Gaylord Anton Nelson, the son of a country doctor and a registered nurse, was born June 4, 1916, in Clear Lake, a small town in northwestern Wisconsin. His great-grandfather had helped found the Republican Party in Wisconsin.
Nelson earned his degrees from San Jose State College and the University of Wisconsin Law School. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, seeing action in Okinawa and commanding a company composed of African American soldiers.
After the war, Nelson set up a law practice in Madison, Wis., and married Carrie Lee Dotson, an Army nurse he had met during the war. He then turned his attention to his longtime interest in elective politics.
Around that time, he also met Aldo Leopold, a scientist and conservationist who wrote "A Sand County Almanac," which outlined a new concept Leopold called "the land ethic" or "ecological conscience."
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community," Leopold wrote. "It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
"I consider it probably the most impressive and influential environmental book of this [the 20th] century," Nelson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1999.
Always a liberal, Nelson was originally a member of Wisconsin's Progressive Republican Party, switching to the Democratic Party in the late 1940s when the Progressives were on the decline. After one failed attempt, he won a seat in the state Senate in 1948, serving for 10 years before being elected Wisconsin governor, a post he held for four years.
By then, he said, he had concluded that the environment was the "most important issue facing us as a society," but he also saw that the political establishment "was not interested."
In 1962, at the age of 46, Nelson was elected to the U.S. Senate. The following year, he convinced President Kennedy to do an "Earth Tour" to urge people to become involved in environmentalism. But the issue got lost in other pressing matters of the day, including the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Nelson said he came upon the idea of Earth Day in 1969 while in Santa Barbara, where he spoke at a water conference and later went to take a look at the disastrous effects of an oil spill at a Unocal platform off the city's coast.
The next day, he said, thinking about the many "teach-ins" against the Vietnam War being held on college campuses at the time, "It suddenly dawned on me -- why not a nationwide teach-in on the environment?"
