movement also struggled with global thinking. Many of the 1960s campaigns focused on protecting American wilderness and cleaning up American air and water; the international dimensions of ecological problems — acid rain, ozone depletion, climate change — would only be fully addressed in the decades that followed.
And the bipartisan consensus that produced this remarkable run of laws was fragile. By the late 1970s, environmental regulation was already attracting organized political opposition, and the easy votes of 92–0 and 373–1 that passed the Endangered Species Act and the Wilderness Act would never be repeated.
None of this changes the central fact: in roughly a decade, the United States went from treating polluted air and water as the inevitable cost of prosperity to treating them as a legal and ethical problem demanding national action. That shift, more than any specific law, is what the 1960–1973 environmental movement actually accomplished.
The environmental movement of 1960–1973 is the closest thing in modern American history to a successful, bipartisan, ground-up reform of the relationship between industry and the natural world. Studying it is partly an exercise in admiration — and partly an inquiry into what is required to make that kind of change happen again.
Every claim on this site is drawn from one of the sources below. Where a claim quotes language directly from a primary source document (the Wilderness Act, NEPA, or Silent Spring), the citation appears beside the quoted text on the relevant page.
1. Alan Brinkley, American History: Connecting with the Past, 14th ed., ch. 30, p. 849.