Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Brian Ballot, I'm Ed Ayers, and I'm Nathan Connolly.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians, and along with Joanne Freeman, we explore a different aspect of American history, each show.

We're going to start this week by going back in time to April 22nd, 1970.

Earth Day, a question of survival.

For Moon Park in Philadelphia today, as much like a rock music festival as a teaching on the environment, a few older people, a few blacks, and some of the poor.

But mainly white middle class young people, as much aroused by the music as by the damage done to the environment by pollution.

Look, it was Philadelphia on Earth.

Oh, it was huge. There are estimates of 20 million participants. There were 10,000 schools and 2,000 universities in colleges.

The first Earth Day isn't exactly how we remember the presidency of Richard Millhouse Nixon.

But historian Jay Brooks Flippin says the president, ever the pragmatist, was an unlikely environmentalist.

He sought the environment as a way to court young votes and divert attention from the Vietnam War.

It was all across the land, communities, large and small, and you'd have businessmen and housewives, college students, children, workers, any establishment or radicals.

It really represented every strat of American society.

It grew sort of generically. There was a movement in San Francisco with an activist named John McConnell.

And he had been pushing for Earth Day on March 21st every year, which was the annual time when the sun crossed the equator.

And to him, it symbolized the harmony and balance in nature.

Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, built on McConnell's idea and turned Earth Day into a national event intended to bring awareness to pollution and the rapid destruction of the environment.

Earth Day was part protest, part celebration.

A lot of the official agenda of these meetings were speeches or petitions and displays. There was some music.

But it's funny to look at some of what individual people were doing.

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