The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation

By Adam Rome

Book Overview

"Rome's genial new book . . . brings to life another era." --Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker

The first Earth Day is the most famous little-known event in modern American history. Because we still pay ritual homage to the planet every April 22, everyone knows something about Earth Day. Some people may also know that Earth Day 1970 made the environmental movement a major force in American political life. But no one has told the whole story before.
The story of the first Earth Day is inspiring: it had a power, a freshness, and a seriousness of purpose that are difficult to imagine today. Earth Day 1970 created an entire green generation. Thousands of Earth Day organizers and participants decided to devote their lives to the environmental cause. Earth Day 1970 helped to build a lasting eco-infrastructure--lobbying organizations, environmental beats at newspapers, environmental-studies programs, ecology sections in bookstores, community ecology centers.
In The Genius of Earth Day, the prizewinning historian Adam Rome offers a compelling account of the rise of the environmental movement. Drawing on his experience as a journalist as well as his expertise as a scholar, he explains why the first Earth Day was so powerful, bringing one of the greatest political events of the twentieth century to life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865477744
• ISBN13: 9780865477742
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Hill & Wang
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Don't Know What I Was Expecting

As a sustainability coordinator in higher education, I was looking for this book to be the answer to my prayers about what book to use for our first sustainability book club. This is not it. It was a good book, and included a thorough history of Earth Day, who started it, why it started, what immediate impact it had, but I wanted more about what it would and still could mean today, over 50 years later. It was also very long and drawn out on all the aspects of Earth Day, and probably more like a textbook to be used in a class about environmental issues or environmental law.