Last week, while attending an event to support an organization I volunteer for, I had the privilege of shaking the hand of Denis Hayes, the man responsible for coordinating the first Earth Day in 1970. On April 22 of that year, an impressive 20 million people were said to participate across the country. It boggles the mind to imagine how a skeleton crew of volunteers – passionate as they were – could turn out such crowds, all without the aid of the Internet, much less social media. While I didn’t get to ask him personally, I can only imagine the occasion he was so instrumental in launching must inspire a mix of pride and bewilderment 43 years later.
In 1970, students, parents, labor leaders, politicians, rich people and regular folks galvanized around a common concern for the environment and turned out for thousands of teach-ins and community events. On the most modern medium of the day, “Today” devoted 10 hours of coverage to Earth Day. Back then, remember, there were just 4 channels! The modern environmental movement had been launched.
These days, people have many more ways for acting on their convictions. Social media has – among other things – become a sort of proxy for civic engagement. Twitter lit up for each of the presidential debates and the election last November as voters everywhere live tweeted their opinions and prognostications and the campaigns sought to enlist those voters through social channels. In another vein, I opened Facebook recently and saw that several of my friends had updated their profile pics to red equal signs to show their support for the right to marry for all while the Supreme Court heard those cases.
Our digitally-mediated world allows us to be in a dozen places at once, including being “activists” from our armchairs, and a profile pic on Facebook can stand in for the placard we once marched with.
Earth Day gets plenty of social media play too – the days and weeks leading up to this day saw posts ranging from the outlandish to the inspired, many appealing to our consumerist leanings, or challenging us to give those inclinations a rethink.
More and more, companies with goods to sell are eager to be seen as caring for the health of the planet in the way they design, produce, package and market their products. How closely these efforts cleave to the original spirit of Earth Day is a matter of opinion, but the opportunity that business sees in the occasion this day has grown into is a testament to the fact that it’s here to stay, with the fundamental issue becoming important to more of us with each passing year. Social media, as the new public square and the marketplace of goods and ideas, have grown to play an indispensable role in spreading the word.
In the two generations since it was first instituted, Earth Day and the messages it seeks to instill have spread around the world to be celebrated in over 170 countries. For his part, Denis Hayes will mark the day in Seattle with the opening of the Bullitt Center, the world’s most sustainable commercial building – a fitting follow on to the spirit of those first actions in 1970. And this time, social media will help spread the word.
Karen is a Senior Research Analyst with Visible. She helps clients make sense of the conversations about them in social media and answer their pressing business questions through the analysis of social media data. Prior to joining Visible, she worked as a research analyst with the Hartman Group doing applied ethnographic research, primarily around consumer attitudes about food, health and wellness and sustainability.
Karen also leads Visible’s Green Team and is passionate about sustainability issues.
