Gaylord Nelson, 89; Champion of Environment Started Earth Day

Gaylord Nelson, a trend-setting environmentalist who as a Democratic U.S. senator from Wisconsin founded Earth Day in 1970, died Sunday. He was 89.

Nelson, who was also a former Wisconsin governor, died of cardiovascular failure at his home in Kensington, Md., a suburb of Washington, according to his biographer Bill Christofferson.

In 1995, President Clinton awarded Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the nation's highest civilian honor. In presenting the award, Clinton called Nelson "the father of Earth Day" and the grandfather of the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Earth Day, which now is celebrated annually on April 22, immediately took hold in the 1970s within a country that was alarmed by such environmental debacles as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, the spontaneous combustion of the oil-slicked Cuyahoga River in Ohio that same year and the widespread poisoning of birds by the use of the pesticide DDT.

An estimated 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, including 10,000 schools, 2,000 colleges and a thousand communities. Taken aback by public enthusiasm during the buildup to the event, members of Congress reacted by participating in Earth Day events in such great numbers that the House and Senate had to be adjourned for the day.

"It organized itself," Nelson wrote years later in "Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise "(2002), written with Susan Campbell and Paul Wozniak.

"The American people finally had a forum for expressing their concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes and air -- and they did so with tremendous exuberance."

In Southern California, students led the way, staging events at numerous high schools and at USC, UCLA, Caltech, Cal Poly, UC Irvine and Pasadena City College.

Nelson said that his hopes for a public demonstration "so big it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and force the environmental issue onto the national political agenda" were more than fulfilled.

Following Earth Day, legislation to protect the environment that had been on the backburner for years in Washington was approved by Congress and signed into law by the executive branch, including major strengthening of clean air, clean water, forestry, coastal conservation and land management policies. Within months of the first Earth Day, President Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency.